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“I guess we’ll wait out here,” replied one; and the other nodded.

“Well, I sha’n’t be gone long,” said Caleb.”Mother’ll know how to manage her.”He drove carefully down the hill; his buggy wings rattled in the wind. The other men pulled up their coat collars, and met the blast stubbornly.

“Pretty ticklish piece of business to tackle,” said one, in a low grunt.

“That’s so,” assented the other. Then they were silent, and waited for Caleb. Once in a while they stamped their feet and slapped their mittened hands. They did not hear Hetty slip the bolt and turn the key of the meeting-house door, nor see her peeping at them from a gallery window.

Caleb returned in twenty minutes; he had not far to go. His wife, stout and handsome and full of vigor, sat beside him in the buggy. Her face was red with the cold wind; her thick cashmere shawl was pinned tightly over her broad bosom.”Has she come down yet?” she called out, in an imperious way.

The two selectmen shook their heads. Caleb kept the horse quiet while his wife got heavily and briskly out of the buggy. She went up the meeting-house steps, and reached out confidently to open the door. Then she drew back and looked around.”Why,” said she, “the door’s locked; she’s locked the door. I call this pretty work!”

She turned again quite fiercely, and began beating on the door.”Hetty!” she called; “Hetty, Hetty Fifield!Let me in!What have you locked this door for?”

She stopped and turned to her husband.

“Don’t you s’pose the barn key would unlock it?” she asked.

“I don’t b’lieve ‘twould.”

“Well, you’d better go home and fetch it.”

Caleb again drove down the hill, and the other men searched their pockets for keys. One had the key of his corn-house, and produced it hopefully; but it would not unlock the meeting-house door.

A crowd seldom gathered in the little village for anything short of a
fire; but to-day in a short time quite a number of people stood on the meeting-house hill, and more kept coming. When Caleb Gale returned with the barn key his daughter, a tall, pretty young girl, sat beside him, her little face alert and smiling in her red hood. The other selectmen’s wives toiled eagerly up the hill, with a young daughter of one of them speeding on ahead. Then the two young girls stood close to each other and watched the proceedings. Key after key was tried; men brought all the large keys they could find, running importantly up the hill, but none would unlock the meeting-house door. After Caleb had tried the last available key, stooping and screwing it anxiously, he turned around.”There ain’t no use in it, any way,” said he; “most likely the door’s bolted.”

“You don’t mean there’s a bolt on that door?” cried his wife.

“Yes, there is.”

“Then you might jest as well have tore ’round for hen’s feathers as keys. Of course she’s bolted it if she’s got any wit, an’ I guess she’s got most as much as some of you men that have been bringin’ keys. Try the windows.”

But the windows were fast. Hetty had made her sacred castle impregnable except to violence. Either the door would have to be forced or a window broken to gain an entrance.

The people conferred with one another. Some were for retreating, and leaving Hetty in peaceful possession until time drove her to capitulate.”She’ll open it to-morrow,” they said. Others were for extreme measures, and their impetuousity gave them the lead. The project of forcing the door was urged; one man started for a crow-bar.

“They are a parcel of fools to do such a thing,” said Caleb Gale’s wife to another woman.”Spoil that good door!They’d better leave the poor thing alone till to-morrow. I dun’ know what’s goin’ to be done with her when they git in. I ain’t goin’ to have father draggin’ her over to Mis’ Radway’s by the hair of her head.”