The Power and the Glory by Grace MacGowan Cooke (page 3)

discarded half a dozen explanations. “There–why, there’s our dance!” And he stood up in relief, as the fiddlers began on an old-fashioned quadrille.

Johnnie responded with alacrity, not aware of having either risen or fallen in her companion’s estimation. She danced through the set with smiling enjoyment, prompting her partner, who knew only modern dances. On his part Conroy studied her covertly, trying to adjust his slow mind to this astonishing new state of things, and to decide what a man’s proper attitude might be toward such a girl. In the end he found himself with no conclusion.

“They say they’re going to try a plain waltz,” he began as he led her back to a seat. He hesitated, glanced about him, and finally placed himself uneasily in the chair beside her. Good Lord! The situation was impossible. What should he say if anybody–Gray Stoddard, for instance–chaffed him about being smitten in this quarter?

“A waltz?” echoed Johnnie helpfully when he did not go on. “I believe I could dance that–I tried it once.”

“Then you’ll dance it with me?” Conroy found himself saying, baldly, awkwardly, but unable, for the life of him, to keep the eagerness out of his voice.

Upon the instant the music struck up. The two rose and made ready for the dance; Conroy placing Johnnie in waltzing position, and instructing her solicitously.

Gray Stoddard looking on, was amazed at the naif simple jealousy that swept over him at the sight. She had danced with Conroy twice already–he ought to be more considerate than to bring the girl into notice that way–a chump like Charlie Conroy, what would he understand of such a nature as Johnnie Consadine’s? Before he fully realized his own intentions, he had paused in front of the two and was speaking.

“I think Miss Johnnie promised me a dance this evening. I’ll have to go back to the office in twenty minutes, and–I hate to interrupt you, but I guess I’ll have to claim my own.”

He became suddenly aware that Conroy was signalling him across Johnnie’s unconscious head with Masonic twistings of the features. Stoddard met these recklessly inconsiderate grimacings with an impassive stare, then looked away.

“I want to see you before you go,” the man from Watauga remarked, as he reluctantly resigned his partner. “Don’t you forget that there’s a waltz coming to me, Miss Johnnie. I’m going to have it, if we make the band play special for us alone.”

Lydia Sessions, passing on the arm of young Baker, glanced at Johnnie, star-eyed, pink-cheeked and smiling, with a pair of tall cavaliers contending for her favours, and sucked her lips in to that thin, sharp line of reprobation Johnnie knew so well. Dismissing her escort graciously, she hurried to the little supper room and found another member of the committee.

“Come here, Mrs. Hexter. Just look at that, will you?” She called attention in a carefully suppressed, but fairly tragic tone, to Stoddard and Johnnie dancing together, the only couple on the floor. “None of the girls know how to waltz. I am not sure that it would be suitable if they did. When I came past, just now, there were two of the men–two–talking to John Consadine, and they were all three laughing. I can’t think how it is that girls of that sort manage to stir things up so and get all the men around them.”

“Neither can I,” said Mrs. Hexter wickedly. “If I did know how, I believe I’d do it sometimes myself. What is it you want of me, Miss Sessions? I must run back and see to supper, if you don’t need me.”

“But I do,” fretted Lydia. “I want your help. This waltzing and–and such things–ought to be stopped.”

“All right,” rejoined practical Mrs. Hexter. “The quickest way to do it is to stop the music.”

She had meant the speech as a jeer, but literal-minded Lydia Sessions welcomed its suggestion. Hurrying down the long room, she spoke to the leader of their small orchestra. The Negro raised to her a brown face full of astonishment. His fiddle-bow faltered–stopped. He turned to his two fellows and gave hasty directions. The waltz measure died away, and a quadrille was announced.

“That was too bad,” said Stoddard as they came to a halt; “you were just getting the step beautifully.”

The girl flashed a swift, sweet look up at him. “I do love to dance,” she breathed.

“John, would you be so kind as to come and help in the supper room,” Miss Sessions’s hasty tones broke in.

She was leaning on Charlie Conroy’s arm, and when she departed to hide Johnnie safely away in the depths of their impromptu kitchen, it left the two men alone together. Conroy promptly fastened upon the other.

Charlie Conroy was a young man who had made up his mind to get on socially. Such figures are rarer in America than in the old world. Yet Charlie Conroy with his petty ambitions does not stand entirely alone. He seriously regarded marriage as a stepping-stone to a circle which should include “the best people.” That this term did not indicate the noblest or most selfless, need hardly be explained. It meant only that bit of froth which in each community rides high on the top of the cup, and which, in Watauga, was augmented by the mill owners of its suburb of Cottonville. Conroy had been grateful for the opportunity to make an entry into this circle by means of assisting Miss Sessions in her charitable work. That lady herself, as sister-in-law of Jerome Hardwick and a descendant of an excellent New England family, he regarded with absolute veneration, quite too serious and profound for anything so assured as mere admiration.

“I tried to warn you,” he began: “but you were bound to get stung.”

“I beg your pardon?” returned Stoddard in that civil, colourless interrogation which should always check over-familiar speech, even from the dullest. But Conroy was not sensitive.

