opened into the kitchen, and back of the bed a raw unguarded flight of steps led up to the peaked space where Allen and David slept.
Hunter Kinemon was extended on the couch, his home-knitted socks comfortably free of shoes, smoking a sandstone pipe with a reed stem. Mrs. Kinemon was seated in a rocking-chair with a stained and torn red plush cushion, that moved with a thin complaint on a fixed base. Allen was over against the stove, his corduroy trousers thrust into greased laced boots, and a black cotton shirt open on a chest and throat like pink marble. And David supported his lanky length, in a careless and dust-colored garb, with a capacious hand on the oak beam of the mantel.
It was May, school had stopped, and a door was open on a warm still dusk. Allen's tale had come to an end; he was pinching the ear of a diminutive dog—like a fat white sausage with wire-thin legs and a rat tail—that never left him. The smoke from the elder Kinemon's pipe rose in a tranquil cloud. Mrs. Kinemon rocked vigorously, with a prolonged wail of the chair springs. "I got to put some tallow to that chair," Kinemon proclaimed.
"The house on Elbow Barren's took," Allen told him suddenly—"the one just off the road. I saw smoke in the chimney this evening."
A revival of interest, a speculation, followed this announcement.
"Any women'll get to the church," Mr. Kinemon asserted. "I wonder? Did a person say who were they?"
"I asked; but they're strange to Crabapple. I heard this though: there weren't any women to them—just men
