17: The red one [***]

Wes Carroll's Puzzler

My perpetually tricky friend told me that while she was walking through town she saw four particularly vibrant houses. There was an auburn one, a brick one, a cherry one, and one the shade of dogwood rose. She wanted me to figure out the order of the houses. She said that the the auburn came before the the brick one while the cherry one came before the dogwood rose, but the cherry and the dogwood rose were not adjacent. I told her that she hadn’t given me enough information, so she just laughed and told me that she could tell me the color of the first one or the color of the last one, but it wouldn’t help if she did either one. // What color was the second house? // Spiciness: *** out of **** // Note: Not having paper makes this one especially difficult. If you give yourself paper, I think you can rate this puzzle as two chili peppers of spiciness instead of three.