“That big red-headed girl, you know,” he said, leaning close and speaking in a confidential tone. “I mistook her for a lady. I was going my full length–telling her what fun the mill girls were, and trying to do the agreeable–when I found out.”

“Found out what?” inquired Stoddard. “That she was not a lady?”

“Aw, come off,” laughed Conroy. “You make a joke of everything.”

“I knew that she was a weaver in the mill,” said Stoddard quietly.

Conroy glanced half wistfully over his shoulder in the direction where Johnnie had vanished.

“She’s a good-looker all right,” he said thoughtfully. “And smile–when that girl smiles and turns those eyes on you–by George! if she was taken to New York and put through one of those finishing schools she’d make a sensation in the swagger set.”

Stoddard nodded gravely. He had not Conroy’s faith in the fashionable finishing school; but what he lacked there, he made up in conviction as to Johnnie’s deserts and abilities.

“There she comes now,” said Conroy, as the door swung open to admit a couple of girls with trays of coffee cups. “She walks mighty well. I wonder where a girl like that learned to carry herself so finely. By George, she _is_ a good-looker! She’s got ’em all beaten; if she was only–. Queer about the accidents of birth, isn’t it? Now, what would you say, in her heredity, makes a common girl like that step and look like a queen?”

Gray Stoddard’s face relaxed. A hint of his quizzical, inscrutable smile was upon it as he answered.

“Nature doesn’t make mistakes. I don’t call Johnnie Consadine a common girl–it strikes me that she is rather uncommon.”

And outside, a young fellow in the Sunday suit of a workingman was walking up and down, staring at the lighted windows, catching a glimpse now and again of one girl or another, and cursing under his breath when he saw Johnnie Consadine.

“Wouldn’t go with me to the dance at Watauga–oh no! But she ain’t too tired to dance with the swells!” he muttered to the darkness. “And I can’t get a word nor a look out of her. Lord, I don’t know what some women think!”

CHAPTER XI

THE NEW BOARDER

Pap Himes was sitting on the front gallery, dozing in the westering sunshine. On his lap the big, yellow cat purred and blinked with a grotesque resemblance in colouring and expression to his master. It was Sunday afternoon, when the toilers were all out of the mills, and most of them lying on their beds or gone in to Watauga. The village seemed curiously silent and deserted. Through the lazy smoke from his cob pipe Pap noticed Shade Buckheath emerge from the store and start up the street. He paid no more attention till the young man’s voice at the porch edge roused him from his half-somnolence.

“Evenin’, Pap,” said the newcomer.

“Good evenin’ yourself,” returned Himes with unusual cordiality. He liked men, particularly young, vigorous, masterful men. “Come in, Buck, an’ set a spell. Rest your hat–rest your hat.”

It was always Pap’s custom to call Shade by the first syllable of his second name. Buck is a common by-name for boys in the mountains, and it could not be guessed whether the old man used it as a diminutive of the surname, or whether he meant merely to nickname this favourite of his.

Shade threw himself on the upper step of the porch and searched in his pockets for tobacco.

“Room for another boarder?” he asked laconically.

The old man nodded.

“I reckon there’s always room, ef it’s asked for,” he returned. “Hit’s the one way I got to make me a livin’, with Louvany dyin’ off and Mavity puny like she is. I have obliged to keep the house full, or we’d see the bottom of the meal sack.”

“All right,” agreed Buckheath, rising, and treating the matter as terminated. “I’ll move my things in a-Monday.”

“Hold on thar–hold on, young feller,” objected Pap, as Shade turned away. It was against all reasonable mountain precedent to trade so quickly; but indeed Shade had merely done so with a view to forcing through what he well knew to be a doubtful proposition.

“I’m a-holding on,” he observed gruffly at last, as the other continued to blink at him with red eyes and say nothing. “What’s the matter with what I said? You told me you had room for another boarder and I named it that I was comin’ to board at your house. Have you got any objections?”

“Well, yes, I have,” Himes opened up ponderously. “You set yourself down on that thar step and we’ll have this here thing out. My boardin’-house is for gals. I fixed it so when I come here. There ain’t scarcely a rowdy feller in Cottonville that hain’t at one time or another had the notion he’d board with Pap Himes; but I’ve always kep’ a respectable house, and I always aim to, I am a old man, and I bear a good name, and I’m the only man in this house, and I aim to stay so. Now, sir, there’s my flatform; and you may take it or leave it.”

Buckheath glanced angrily and contemptuously into the stupid, fatuous countenance above him; he appeared to curb with some difficulty the disposition to retort in kind. Instead, he returned, sarcastically:

“The fellers around town say you won’t keep anything but gals because nothin’ but gals would put up with your hectorin’ ’em, and crowdin’ ten in a room that was intended for four. That’s what folks say; but I’ve got a reason to want to board with you, Pap, and I’ll pay regular prices and take what you give me.”

Himes looked a little astonished; then an expression of distrust stole over his broad, flat face.

“What’s bringin’ you here?” he asked bluntly.

“Johnnie Consadine,” returned Shade, without evasion or preamble. “Before I left the mountains, Johnnie an’ me was aimin’ to wed. Now she’s got down here, and doin’ better than ever she hoped to, and I cain’t get within hand-reach of her.”

