“Do you think they gave us bad ones on purpose?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said. “They didn’t want to tell Mother she couldn’t try it, and they gave her these old ones to discourage her.”
I looked at the old rag hanging on my ruined stretcher, and said, “Well, it looks like they did a pretty good job of it.”
“Hmf,” Grace sniffed, “that’s because they don’t know Mother. What I want to know is how we’re going to build a whole new corner on this one.”
We were both looking at the place where the corner should have been, when we heard Mother coming down the stairs. Grace got up quickly and drew one finger across her lips. I knew what she meant, so I picked up my shoes, cap, and coat, then took the milk bucket and tiptoed out to the woodshed. I waited to light the lantern till I was inside the barn.
I didn’t think much about my chores that morning, but kept trying to figure out a way to make a curtain stretcher that would do three things at one time. It would have to be strong enough not to twist or get sway-backed; it would have to fit any size curtain; and the brads would have to be made so they’d slide along and wouldn’t rust. By the time I got around to feeding the hens, I thought I had an idea.
After breakfast, I rode down to Mr. Nutting’s lumberyard. When I went into his office, he looked up from the papers he was working on, and said, “Hi’ya, Little Britches! What can I do for you?”
“I don’t know,” I told him, “because I don’t know if it can be done; but can a buzz saw cut an L into a piece of oak lumber?”
“Spur him, cowboy; you got him goin’ backwards!” he hollered. “What you mean is, can a buzz saw cut an L out of a piece of lumber.”
“No, I don’t either,” I told him; “the L’s got to be inside.”
“Here, you draw me a picture of it,” he said, as he brought a piece of paper and a pencil over to the counter. Then, when I’d drawn it, he said, “Well, that’s sure an L into a piece of lumber, but a buzz saw wouldn’t cut it. What you want to cut a piece of lumber that way for?”
After I’d told him all about the curtain business and how I planned to make the frame, he had me come into his office. Then he made me a set of drawings for a stretcher that would fit any size curtains, that wouldn’t warp, and grooved so the brads would slide. After the drawing was all finished, Mr. Nutting said, “How about working out a deal here? You folks do up Annie’s lace curtains for her, and I’ll furnish the stretcher frame; you’ll have to furnish your own hooks.”
I stuck my hand out across the drawing board, and said, “It’s a deal if you’ll have it made by tonight; we might have to work on curtains tomorrow.”
Mr. Nutting shook hands with me, and said, “Fair enough. Let’s go back to the sash mill and talk to Lou Neff; he’s not too busy today.” We went back, but I didn’t do any of the talking. Lou did most of it as he went over the drawing, and about all Mr. Nutting had to tell him was to use hard maple lumber instead of oak because it would be smoother.
Of course, ordinary brads wouldn’t work for the new stretcher. Instead, I’d planned to make hooks—like a capital letter S—that would slide in the grooves. They had to be strong enough so that they wouldn’t bend easily, and they had to be made of something that wouldn’t rust.
They had most every kind of thing in the Nimble Nickel, so I went down there as soon as we’d finished talking to Lou, and found just what I needed. There was a whole tray of little hooks for hanging curtain rods. They were made of brass, and there was an inch of smooth wire before the thread started. The sign on them said, “Ten for five cents,” but when I asked the manager how many I could have for a dollar, he told me two gross.
I didn’t want to spend that much till I was sure they’d work, so I just took ten, and carried them over to Mr. Langworthy’s blacksmith shop. He always knew the easiest way to do things with metal, and it seemed to me it would be a big job to make my hooks one by one.
Mr. Langworthy was shoeing a horse when I went into the shop, so, as he burnt the shoe in place, cooled it, and nailed it on, I found a little piece of soft wire and bent it into the shape I wanted. Then I showed him my curtain-rod hooks and the bent piece of wire. “Is there any easy way you know of,” I asked him, “to bend these brass hooks like this piece of wire and still not break them? I’ve got to make two hundred and eighty-eight of them.”
