The Best Short Stories of 1917, and the Yearbook of the American Short Story. Edward Joseph Harrington O'Brien
down at Abbie's feet.
"Just you look, Abbie! That there crate's made of little fishin' poles, an' what's inside's all wrapped up in Chinee mats!"
Old Chris came around from the back of the house. Jim East grabbed his arm and pointed at the bamboo crate:
"Just you put your nose down, Chris, an' smell. Ain't that foreign?"
Abbie brought her scissors. Carefully she removed the red and yellow labels.
"There's American writin' on 'em, too," Jim East hastened to explain, "'cause otherwise how'd I know who it was for, hey?"
Abbie carried the labels into the parlor and looked for a safe place for them. She saw the picture-album and put them in it. Then she hurried back to the porch. Old Chris opened one end of the crate.
"It's a plant," Jim East whispered; "a Chinee plant."
"It's a dwarf orange-tree," Old Chris announced. "See, it says so on that there card."
Abbie carried the little orange-tree into the parlor. Who could have sent it to her? There was no one she knew, away off there in China!
"You be careful of that bamboo and the wrappings," she warned Old Chris. "I'll make something decorative-like out of them."
Abbie waited until Jim East drove away in his delivery cart. Then she sat down at the table in the parlor and opened the album. She found her name on one of the labels—Abbie Snover, Almont, Michigan, U. S. A. It seemed queer to her that her name had come all the way from China. On the card that said that the plant was a dwarf orange-tree she found the name—Thomas J. Thorington. Thomas? Tom? Tom Thorington! Why, the last she had heard of Tom had been fifteen years back. He had gone out West. She had received a picture of him in a uniform, with a gun on his shoulder. She dimly recollected that he had been a guard at some penitentiary. How long ago it seemed! He must have become a missionary or something, to be away off in China. And he had remembered her! She sat for a long time looking at the labels. She wondered if the queer Chinese letters spelled Abbie Snover, Almont, Michigan. She opened the album again and hunted until she found the picture of Tom Thorington in his guard's uniform. Then she placed the labels next to the picture, closed the album, and carefully fastened the adjustable clasp.
Under Abbie's constant attention, the little orange-tree thrived. A tiny green orange appeared. Day by day she watched it grow, looking forward to the time when it would become large and yellow. The days grew shorter and colder, but she did not mind; every week the orange grew larger. After the first snow, she moved the tree into the down-stairs bedroom. She placed it on a little stand in the South window. The inside blinds, which she had always kept as her mother liked them best—the lower blinds closed, the top blinds opened a little to let in the morning light—she now threw wide open so that the tree would get all of the sun. And she kept a fire in the small sheet-iron stove, for fear that the old, drafty wood furnace might not send up a steady enough heat through the register. When the nights became severe, she crept down the narrow, winding stairs, and through the cold, bare halls, to put an extra chunk of hardwood into the stove. Every morning she swept and dusted the room; the ashes and wood dirt around the stove gave her something extra to do near the orange-tree. She removed the red and white coverlet from the bed, and put in its place the fancy patch-quilt with the green birds and the yellow flowers, to make the room look brighter.
"Abbie Snover loves that orange-tree more'n anything in the world," Old Chris cautioned the children when they came after cookies, "an' don't you dare touch it, even with your little finger."
The growing orange was as wonderful to the children as it was to Abbie. Instead of taking the cookies and hurrying home, they stood in front of the tree, their eyes round and big. And one day, when Abbie went to the clothes-press to get the cookie-pail, Bruce Sanders snipped the orange from the tree.
The children were unnaturally still when Abbie came out of the clothes-press. They did not rush forward to get the cookies. Abbie looked quickly at the tree; the pail of cookies dropped from her hands. She grabbed the two children nearest and shook them until their heads bumped together. Then she drove them all in front of her to the door and down the path to the gate, which she slammed shut behind them.
Once outside the gate the children ran, yelling: "Ab-bie Sno-ver, na—aa—ah! Ab-bie Sno-ver, na—aa—ah!"
Abbie, her hands trembling, her eyes hot, went back into the house. That was what came of letting them take fruit from the trees and vines in the yard; of giving them cookies every time they rang her door-bell. Well, there would be no more cookies, and Old Chris should be told never to let them come into the yard again.
That evening, when the metallic hiccough of the well pump on the kitchen porch told her that Old Chris was drawing up fresh water for the night, Abbie went out into the kitchen to make sure that he placed one end of the prop under the knob of the kitchen door and the other end against the leg of the kitchen table.
"It'll freeze afore mornin'," said Old Chris.
"Yes," Abbie answered.
But she did not get up in the night to put an extra chunk of wood in the stove of the down-stairs bedroom.
"Ab-bie Sno-ver, na—aa—ah! Ab-bie Sno-ver, na—aa—ah!"
Old Chris stopped shoveling snow to shake his fist at the yelling children.
"Your Mas'll fix you, if you don't stop that screechin'!"
And they answered: "Ab-bie Sno-ver, an' old Chris! Ab-bie Sno-ver, an' old Chris!"
Every day they yelled the two names as they passed the big house. They yelled them on their way to and from school, and on their way to Giddings's Hill to slide. The older boys took it up, and yelled it when they saw Abbie and Old Chris on Main Street Saturday mornings. And finally they rimed it into a couplet,
"Ab-bie Sno-ver, an' Old Chris—
We saw Chris an' Ab-bie kiss!"
It was too much. Abbie went to Hugh Perry's mother.
Mrs. Perry defended her young son. "He couldn't have done it," she told Abbie. "He ain't that kind of a boy, and you can just tell that Old Chris I said so. I guess it must be true, the way you're fussin' round!"
Mrs. Perry slammed the door in Abbie's face. Then she whipped her young son, and hated Abbie and Old Chris because they were responsible for it.
"That Abbie Snover came to my house," Mrs. Perry told Mrs. Rowles, "an' said my Hugh had been a-couplin' her name with Old Chris's in a nasty way. An' I told her—"
"The idea! the idea!" Mrs. Rowles interrupted.
"An' I told her it must be so, an' I guess it is," Mrs. Perry concluded.
Mrs. Rowles called upon Pastor Lucus's wife.
"Abbie Snover an' Old Chris was seen kissin'."
"It's scandalous," Mrs. Lucas told the pastor. "The town shouldn't put up with it a minute longer. That's what comes of Abbie Snover not coming to church since her Ma died."
On Saturday mornings when Abbie went down-town followed by Old Chris, the women eyed her coldly, and the faces of the men took on quizzical, humorous expressions. Abbie could not help but notice it; she was disturbed. The time for "the Jersey girls" to call came around. Every afternoon Abbie sat in the window and watched for them to turn the corner at Chase's Lane. She brought out the polished apples which she kept in the clothes-press all ready for some one, but "the Jersey girls" did not come.
"You haven't heard of anybody being sick at the Jersey house, have you, Chris?"
"Um? Nope!"
"Haven't seen Josie or Em Jersey anywhere lately?"
"Seen 'em at the post-office night afore last."
"H'mp!"
Abbie pushed the kettle to the front of the kitchen stove, poked up the fire, and put in fresh sticks of wood. When the water boiled she poured it into a blue-lacquered pail with yellow bands around the rim, carried it up the steep back stairs, and got out fresh stockings.
An hour later Old Chris saw her climbing up Tillson street. He scratched his