“Ye cain’t?” inquired Pap scornfully. “Why anybody could marry that gal that wanted to. But Lord! anybody can marry _any_ gal, if he’s got the sense he was born with.”

“All right,” repeated Shade grimly. “I come to you to know could I get board, not to ask advice. I aim to marry Johnnie Consadine, and I know my own business–air you goin’ to board me?”

The old man turned this speech in his mind for some time.

“Curious,” he muttered to himself, “how these here young fellers will get petted on some special gal and break their necks to have her.”

“Shut up–will you?” ejaculated Buckheath, so suddenly and fiercely that the old man fairly jumped, rousing the yellow cat to remonstrative squirmings. “I tell you I know my business, and I ask no advice of you–will you board me?”

“I cain’t do it, Buck,” returned Himes definitely. “I ain’t got such a room to give you by yourself as you’d be willin’ to take up with; and nobody comes into my room. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you–I’ll meal you, ef that will help your case any. I’ll meal you for two dollars a week, and throw in a good word with Johnnie.”

Buckheath received the conclusion of this speech with a grin.

“I reckon your good word ‘d have a lot to do with Johnnie Consadine,” he said ironically, as he picked up his hat from the floor.

“Uh-huh,” nodded Pap. “She sets a heap of store by what I say. All of ’em does; but Johnnie in particular. I don’t know but what you’re about right. Ain’t no sense in bein’ all tore up concernin’ any gal or woman; but I believe if I was pickin’ out a good worker that would earn her way, I’d as soon pick out Johnnie Consadine as any of ’em.”

And having thus paid his ultimate compliment to Johnnie, Himes relapsed into intermittent slumber as Shade moved away down the squalid, dusty street under the fierce July sun.

Johnnie greeted the new boarder with a reserve which was in marked contrast to the reception he got from the other girls. Shade Buckheath was a handsome, compelling fellow, and a good match; this Adamless Eden regarded him as a rival in glory even to Pap himself. When supper was over on the first night of his arrival, Shade walked out on the porch and seated himself on the steps. The girls disposed themselves at a little distance–your mountain-bred young female is ever obviously shy, almost to prudery.

“Whar’s Johnnie Consadine?” asked the newcomer lazily, disposing himself with his back against a post and his long legs stretched across the upper step.

“Settin’ in thar, readin’ a book,” replied Beulah Catlett curtly. Beulah was but fourteen, and she belonged to the newer dispensation which speaks up more boldly to the masculine half of creation. “Johnnie! Johnnie Consadine!” she called through the casement. “Here’s Mr. Buckheath, wishful of your company. Better come out.”

“I will, after a while,” returned Johnnie absently. “I’ve got to help Aunt Mavity some, and then I’ll be there.”

“Hit’s a sight, the books that gal does read,” complained Beulah. “Looks like a body might get enough stayin’ in the house by workin’ in a cotton mill, without humpin’ theirselves up over a book all evenin’.”

“Mr. Stoddard lends ’em to her,” announced Mandy importantly. “He used to give ’em to Miss Lyddy Sessions, and she’d give ’em to Johnnie; but now when Miss Lyddy’s away, he’ll bring one down to the mill about every so often, and him an’ Johnnie’ll stand and gas and talk over what’s in ’em–I cain’t understand one word they say. I tell you Johnnie Consadine’s got sense.”

Her pride in Johnnie made her miss the look of rage that settled on Buckheath’s face at her announcement. The young fellow was glad when Pap Himes began to speak growlingly.

“Yes, an’ if she was my gal I’d talk to her with a hickory about that there business. A gal that ain’t too old to carry on that-a-way ain’t too old to take a whippin’ for it. Huh!”

For her own self Mandy would have been thoroughly scared by this attack; in Johnnie’s defence she rustled her feathers like an old hen whose one chick has been menaced.

“Johnnie Consadine is the prettiest-behaved gal I ever seen,” she announced shrilly. “She ain’t never said nor done the least thing that she hadn’t ort. Mr. Stoddard he just sees how awful smart she is, and he loves to lend her books and talk with her about ’em afterward. For my part I ain’t never seen look nor motion about Mr. Gray Stoddard that wasn’t such as a gentleman ort to be. I know he never said nothin’ he ort not to _me_.”

The suggestion of Stoddard’s making advances of unseemly warmth to Mandy Meacham produced a subdued snicker. Even Pap smiled, and Mandy herself, who had been looking a bit terrified after her bold speaking, was reassured.

Buckheath had been a week at the Himes boarding-house, finding it not unpleasant to show Johnnie Consadine how many of the girls regarded him with favour, whether she did or not, when he came to supper one evening with a gleam in his eye that spoke evil for some one. After the meal was over, he followed Pap out on the porch and sat down beside the old man, the girls being bunched expectantly on the step, for he was apt to delay for a bit of chat with one or another of them before leaving.

“You infernal old rascal, I’ve caught up with you,” he whispered, leaning close to his host.

Himes clutched the pipe in his teeth till it clicked, and stared in helpless resentment at his mealer.

“What’s the matter with you?” he demanded.

“Speak lower, so the gals won’t hear you, or you’ll wish you had,” counselled Shade. “I sent that there thing on to Washington to get a patent on it, and now I find that they was a model of the same there in the name of Gideon Himes. What do you make of that?”

