Chapter 1

Shirley's brown eyes sparkled at just the thought of it! She had seen the men around town-rugged, muscular, shirts rolled up tight over their rock-hard biceps. Tight-crotched pants, too, that had not gone unnoticed by the young dark-haired beauty. She was sure her blonde cousin had no such stirrings when she first noticed the truckers invading the tiny dot-on-the-map town. But then she had a cool way of hiding her true emotions.

The two girls lived in one of the two truly quaint but huge houses left in the area. Side by side, the two former estates were a reminder of days gone by. Servants, tea in the afternoon, croquet on the lawn on Sunday, after church. But in 1980, just paying the taxes on them was next to impossible. Thus, the house next door had become a rooming establishment, rent by the day, week or month, and often Shirley thought of it as a beautiful queen who was slowly dying. But the devilish thought of what the neighbor was now suggesting to her Aunt Jenny! Those devil-may-care truck drivers renting rooms in this house! Of course Aunt Jenny would never go for it, and she was saying so now on the phone. Shirley wondered if her Aunt Jenny had ever once in her life felt that certain "itch" just looking at a young and virile man. Of course not, not Aunt Jenny.

"Yes, I know you have taken surveyors and engineers," Jenny was saying in the same cold voice. "You were just lucky that nothing happened and, after all, they were nice young men. But truck drivers! You never know what kind of rough characters they will turn out to be. I think you will be fortunate indeed if you don't lose some of your precious antiques or even get the house burned down over your head. No, thank you, I want no part of such goings-on. I didn't approve of this new highway in the first place. And I am certainly not going to take into my home any of the riffraff who work for the Highway Commission. Goodbye."

Aunt Jenny slammed down the receiver and turned to look at both girls defiantly. She was a tall, spare woman whose dark graying hair was pulled back severely from an angular face. Life had not been kind to Jenny, who had been widowed for fourteen years. But she had not asked for pity or consideration. She had her own rigid principles, and they had sustained her when her small pension had seemed most inadequate.

One of those principles was the firm resolve that her daughter should be brought up as a lady. Of course she could not give the girl the beautiful clothes she should have, but she could give her the respectability and elegant background of the old home.

The other principle had made it imperative for her to take Shirley into her home when Jenny's sister and brother-in-law were killed in an accident. Shirley had made herself useful, as Jenny was the first to admit, but the older woman did not feel the same burning ambition for her niece that she felt for her daughter. Jenny thought, in fact, that Shirley was making a serious mistake in not accepting George Weaver, a widower with a shop of his own.

"Aunt Jenny," Shirley said in a troubled voice, "why won't you take in the truck drivers? I heard that Mrs. Jameson gets eighty dollars a week from each of them."

"What Mabel Jameson does is no longer of any interest to me," Jenny retorted. "She has four of those fellows in her house right now, and it is none of my business if she hasn't any room to take two more."

"You're quite right, Mums," Dolly said, filing her already perfect nails into a more oval shape. "I don't know how she can stand turning her beautiful home over to such low characters." She glanced appreciatively around at the gracious old room.

"I've got to get back to the biscuits," Shirley muttered, and vanished into the kitchen.

She had to get out of there before she said something really angry to Aunt Jenny, she reflected as she kneaded the biscuit dough with unnecessary vigor. It was just too bad that a person who was as fundamentally kind as Aunt Jenny should have this stubborn streak about working men or women. But there it was. Shirley had had it explained to her many times that men who worked with their hands were a class apart, and that nice girls considered only the attentions of merchants such as George Weaver. Nor did nice girls of twenty take a job in a city fifty miles away if, like Shirley, they had a good home with relatives.

Instead, Shirley thought as she slammed the biscuits into the oven, a nice girl was supposed to be content living as a poor relation and working as a household drudge. It was not that she was ungrateful to Aunt Jenny, Shirley told herself for the hundredth time. But it did seem too bad to try to skimp along on a small amount of money when she could so easily have taken care of herself and even contributed to the support of the house. Shirley glanced at the clock and was reminded that she had to feed the chickens and pick up the eggs. Her aunt had objected to even this small venture, Shirley remembered. But she had since become quite tolerant of the twelve "hard-working girls" down in the henhouse.

Shirley moved between the feed bin and trough with almost automatic gestures.

"You don't know how lucky you are," she told one plump white hen who was eating with speed and precision. "You can work anytime, anywhere you want to, while I have to be a nice girl and only scrub the floor and cook the meals and clean the house. I can't even help with the housework if we take in boarders, because then I would be earning money. The only thing I can do is marry a widower with a brat of a child, just because he wants a good housekeeper for free."

