Osmun’s quarter-century occupancy of Vailholme nobody took advantage of the chance.

During that quarter-century the wilderness’s beauty attracted more and more people of means and of taste. Once-bleak hills blossomed into estates. The village of Aura became something[20] of a resort. The face of the whole countryside changed.

[20]

When Osmun Vail died (see, we are through with him already, though not so much as launched on the queer effects of his queerer actions!) he bequeathed to his beloved crony, Malcolm Creede, the sum of $500,000, and a free gift of the house he had built for him, and one hundred acres of land around it.

Creede had named this big new home “Canobie,” in memory of his mother’s borderland birthplace. He still owned Rackrent Farm, two miles distant. He had taken pride, in off moments, in improving the sorry old farmhouse and bare acres into something of the quaint well-being which he and his dead wife had once planned for their wilderness home. Within a year after Vail’s death Creede also died, leaving his fortune and his two homes, jointly, to his twin sons, Clive and Osmun.

The bulk of Vail’s fortune—a matter of $4,000,000 and the estate of Vailholme—went to the testator’s sole living relative; his grand-nephew, young Thaxton Vail, a popular and easy-going chap who, for years, had made his home with his great-uncle.

Along with Vailholme, naturally, went the[21] proviso that ten of its forty-three rooms should be set aside, if necessary, for hotel accommodations.

[21]

Thaxton Vail nodded reminiscently, as he read this clause in the will. Long since, Osmun had explained its origin to him. The young fellow had promised, in tolerant affection for the oldster, to respect the whim. As nobody ever yet had taken advantage of the hotel proposition and as not six people, then alive, had heard of it, he felt safe enough in accepting the odd condition along with the gift.

[22]

Chapter II AT LAST THE STORY BEGINS

Chapter II

AMONG the two million Americans shoved bodily into the maelstrom of the World War were Thaxton Vail and the Creede twins.

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