Pap stared at the thin strips of metal lying in Shade’s hard, brown palm.

“The little liar!” he breathed. “She told me she got it up herself.” He glared at the bits of steel with protruding eyes, and breathed hard.

“Well, she didn’t,” Shade countered swiftly, taking advantage of the turn things were showing. “I made six of ’em; and when I told her to bring ’em back and I’d give her some that would wear better, she only brought me five. She said she’d lost one here at home, she believed. I might have knowed then that you’d get your claws on it ef I wasn’t mighty peart.”

Old Gideon was not listening; he had fallen into a brown study, turning the piece of metal in his skilful, wonted, knotty fingers, with their spade tips.

“Put it out of sight–quick–here she comes!” whispered Shade; and the old man looked up to see Johnnie Consadine in the doorway. A grin of triumph grew slowly upon his face, as he gazed from one to the other.

“She did get it up!” he returned in Buckheath’s face. “You liar! You’re a-aimin’ to steal it from her. You filed out the pieces like she told you to, and when you found it would work, you tried to get a patent on it for yo’se’f. Yes, sir, I’m onto _you!_”

Shade looked over his shoulder. The girls had forsaken the steps. Despairing of his coming, they were strolling two-and-two after Johnnie on the sidewalk.

“It’s you and me for it, Pap,” he said hardily. “What was _you_ tryin’ to do? Was you gettin’ the patent for Johnnie? Shall I call her up here and ask her?”

“No, no,” exclaimed the old man hastily. “They ain’t no use of puttin’ sich things in a fool gal’s hands. She never heard of a patent–wouldn’t know one from a hole in the ground. Hit’s like you say, Buck–you and me for it.”

The two men rose and stood a moment, Shade smiling a bit to think what he would do with Pap Himes and his claim if he could only once get Johnnie to say yes to his suit. The thick wits of the elder man apparently realized this feature of the matter not at all.

“Why that thar girl is crazy to get married,” he argued, half angrily. “You know in reason she is–they all are. The fust night when you brung her here I named it to her that she was pretty well along in years, and she’d better be spry about gettin’ her hooks on a man, or she was left. She said she’d do the best she could–I never heered a gal speak up pearter–most of ’em would be ‘shamed to name it out so free. Why, if it was me, I’d walk her down to a justice’s office an’ wed her so quick her head’d swim.

“Who’s that talking about getting married?” called Johnnie’s voice from the street, and Johnnie herself ran up the steps.

“Hit was me,” harangued Pap Himes doggedly. “I was tellin’ Shade how bad you wanted to git off, and that I ‘lowed you’d be a good bargain for him.”

He looked hopefully from one to the other, as though he expected to see his advice accepted and put into immediate practice. Johnnie laughed whole-heartedly.

“Pap,” she said with shining eyes, “if you get me a husband, I’ll have to give you a commission on it. Looks like I can’t noways get one for myself, don’t it?”

She passed into the house, and Shade regarded his ally in helpless anger.

“That’s the way she talks, here lately,” he growled, “Seems like it would be easy enough to come to something; and by the Lord, it would, with any other gal I ever seed–or with Johnnie like she was when she first came down here! But these days and times she’s got a way of puttin’ me off that I can’t seem to get around.”

Neither man quite understood the power of that mental culture which Johnnie was assimilating so avidly. That reading things in a book should enable her–a child, a girl, a helpless woman–to negative their wishes smilingly, this would have been a thing quite outside the comprehension of either.

“Aunt Mavity wants me to go down to the store for her,” Johnnie announced, returning. “Any of you girls like to come along?”

Mandy had parted her lips to accept the general invitation, when Shade Buckheath rose to his feet and announced curtly, “I’ll go with you.”

His glance added that nobody else was wanted, and Mandy subsided into a seat on the steps and watched the two walk away side by side.

“Looks like you ain’t just so awful pleased to have me boardin’ with Pap,” Shade began truculently, when it appeared that the girl was not going to open any conversation with him. “Maybe you wasn’t a-carin’ for my company down street this evenin’.”

“No,” said Johnnie, bluntly but very quietly. “I wish you hadn’t come to the house to board. I have told you to let me alone.”

Shade laughed, an exasperated, mirthless laugh. “You know well enough what made me do it,” he said sullenly. “If you don’t want me to board with Pap Himes you can stop it any day you say the word. You promise to wed me, and I’ll go back to the Inn. The Lord knows they feed you better thar, and I believe in my soul the gals at Pap Himes’s will run me crazy. But as long as you hang off the way you do about our marryin’, and I git word of you carryin’ on with other folks, I’m goin’ to stay where I can watch you.”

“Other folks!” echoed Johnnie, colour coming into her cheeks. “Shade, there’s no use of your quarrelling with me, and I see it’s what you’re settin’ out to do.”

“Yes, other folks–Mr. Gray Stoddard, for instance. I ain’t got no auto to take you out ridin’ in, but you’re a blame sight safer with me than you are with him; and if I was to carry word to your mother or your uncle Pros about your doin’s they’d say–“

“The last word my uncle Pros left with ma to give me was that you’d bear watchin’, Shade Buckheath,” laughed Johnnie, her face breaking up into sweet, sudden mirth at the folly of it all. “You’re not aimin’ for my good. I don’t see what on earth makes you talk like you wanted to marry me.”