Of course, he wanted to know what I was going to do with them. So I drew a plan on the floor to show him how the curtain stretcher was going to look, and how Lou was going to make the L-shaped slots for the hooks to slide in. As I was making the drawing, Mr. Langworthy pushed a pair of new horseshoes into the center of the forge and looped his arm over the bellows pole. He never seemed to think about pumping it any more than he thought about breathing. His arm just floated up and down a little with the pole, the way a trout’s fins do when he’s resting.
When I’d finished, he was turning the little curtain hooks over and over in his big, rough fingers. “Dinky little things, ain’t they?” he said. “Take a man all day to bend that many one by one. Have to get ’em all just alike or they won’t slide good.” As he talked, he broke the screw end off the hook with his thumbs and fingers. “Pretty soft brass,” he said; “have to work it hot to make good bends. Tell you what: I ain’t got time to make ’em for you, but I’ll tell you what to do as you go along. Then we’ll see what kind of a mechanic you are.”
After I’d gone back to the Nimble Nickel for the rest of the hooks, I started my blacksmithing. Mr. Langworthy told me how to lay them side by side on an iron bar, clamp them down with another bar, then heat them in the forge and hammer the bends in the whole row at one time. He explained each part of the job before I did it, and I was careful to do exactly as he told me. In less than an hour I was hammering the last bend into the line of red-hot hooks.
I think Mr. Langworthy was almost as proud of my job as I was. After he’d shut one eye and sighted along the row of little brass hooks, he said, “By the Lord Harry, given three times your weight, you’d make a blacksmith. Couldn’t a’been more alike if they’d been bent in a die.”
While he was loosening the hand screws and cooling the bar of hooks in the water tub, I asked Mr. Langworthy how much I owed him, but he just laughed at me. “Didn’t put in over five minutes work on ’em myself,” he said, “and that couldn’t come to over a dime. Supposin’ we settle it with bellows pumpin’ one of these days?”
I knew I didn’t really need to do it, but I wanted Harry Nutting to see what a good job I’d done on the curtain hooks, so I put them in my pocket as soon as they were cooled and took them up to his lumberyard. All the way up Main Street, I planned what I’d say to him so it wouldn’t sound too much like bragging. He was looking over a load of lumber when I got there, so I waited till he was through. Then I took a handful of them out, and said, “I just brought these up so you could see if I’d made them right for fitting in the slots Lou Neff cut in the stretcher.”
“Whoa, back up!” Mr. Nutting told me. “You haven’t been gone an hour. How d’you expect Lou to have that contraption made? It’ll take him half a day.”
Then he held his hand out for me to give him the hooks. He picked up three or four of them and fitted them side by side in his fingers. “Where’d you find these?” he asked me; “never saw anything just like them.”
“I made them,” I told him. “Mr. Langworthy showed me how. They’re out of those little curtain-rod screw hooks they have at the Nimble Nickel.”
Mr. Nutting fitted a few more of them together, took a rule from his hip pocket, and measured them all around, then hollered, “Oh, Lou! Come take a look at this!”
When Lou came, Mr. Nutting said, “Remember telling me that Charlie Moody could make anything he wanted out of anything he had? Look what his boy has made in the last hour out of a bunch of curtain hooks. Every one of ’em measures right to the T.”
I would have liked to just let it go at that, but of course I couldn’t, so I said
, “It was Mr. Langworthy that made them come out right; I only did what he told me to.”
They said some more nice things about what Father used to do, then I gave Lou the rest of the hooks and went home. I didn’t even take one of the little hooks to show Grace. I wanted Mother and her to have the biggest surprise they could when I brought home the finished stretcher.
Mother and Grace were behind with the cookery order, and they didn’t even want me to come into the kitchen until it was all ready to load on the wagon. Mother gave Muriel things to make us boys a picnic lunch out in the barn, and we stayed right there till Grace called me to get the wagon ready.