Shirley gathered up the six eggs that were in the nests and returned to the house. She had to wait a few minutes for the biscuits to finish baking, so she sat in the big rocking chair near the table in the bay window. In the distance she could just see the green roof of the Jameson mansion, and as she caught sight of it, her resentment flared again.

Mabel Jameson, plump and confident, was, in Shirley's opinion, doing a remarkable job of adjusting herself to modern standards. Her husband had been a weakling who had lost her fortune and had left his widow only the house itself when he died, so Shirley had been told. Yet Mrs. Jameson had found a new life for herself, first opening her home to tourists, and now giving the men who had to work on the new highway room and board. It must have proven profitable, too, if Mrs. Jameson's new car and the fresh coat of paint on the house were any indication of how well she was making out.

But Aunt Jenny would not change. Two months ago when the surveyors had first laid out the highway, Mrs. Jameson had asked her friend for the use of the five idle bedrooms in the Winsted home. She had been curtly refused. Later Shirley had seen the surveyors getting out of their station wagons in front of the Jameson home, and it seemed to her that they were very nice young men indeed. When the surveyors had left, the men had arrived who set the dynamite on the rocky ledges where the highway was to go. They, too, had seemed like nice, clean young men. But Mrs. Jameson hadn't even bothered to ask Jenny's help.

Shirley wondered that the other woman had had the courage to query her aunt about rooms for truck drivers. Surely Mrs. Jameson would know that a driveway not open to station wagons would be adamantly closed to dirty, greasy trucks. With an exclamation, Shirley jumped to her feet and peered out through the bay window. She could scarcely believe her eyes as she saw a huge red dump-truck wheel into the drive and park before the front door.

Hastily she took the biscuits out of the oven and turned off the heat. This she must see!

By the time she got to the living room, Dolly had already opened the front door and was greeting two tall, bronzed young men. They wore jeans and blue shirts almost as if they were a uniform. One man, grinning down at Dolly with obvious admiration, had flaming red hair; the other, who seemed quieter and more reserved, had crisp black hair that was cut short in the obvious attempt to control its curliness.

"Good morning, ma'am," the redheaded man said in a voice with a slight Southern accent. "Could you tell me where Mrs. Jameson's place is? My name's Tom Sanders, and this 'ere's my buddy, Dan Hallbrook."

"Please come in." Dolly backed away from the door as if too fascinated to know quite what she was saying.

Aunt Jenny put down her knitting and got slowly to her feet, as if she too could not quite believe her eyes. The men, Shirley thought, looked too young and vital and big for the quaint old-fashioned living room.

"Who are you?" demanded Jenny sharply.

"They've just told us their names, Mums."

"We work for the highway, ma'am," Dan Hallbrook said quietly.

"So you're two of those highwaymen," Aunt Jenny said disapprovingly. The redheaded one smiled as if she were joking, but the dark-haired man's eyes seemed to sharpen and his lips pressed together in a straight line.

"Oh, Mums," Dolly exclaimed, "what will these nice young men think of us?" She looked at the redhead flirtatiously. "They just stopped to ask where Mrs. Jameson lives."

Jenny had glanced out the window and noticed the big red truck parked in the driveway. She said sharply: "Mabel Jameson lives about half a mile down the road, going toward the center of the village. It will take you only about two minutes to get there-and I will give you just two minutes to get that monstrous red machine out of my front yard!"

Tom Sanders stopped smiling as suddenly as if he'd been slapped. But it was Dan Hall brook who said with deceptive softness:

"That monstrous machine, ma'am, cost us fifty-five thousand dollars. Which, to my way of thinking, is a monstrous amount of money-enough to command respect, ma'am, even from you."

The two men moved so quickly that Shirley was sure afterwards it was no longer than a minute and a half before they had zoomed out of sight down the road.

The Winsted home in Burrbridge had been built in a gracious era. A central hall divided the living room and bedrooms on the first floor at the left from the dining room and kitchen on the right. The dining room table of mahogany could be pulled out to accommodate fourteen, but usually, as tonight, it was set for only five.

The linen cloth was creamy with age and had been washed so often it now reached in silken folds to the floor. White candles in hurricane chimneys burned steadily, and the silver and glasses gleamed in their light. Shirley heard the others coming from the living room and hastily went through the swinging door to the kitchen to get the tuna fish casserole she had decided could most readily combine hospitality with economy.