“Because I do,” said Buckheath helplessly. He wondered if the girl did not herself know her own attractions, forgetful that he had not seen them plainly till a man higher placed in the social scale set the cachet of a gentleman’s admiration upon them.

CHAPTER XII

THE CONTENTS OF A BANDANNA

It was a breathless August evening; all day the land had lain humming and quivering beneath the glare of the sun. It seemed that such heat must culminate in a thunder shower. Even Pap Himes had sought the coolest corner of the porch, his pipe put out, as adding too much to the general swelter, and the hot, yellow cat perched at a discreet distance.

The old man’s dreamy eyes were fixed with a sort of animal content on the winding road that disappeared in the rise of the gap. If was his boast that God Almighty never made a day too hot for him, and to the marrow of them his rheumatic bones felt and savoured the comfort of this blistering weather. High up on the road he had noted a small moving speck that appeared and disappeared as the foliage hid it, or gaps in the trees revealed it. It was not yet time for the mill operatives to be out; but as he glanced eagerly in the direction of the buildings, the gates opened and the loom-fixers streamed forth. Pap had matters of some importance to discuss with Shade Buckheath, and he was glad to see the young man’s figure come swinging down the street. The two were soon deep in a whispered discussion, their heads bent close together.

The little speck far up the road between the trees announced itself to the eye now as a moving figure, walking down toward Cottonville.

“Well, I’ll read it again, if you don’t believe me,” Buckheath said impatiently. “All that Alabama mill wants is to have me go over there and put this trick on their jennies, and if it works they’ll give us a royalty of–well, I’ll make the bargain.”

“Or I will,” countered Pap swiftly.

“You?” inquired Shade contemptuously. “Time they wrote some of the business down and you couldn’t read it, whar’d you be, and whar’d our money be?”

The moving speck on the road appeared at this time to be the figure of a tall man, walking unsteadily, reeling from side to side of the road, yet approaching the village.

“Shade,” pacified Himes, with a truckling manner that the younger man’s aggressions were apt to call out in him, “you know I don’t mean anything against you, but I believe in my soul I’d ruther sell out the patent. That man in Lowell said he’d give twenty thousand dollars if it was proved to work–now didn’t he?”

“Yes, and by the time it’s proved to work we’ll have made three times that much out of it. There ain’t a spinning mill in the country that won’t save money by putting in the indicator, and paying us a good royalty on it. If Johnnie and me was wedded, I’d go to work to-morrow advertising the thing.”

“The gal ain’t in the mill this afternoon, is she?” asked old Himes.

“No, she’s gone off somewheres with some folks Hardwick’s sister-in-law has got here. If you want to find her these days, you’ve got to hunt in some of the swell houses round on the hills.”

He spoke with bitterness, and Pap nodded comprehendingly; the subject was an old one between them. Then Shade drew from his pocket a letter and prepared to read it once more to the older man.

“Whar’s Johnnie?”

Himes started so violently that he disturbed the equilibrium of his chair and brought the front legs to the floor with a slam, so that he sat staring straight ahead. Shade Buckheath whirled and saw Pros Passmore standing at the foot of the steps–the moving speck come to full size. The old man was a wilder-looking figure than usual. He had no hat on, and a bloody cloth bound around his head confined the straggling gray locks quaintly. The face was ghastly, the clothing in tatters, and his hands trembled as they clutched a bandanna evidently full of some small articles that rattled together in his shaking grasp.

“Good Lord–Pros! You mighty nigh scared me out of a year’s growth,” grumbled Pap, hitching vainly to throw his chair back into position. “Come in. Come in. You look like you’d been seein’ trouble.”

“Whar’s Johnnie?” repeated old Pros hollowly.

It was the younger man who answered this time, with an ugly lift of the lip over his teeth, between a sneer and a snarl.

“She’s gone gaddin’ around with some of her swell friends. She may be home before midnight, an’ then again she may not,” he said.

The old man collapsed on the lower step.

“I wish’t Johnnie was here,” he said querulously. “I–” he looked about him confusedly–“I’ve found her silver mine.”

At the words the two on the porch became suddenly rigid. Then Buckheath sprang down the steps, caught Passmore under the arm-pits and half led, half dragged him up to a chair, into which he thrust him with little ceremony.

He stood before the limp figure, peering into the newcomer’s face with eyes of greed and hands that clenched and unclenched themselves automatically.

“You’ve found the silver mine!” he volleyed excitedly. “Whose land is it on? Have you got options yet? My grandpappy always said they was a silver mine–“

“Hush!” Pap Himes’s voice hissed across the loud explosive tones. “No need to tell your business to the town. I’ll bet Pros ain’t thought about no options yit. He may need friends to he’p him out on such matters; and here’s you and me, Buck–God knows he couldn’t have better ones.”

The old man stared about him in a dazed fashion.

“I’ve got my specimens in this here bandanner,” he explained quaveringly. “I fell over the ledge, was the way I chanced upon it at the last, and I lay dead for a spell. My head’s busted right bad. But the ore specimens, they’re right here in the bandanner, and I aimed to give ’em to Johnnie–to put ’em right in her lap–the best gal that ever was–and say to her, ‘Here’s your silver mine, honey, that your good-for-nothin’ old uncle found for ye; now you can live like a lady!’ That’s what I aimed to say to Johnnie. I didn’t aim that nobody else should tetch them samples till she’d saw ’em.”