Philip went with me on the cookery route, and we hurried as fast as we could. We finished by half-past four, took the money we’d collected to Mr. Shellabarger, and were at the lumberyard before five o’clock. Mr. Nutting and Lou Neff were waiting in the office for me. They had the stretcher opened to its largest size and standing in the middle of the office floor. The maple wood was as white and smooth as a slice of snow apple, and the little brass hooks looked as though they might be pure gold.
I was anxious to take it home and show it to Mother and Grace, so, after we’d played with it a little while, we loosened all the wing nuts and folded it up like a bundle of poles. Then Lou helped me take it out to our wagon. I didn’t want to get it all dirty before I even got it home, so Philip drove and I sat in the back of the wagon with the frame across my lap.
Usually, I took care of Lady the first thing I did when I got home, but that night I left her standing out by the front gate while Philip and I carried the stretcher into the house. And then I forgot all about her for at least half an hour. Mother and Grace, and the rest of the children too, were about as excited with the new stretcher as I. At first, they wouldn’t believe that I planned a lot of it myself, and then Grace said it looked as though I might turn out to have some common sense after all. When she liked me best, she always said sort of mean things like that. Before Mother remembered about supper and I remembered about Lady, we’d set the stretcher to nearly every size there could be.
I never did my chores any faster than I did that night, and Mother waited supper till I had them finished. When I brought the milk bucket in, I noticed that she had the raggedy old curtain all washed again and soaking in a pan of starch water.
There was all the difference in the world when we started the job. Grace must have been thinking a lot about the chewed-out corner. We’d hardly tightened the last wing nut when she said to Mother, “Wouldn’t it be easier for you to fix that broken place at the top than to kneel down to this corner? I’d have to be reaching up over my head all the time if I did the top.”
They had basted the mending twist into the lace so it wouldn’t get tangled in the washing and starching. Grace slid out three long lengths of it, held the ends of them in her teeth, and twisted them with her fingers until she had a thin rope. Before she started, the chewed-out corner looked big enough for a hog to crawl through, but after she’d pulled the two old border strings tight with her new rope, a cat could hardly have got through. Within twenty minutes, she’d knotted strings of twist between each row of lace mesh, so that they looked for all the world like little harp strings. I never saw her fingers work so fast as they did when she was twisting in the cross strings and drawing them tight to make the new mesh.
I’d been so busy watching Grace that I’d almost forgotten about Mother. But when I looked up, she’d worked new threads into the broken edge so carefully that I could hardly tell where it had been. I wanted to have done some weaving myself, but I think Mother knew I’d be too clumsy. At first, she told me I’d done my share in getting such a good stretcher, but later she let me sprinkle the curtain so the lace would stay soft.
That evening was nice enough to make up for all the trouble we’d had the one before. I knew Mother and Grace would do the best they could, but I didn’t have any idea they’d ever be able to make that old rag look like a lace curtain again. And I really don’t believe they thought so either. We were all kind of proud of each other.
It’s funny how fast time goes if you’re busy enough to forget about it. When the last thread was knotted in, we didn’t seem to have been working more than an hour, but it was half past eleven. Mother didn’t seem to mind, though. And she didn’t tell Grace and me we’d have to hurry right to bed and get a good night’s sleep. She just looked at the clock, and said, “My, my! ‘Tempers fudgit,’ as Mrs. Hurd used to say. Oh well, tomorrow is Sunday, and we’ll stay in bed just as long as we want to.”
She stood back, with her hands on her hips and her head cocked over a little to one side, and looked the curtain all over. “Now—let—me—see,” she said. “I think it would be best if we took the whole thing down and soaked it thoroughly before we tried to stretch it to full size. What do you think?”
We both thought so, too, and inside of two minutes we had it all picked off the hooks. When it was wet, it went back onto the frame easily, but it didn’t stretch the way we had hoped it would. The new threads were stronger than the old ones, and when we pushed the stretcher bars out to the full four by eight feet, it pulled a good many of the lace meshes a little out of shape.
