THE WINDY HILL

THE
WINDY HILL

BY
CORNELIA MEIGS

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1922

All rights reserved

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Copyright, 1921,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published August, 1921.

FERRIS
PRINTING COMPANY
NEW YORK CITY

CONTENTS

THE WINDY HILL

CHAPTER IToC

THE BEEMAN

The road was a sunny, dusty one, leading upward through Medford Valley, with half-wooded hills on each side whose far outline quivered in the hot, breathless air of mid-June afternoon. Oliver Peyton seemed to have no regard for heat or dust, however, but trudged along with such a determined stride that people passing turned to look after him, and more than one swift motor car curved aside to give him room.

"Want a ride?" inquired one genial farmer, drawing up beside him. "Where are you going?"

Oliver turned to answer the first question, meaning to reply with a relieved "yes," but his square, sunburned face hardened at the second.

"Oh, I am just going down the road—a little way," he replied stiffly, shook his head at the repeated offer of a lift, and tramped on in the dust.

The next man he met seemed also to feel a curiosity as to his errand, for he stopped a very old, shambling horse to lean from his seat and ask point-blank: "Where may you be going in such a hurry on such a hot day?"

Oliver, looking up at the person who addressed him and gauging his close-set, hard gray eyes and his narrow, dark face, conceived an instant dislike and distrust of the stranger. He replied shortly, as he had before, but with less good temper:

"I am going down the road a little way. And, as you say, I am rather in a hurry."

"Oh, are you indeed?" returned the man, measuring the boy up and down with a disagreeable, inquisitive glance. "In too much of a hurry to have your manners with you, even!" He shot him a look of keen and hostile penetration. "It almost looks as though you were running away from something."

He stopped for no further comment but went jingling off in his rattletrap cart, the cloud of dust raised by his old horse's clumsy feet hanging long in the air behind him. Oliver plodded forward, muttering dark threats against the disagreeable stranger, and wishing that he had been sufficiently quick of speech to contradict him.

Yet the random guess was a correct one, and running away was just what Oliver was doing. He had not really meant to when he came out through the pillared