Himes and Buckheath were exchanging glances across the old man’s bent, gray head. Common humanity would have suggested that they offer him rest or refreshment, but these two were intent only on what the bandanna held.

What is it in the thought of wealth from the ground that so intoxicates, so ravishes away from all reasonable judgment, the generality of mankind? People never seem to conceive that there might be no more than moderate repayal for great toil in a mine of any sort. The very word mine suggests to them tapping the vast treasure-house of the world, and drawing an unlimited share–wealth lavish, prodigal, intemperate. These two were as mad with greed at the thought of the silver mine in the mountains as ever were forty-niners in the golden days of California, or those more recent ignoble martyrs who strewed their bones along the icy trails of the Klondike.

“Ye better let me look at ’em Pros,” wheedled Pap Himes. “I know a heap about silver ore. I’ve worked in the Georgia gold mines–and you know you never find gold without silver. I was three months in the mountains with a feller that was huntin’ nickel; he l’arned me a heap.”

The old man turned his disappointed gaze from one face to the other.

“I wish’t Johnnie was here,” he repeated his plaintive formula, as he raised the handkerchief and untied the corners.

Pap glanced apprehensively up and down the street; Buckheath ran to the door and shut it, that none in the house might see or overhear; and then the three stared at the unpromising-looking, earthy bits of mineral in silence. Finally Himes put down a stubby forefinger and stirred them meaninglessly.

“Le’ me try one with my knife,” he whispered, as though there were any one to hear him.

“All right,” returned the old man nervelessly. “But hit ain’t soft enough for lead–if that’s what you’re meanin’. I know that much. A lead mine is a mighty good thing. Worth as much as silver maybe; but this ain’t lead.”

A curious tremor had come over Pap Himes’s face as he furtively compared the lump of ore he held in his hand with something which he took from his pocket. He seemed to come to some sudden resolution.

“No, ’tain’t lead–and ’tain’t nothin’,” he declared contemptuously, flinging the bit he held back into the handkerchief. “Pros Passmore–ye old fool–you come down here and work us all up over some truck that wasn’t worth turnin’ with a spade! You might as well throw them things away. Whar in the nation did you git ’em, anyhow?”

Passmore stumbled to his feet. He had eaten nothing for three days. The fall over the ledge had injured him severely. He was scarcely sane at the moment.

“Ain’t they no ‘count?” he asked pitifully. “Why, I made shore they was silver. Well”–he looked aimlessly about–“I better go find Johnnie,” and he started down the steps.

“Leave ’em here, Pros, and go in. Mavity’ll give you a cup of coffee,” suggested Pap, in a kinder tone.

The bandanna slipped rattling from the old man’s relaxed fingers. The specimens clattered and rolled on the porch floor. With drooping head he shambled through the door.

A woman’s face disappeared for a moment from the shadowy front-room window, only to reappear and watch unseen. Mavity was listening in a sort of horror as she heard her father’s tones.

“Git down and pick ’em up–every one! Don’t you miss a one. Yo’ eyes is younger’n mine. Hunt ’em up! hunt ’em up,” hissed Pap, casting himself upon the handkerchief and its contents.

“What is it?” questioned Buckheath keenly. “I thort you had some game on hand.” And he hastened to comply. “Air they really silver?”

[Illustration: HE LOOMED ABOVE THEM, WHITE AND SHAKING. “YOU THIEVES,” HE ROARED. “GIVE ME MY BANDANNER! GIVE ME JOHNNIE’S SILVER MINE!”]

“No–better’n that. They’re nickel. The feller that was here from the North said by the dips and turns of the stratagems an’ such-like we was bound to have nickel in these here mountains somewhar. A nickel mine’s better’n a gold mine–an’ these is nickel. I know ’em by the piece o’ nickel ore from the Canady mines that I carry constantly in my pocket. We’ll keep the old fool out of the knowin’ of it, and find whar the mine is at, and we’ll–“

The two men squatted on the floor, tallying over the specimens they had already collected, and looking about them for more. In the doorway behind them appeared a face, gaunt, grimed, a blood-stained bandage around the brow, and a pair of glowing, burning eyes looking out beneath. Uncle Pros had failed to find Mavity Bence, and was returning. Too dazed to comprehend mere words, the old prospector read instantly and aright the attitude and expression of the two. As they tied the last knot in the handkerchief, he loomed above them, white and shaking.

“You thieves!” he roared. “Give me my bandanner! Give me Johnnie’s silver mine!”

“Yes–yes–yes! Don’t holler it out that-a-way!” whispered Pap Himes from the floor, where he crouched, still clutching the precious bits of ore.

“We was a-goin’ to give ’em to you, Uncle Pros. We was just foolin’,” Buckheath attempted to reassure him.

The old man bent forward and shot down a long arm to recover his own. He missed the bandanna, and the impetus of the movement sent him staggering a pace or two forward. At the porch edge he strove to recover himself, failed, and with a short, coughing groan, pitched down the steps and lay, an inert mass, at their foot.

