Chapter XV
August was a month of drought and intense heat that year; by the
first week in September the stream had dwindled to the merest silver
thread, its wasted waters floating upward in clouds of impalpable
mist at dawn and evening to be lost forever in the empty vault of
heaven. Behind the closed shutters of the village houses, women
fanned themselves in the intervals of labor over superheated
cookstoves. Men consulted their thermometers with incredulous eyes.
Springs reputed to be unfailing gradually ceased their cool trickle.
Wells and cisterns yielded little save the hollow sound of the
questing bucket. There was serious talk of a water famine in
Brookville. At the old Bolton house, however, there was still water
in abundance. In jubilant defiance of blazing heavens and parching
earth the Red-Fox Spring--tapped years before by Andrew Bolton and
piped a mile or more down the mountain side, that his household,
garden and stock might never lack of pure cold water--gushed in
undiminished volume, filling and overflowing the new cement
reservoir, which had been one of Lydia Orr's cautious innovations in
the old order of things.
The repairs on the house were by now finished, and the new-old
mansion, shining white amid the chastened luxuriance of ancient
trees, once more showed glimpses of snowy curtains behind polished
windowpanes. Flowers, in a lavish prodigality of bloom the Bolton
house of the past had never known, flanked the old stone walls,
bordered the drives, climbed high on trellises and arbors, and blazed
in serried ranks beyond the broad sweep of velvet turf, which repaid
in emerald freshness its daily share of the friendly water.
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