When she came back a moment later, both Jenny Winsted and her daughter were seated, while George Weaver and Joe Hamilton stood waiting for her to join them.

As Shirley had known she would, Aunt Jenny had placed George Weaver at the right, and the chair next to him was hers. When she took her place, Shirley thought that she actually did like George Weaver. He was not tall and had a tendency to put on weight if he didn't watch his diet. But his ruddy, smooth-shaven face beamed with humor and his thinning brown hair was carefully trimmed and combed. No, there was nothing the matter with George, but Shirley just could not see herself spending the rest of her life in his company.

"How are things at the paint shop, George?" Shirley asked as she sat down. She did not really want to know, but it was a safe question and George would, of course, give her a detailed account of the market and the local demand for paint products. Shirley sometimes thought that she could have told anyone just what painting had been done in the village in the past year and exactly how much it had cost.

While George launched into his favorite topic, she glanced over at Joe Hamilton who, as usual, was looking at Dolly with his heart in his eyes. Joe's hair was dark and straight, with an irrepressible cowlick that he kept trying to smooth down. His face was rather sharp-featured, but was redeemed by a cleft chin and an unusually sensitive mouth. Joe was an electrical engineer and so would have been considered eligible for Dolly's hand by Aunt Jenny. But he also repaired television sets in his spare time, which placed him under a slight cloud in Jenny Winsted's opinion...." And if I could get the contract for the painting of the maintenance building from the Highway Commission, I would really be in clover," George said to Shirley.

Aunt Jenny jabbed at her casserole and said briskly: "Don't mention that Highway Commission. All they're good for is to think up new ways to get more taxes out of us. We had a perfectly good road between Burrbridge and Stanton. There was absolutely no reason to spend a million dollars just to take out a few curves."

"They were dangerous curves," Joe Hamilton said mildly.

"Well, yes," George agreed. "But they needn't have built a whole new highway for fifty miles. I am inclined to agree with our hostess that a new highway which bypasses the village of Burrbridge will eventually do us more harm than good."

There was no need to wait for eventual harm, Jenny pointed out. There was great damage being done at present by encouraging the riffraff and transient foreigners who followed such construction to live in their beautiful village, even to board in their beautiful homes.

"Why, two of them actually had the nerve to come to my front door this morning," Jenny said in an injured tone. "And in addition, they drove a monstrosity of a truck, almost as big as this room, and parked it right out there in my driveway. I sent them packing, I can tell you."

The conversation continued until Jenny had had a chance to express her opinion of the traitorous action of Mabel Jameson in giving room and board to common truck drivers. "More than that, she actually expected me to take in two of them. I told her what I thought of that insulting idea," Jenny finished.

Shirley was grateful to Joe Hamilton for the way he changed the subject and mentioned the dance that was to be given at the Country Club next month. Dolly was a member of the Country Club, and the money she paid in yearly dues was carefully saved by Jenny for this purpose. Dolly had often told Shirley that it was difficult to keep up appearances with the select circle who were members of the club. But the yearly dance that started the season was a must, and Dolly was already planning her costume with care.

While her cousin discussed the program and the decorations with the others, Shirley cleared the table and brought out the chocolate cream pie she had made for dessert. It was George Weaver's favorite, and Aunt Jenny gave her niece a knowing smile as the dish was placed before her. Shirley knew that her aunt was thinking she had baked this dessert especially for George. Actually, Shirley had felt so remorseful over her earlier hard thoughts about Aunt Jenny that she had baked the pie to please the older woman and to salve her own conscience.

They were just finishing their coffee when Joe Hamilton suddenly straightened and stared out the window.

"That can't be the glow from the sunset," he said in a carefully controlled voice. "I think we have a fire on our hands, and I'm pretty sure it's the Jameson place."

With one accord, they jumped to their feet and ran to the windows. A spectacular and frightening pillar of fire shot above the treetops as if the Jameson house had exploded.

"I knew it!" Jenny said in a shocked voice. "I even told Mabel this morning that those truck drivers would probably burn the house over her head. But anyway, this is a terrible tragedy. We must see what we can do for poor Mabel."

"I'm almost certain that fire wasn't started by the truck drivers," Joe Hamilton said at once. "Mabel Jameson has-or had-an old furnace. I've been after her to get a new one for years. It was much too dangerous for her to have in her home."

Even as he spoke he was going to the front door, closely followed by George Weaver. Shirley and Dolly ran after them, and Aunt Jenny called as they got into the car:

"Now be sure to bring poor Mabel back with you. She can stay here as long as she wants to. Or if there's anything else we can do for her ... "