“Cover that handkecher up,” whispered Himes before either man moved to his assistance.

CHAPTER XIII

A PATIENT FOR THE HOSPITAL

When the Hardwick carriage drove up in the heavy, ill-odoured August night, and stopped at the gate to let Johnnie Consadine out, Pap Himes’s boarding-house was blazing with light from window and doorway, clacking and humming like a mill with the sound of noisy footsteps and voices. Three or four men argued and talked loudly on the porch. Through the open windows of the front room, Johnnie had a glimpse of a long, stark figure lying on the lounge, and a white face which struck her with a strange pang of vague yet alarming resemblance. She made her hasty thanks to Miss Sessions and hurried in. Gray Stoddard’s horse was standing at the hitching post in front, and Gray met her at the head of the steps.

Stoddard looked particularly himself in riding dress. Its more unconventional lines suited him well; the dust-brown Norfolk, the leathern puttees, gave an adventurous turn to the expression of a personality which was only so on the mental side. He always rode bareheaded, and the brown hair, which he wore a little longer than other men’s, was tossed from its masculine primness to certain hyacinthine lines which were becoming. Just now his clear brown eyes were luminous with feeling. He put out a swift, detaining hand and caught hers, laying sympathetic fingers over the clasp and retaining it as he spoke.

“I’m so relieved that you’ve come at last,” he said. “We need somebody of intelligence here. I just happened to come past a few minutes after the accident. Don’t be frightened; your uncle came down to see you, and got a fall somehow. He’s hurt pretty badly, I’m afraid, and these people are refusing to have him taken to the hospital.”

On the one side Himes and Buckheath drew back and regarded this scene with angry derision. In the carriage below Lydia Sessions, who could hear nothing that was said, stared incredulously, and moved as though to get down and join Johnnie.

“You’ll want him sent to the hospital?” Stoddard urged, half interrogatively. “Look in there. Listen to the noise. This is no fit place for a man with a possible fracture of the skull.”

“Yes–oh, yes,” agreed Johnnie promptly. “If I could nurse him myself I’d like to–or help; but of course he’s got to go to the hospital, first of everything.”

Stoddard motioned the Hardwick driver to wait, and called down to the carriage load, “I want you people to drive round by the hospital and send the ambulance, if you’ll be so kind. There’s a man hurt in here.”

Lydia Sessions made this an immediate pretext for getting down and coming in.

“Did you say they didn’t want to send him to the hospital?” she inquired sharply and openly, in her tactless fashion, as she crossed the sidewalk. “That’s the worst thing about such people; you provide them with the best, and they don’t know enough to appreciate it. Have they got a doctor, or done anything for the poor man?”

“I sent for Millsaps, here–he knows more about broken bones than anybody in Cottonville,” Pap offered sullenly, mopping his brow and shaking his bald head. “Millsaps is a decent man. You know what _he’s_ a-goin’ to do to the sick.”

“Is he a doctor?” asked Stoddard sternly, looking the lank, shuffling individual named.

“He can doctor a cow or a nag better’n anybody ever saw,” Pap put forward rather shamefacedly.

“A veterinarian,” commented Stoddard. “Well, they’ve gone for the ambulance, and the surgeon will soon be here now.”

“I don’t know nothin’ about veterinarians and surgeons,” growled Pap, still alternately mopping his bald head and shaking it contemptuously; “but I know that Millsaps ain’t a-goin’ to box up any dead bodies and send ’em to the medical colleges; and I know he made as pretty a job of doctoring old Spotty has ever I seen. To be shore the cow died, but he got the medicine down her when it didn’t look as if human hands could do it–that’s the kind of doctor he is.”

“I aim to give Mr. Passmore a teaspoonful of lamp oil–karosene,” said the cow doctor, coming forward, evidently feeling that it was time he spoke up himself. “Lamp oil is mighty rousin’ to them as late like he’s doin’. I’ve used copperas for such–but takes longer. Some say a dose of turpentine is better lamp oil–but I ‘low both of ’em won’t hurt.”

Johnnie pushed past them all into the front room where the women were running about, talking lot and exclaiming. A kerosene lamp without a chimney smoked and flared on the table, filling the room with evil odours. Pros Passmore’s white face thrown up against the lounge cushion was the only quiet, dignified object in sight.

“Mandy,” said Johnnie, catching the Meacham woman by the elbow as she passed her bearing a small kerosene can, “you go up to my room and get the good lamp I have there. Then take this thing away. Where’s Aunt Mavity?”

“I don’t know. She’s been carryin’ on somethin turrible. Yes, Johnnie, honey–I’ll get the lamp for ye.”

When Johnnie turned to her uncle, she found Millsaps bending above him, the small can in his hands, its spout approached to the rigid blue lips of the patient with the unconcern of a man about to fill a lamp. She sprang forward and caught his arm, bringing the can away with a clatter and splash.

“You mustn’t do that,” she said authoritatively. “The doctors will be here in a minute. You mustn’t give him anything, Mr. Millsaps.”

“Oh, all right–all right,” agreed Millsaps, with decidedly the air that he considered it all wrong.

