"WHY! He must mean my rose," said Dave Tennant. "But how in the kingdom did Jepsom ever think of it!"
He was sitting in a wooden armchair before his greenhouse door. The Weekly Bugle, which a neighbor brought over from the post-office, interrupted him in the midst of morning rounds.
He looked helplessly up from staring head-lines, and down the straggling village street. From one end to the other it was ablaze with blossoms. It was not hard to see why the bees loved it so; long before a wayfarer came within sight of it he threw back his head and drew in the perfume. But although, with the bees, the flowers had drawn Dave to Deering, at this moment he hardly saw them. His eyes went back to the paper.
"Munificence of Adams County's Millionaire!" it said, in the largest type the Bugle possessed. "Prize Offered to Horticulturists! County Fair Next Summer! One Thousand Dollars for a White Rose With Jacqueminot Perfume!"
Dave raised his near-sighted blue eyes from the paper.
"Now that really is a lucky thing for me—I suppose I ought to have been thinking about money long before this. I wonder what made me try just that experiment—it isn't like me to do anything that has money in it. I have been careless—must have thought something would feed me—don't believe I thought much about it. And here I am, sixty-odd, and beginning to be stiff with the rheumatism. And nobody belonging to me. Then—after all these years—comes this thing! Never thought of it before, but I wonder what would have been ahead of me if I gave out. Makes you think about the man that the ravens fed in the wilderness, or falling manna—Come to think of it, ravens are more in order. Old Jepsom isn't unlike one—in features. Must be pretty decent inside. Who would ever have thought he cared anything about flowers?"
Tennant rose slowly to the full height of his spare figure and tossed back white locks with a gallant motion of his head. He looked down the village street again.
"It never seems to grow old to me," he murmured.—Much solitude had given Dave the habit of thinking aloud. Then, with the smile that made a gentle nut-cracker of his face:
"I ought to like it—it's what brought me here. Wasn't it just like me to leave Danforth, where I was laying up money, and come here, just because the people knew how to raise flowers—and didn't need me?" He stood still and looked.
Nasturtiums overflowed all bound of window-box or sweet-alyssum bordered walks; they nodded bright heads from the tops of stone walls and peeped around trellises. Sweet-peas threw prodigal color and sweetness into the air. Garden beds blazed with delicately flaunting poppies, were gorgeous with geraniums or starred with eschscholtzia. Hose hedges, still fragrant, led from white doorsteps to green garden gates; petunias, fuchsias, sweet-williams, four-o'clocks, filled in every crevice.
"I hardly know a man or woman in this place," thought Dave, as, paper in hand, he turned to go into his greenhouse, "but I know their gardens."
Automatically his deft fingers broke a dead leaf from a thrifty carnation.
"I had neighbors back in Danforth. But they let even their geraniums die in winter." He straightened a pink rosebud that had become entangled with its own foliage.
"We couldn't live in a place like that, could we, Beauty?" he queried aloud. It would have been hard to persuade Dave that his flowers did not understand him. "We gave them ten years' trial!"
Tennant came to a halt before a tall, slender rose bush. Weighting down the delicate stem was a white rose. He looked at it almost reverently. Then he buried his face in its petals.
"That's the Jacqueminot Enchantment; there's no doubt of that. What was it I used to call it when I was a child?—Sugar and spice and all things nice.' Are you going to make a thousand dollars for your daddy, girl, to take care of him in the old age he ought to have been thinking about himself?" He raised the paper to his eyes. "But they say Jepsom wants a strong, healthy plant." His face clouded. Dave was subject to shifting moods. "That's the trouble. That's what I haven't been able to maintain yet. Every time I tried to bud or graft her on to a stouter stock I failed. If the bees hadn't been such rowdies, some of her brothers or sisters might have turned out better. Well, I've got a year to work in."
His eyes fell again on the paper.