Grace wanted to snip out the threads that were too tight, and put in others that wouldn’t pull so much. But Mother said, “I think we had better let well enough alone. We can’t expect to make these into new curtains, but we have learned a great deal about what we can do from this one, and I’m sure we can do better on the others. Now, let’s all go to bed and give thanks for the help we have received.”
I had to go to school all the next week, so the only chance I had to help with the curtains was from suppertime till Mother made us go to bed at nine o’clock. But Mother and Grace were spending every minute they could on them. Some went fairly easy, and some were rotten enough that they tore when the new threads were pulled tight. By the end of the week, Mother’s hands trembled so much she couldn’t tie the little knots, and Grace finished mending the last of the curtains while Mother did the cooking for my Saturday delivery.
All day Sunday, Mother had to catch up the housework that had been let go during the week. And Monday morning her back ached so much that she couldn’t go to Denver with me to deliver the finished curtains. Grace went instead.
Right after breakfast, Mother sent me to Mr. Shellabarger’s for some big sheets of butcher’s paper, so we could wrap the curtains in long folds instead of creasing them. Then we spread a blanket on the bottom of the wagon, and covered the bundle with a sheet, to keep the dust out.
Just before we started, Mother came out to the wagon, and said, “Be sure you deliver these to no one but the manager of the Brown Palace Hotel. For the moment I can’t think of his name, but he is a fine man. I don’t want you to think he has done us any injustice. He hasn’t. He was simply giving us a chance to show whether or not we were capable of being trusted with their good curtains. I hope he will examine these when you take them in. And tell him I am sorry I was unable to bring them back myself.”
I think it would have been about as easy for us to have visited the president of the United States as it was to see the manager of the Brown Palace Hotel. From the minute I started tying Lady to the lamp post in front of the main entrance, people in uniforms began telling us we were in the wrong place, or that we couldn’t talk to the manager. The bundle of curtains was awkward to hold, and it kept slipping in our hands as they made us go from one door to another or from one person to another. Everybody told us we’d have to see somebody else, and everybody told us we couldn’t see the manager.
After nearly an hour, Grace got mad and left me standing in a basement hallway with the bundle. She never would tell me what she did, but in less than ten minutes two porters came to take the curtains and me to the manager’s office. He was sitting behind a big desk, and Grace was sitting beside it—looking as smug as a cat that’s just cornered a mouse.
The manager didn’t say anything to me when
we came into his office, but he told the porters to put the bundle on a table across the room from his desk. Then he went over, snipped the strings with little scissors that folded into his pocket knife, and threw the paper back.
On top was the first curtain we had done up. He looked down at it for a couple of seconds, and said, “Well, I’ll be . . .” Then he fingered the new corner that Grace had woven in and looked at it carefully. I was standing right beside him. He swung his head around toward me, and said, “Who did this work?”
“Mother and Grace did it together,” I told him; “Grace did that corner.”
“Who’s Grace?” he asked.
“She’s my sister,” I said. “This is Grace right here.”
He looked around at Grace, and his voice was as gentle as could be when he said, “Who taught you to do such work as this?”
“Mother taught me to sew when I was little,” Grace told him.
He smiled, and asked, “How old are you now, Grace?”
“Thirteen, but I’ll be fourteen in March.”
He motioned for the two porters to go out, then went over and half sat on the front edge of his desk. “Well, you’re quite a little woman,” he told Grace. “How long have you and your mother been doing up lace curtains?”
“These are the first ones we ever tried,” she said. “We didn’t have very good luck at first, but Ralph invented an adjustable stretcher that made it easy.”
“Who’s Ralph?” he asked her.
I always spoke too quick. “Me,” I said, before Grace had a chance to answer.
“So you’re an inventor?” he asked me. “How old are you, Ralph?”
“I’ll be twelve in two weeks,” I told him, “and I want to be an inventor. Father taught me to make lots of things before he died. He could always make anything we needed out of anything he had.”