“There is some people that has objections to having their kin-folks cyarved up by student doctors. Then agin, there is others that has no better use for kin than to let ’em be so treated. I ‘low that a little dosin’ of lamp oil never hurt nobody–and it’s cured a-many, of most any kind of disease. But just as you say–just as you say.” And he shuffled angrily from the room.

Johnnie went and knelt by the lounge. With deft, careful fingers she lifted the wet cloths above the bruised forehead. The hurt looked old. No blood was flowing, and she wondered a little. Catching Shade Buckheath’s eye fixed on her from outside the window, she beckoned him in and asked him to tell her exactly how the trouble came about. Buckheath gave her his own version of the matter, omitting, of course, all mention of the bandanna full of ore which lay now carefully hidden at the bottom of old Gideon Himes’s trunk.

“And you say he fell down the steps?” asked Johnnie. “Who was with him? Who saw it?”

“Nobody but me and Pap,” Shade answered, trying to give the reply unconcernedly.

“I–I seen it,” whispered Mavity Bence, plucking at Johnnie’s sleeve. “I was in the fore room here–and I seen it all.”

She spoke defiantly, but her terrified glance barely raised itself to the menacing countenances of the two men on the other side of the lounge, and fell at once. “I never heard nothin’ they was sayin’,” she made haste to add. “But I seen Pros fall, and I run out and helped Pap and Shade fetch him in.”

Peculiar as was the attitude of all three, Johnnie felt a certain relief in the implied assurance that there had been no quarrel, that her uncle had not been struck or knocked down the steps.

“Why, Pap,” she said kindly, looking across at the old man’s perturbed, sweating face, “you surely ain’t like these foolish folks round here in Cottonville that think the hospital was started up to get dead bodies for the student doctors to cut to pieces. You see how bad off Uncle Pros is; you must know he’s bound to be better taken care of there in that fine building, and with all those folks that have learned their business to take care of him, than here in this house with only me. Besides, I couldn’t even stay at home from the mill to nurse him. Somebody’s got to earn the money.”

“I wouldn’t charge you no board, Johnnie,” fairly whined Himes. “I’m willin’ to nurse Pros myself, without he’p, night and day. You speak up mighty fine for that thar hospital. What about Lura Dawson? Everybody knows they shipped her body to Cincinnati and sold it. You ort to be ashamed to put your poor old uncle in such a place.”

Johnnie turned puzzled eyes from the rigid face on the lounge–Pros had neither moved nor spoken since they lifted and laid him there–to the old man at the window. That Pap Himes should be concerned, even slightly, about the welfare of any living being save himself, struck her as wildly improbable. Then, swiftly, she reproached herself for not being readier to believe good of him. He and Uncle Pros had been boys together, and she knew her uncle one to deserve affection, though he seldom commanded it.

There was a sound of wheels outside, and Gray Stoddard’s voice with that of the doctor’s. Shade and Pap Himes still hovered nervously about the window, staring in and hearkening to all that was said, Mavity Bence had wept till her face was sodden. She herded the other girls back out of the way, but watched everything with terrified eyes.

“He’ll jest about come to hisself befo’ he dies,” the older conspirator muttered to Shade as the stretcher passed them, and the skilled, white-jacketed attendants laid Pros Passmore in the vehicle without so much as disturbing his breathing. “He’ll jest about come to hisself thar, and them pesky doctors ‘ll have word about the silver mine. Well, in this world, them that has, gits, mostly. Ef Johnnie Consadine had been any manner o’ kin to me, I vow I’d ‘a’ taken a hickory to her when she set up her word agin’ mine and let him go out of the house. The little fool! she didn’t know what she was sendin’ away.”

And so Pros Passmore was taken to the hospital. His bandanna full of ore remained buried at the bottom of Gideon Himes’s trunk, to be fished up often by the old sinner, fingered and fondled, and laid back in hiding; while the man who had carried it down the mountains to fling it in Johnnie’s lap lay with locked lips, and told neither the doctors nor Himes where the silver mine was. August sweated itself away; September wore on into October in a procession of sun-robed, dust-sandalled days, and still Uncle Pros gave no sign of actual recovery.

Johnnie was working hard in the mill. Hartley Sessions had become, in his cold, lifeless fashion, very much her friend. Inert, slow, he had one qualification for his position: he could choose an assistant, or delegate authority with good judgment; and he found in Johnnie Consadine an adjutant so reliable, so apt, and of such ability, that he continually pushed more work upon her, if pay and honours did not always follow in adequate measure.

For a time, much as she disliked to approach Shade with any request, Johnnie continued to urge him whenever they met to finish up the indicators and let her have them back again. Then Hartley Sessions promoted her to a better position in the weaving department, and other cares drove the matter from her mind.

The condition of Uncle Pros added fearfully to the drains upon her time and thought. The old man lay in his hospital cot till the great frame had wasted fairly to the big bones, following her movements when she came into the room with strange, questioning, unrecognizing eyes, yet always quieted and soothed by her presence, so that she felt urged to give him every moment she could steal from her work. The hurts on his head, which were mere scalp wounds, healed over; the surgeon at the hospital was unable to find any indentation or injury to the skull itself which would account for the old man’s condition. They talked for a long time of an operation, and did finally trephine, without result. They would make an X-ray photograph, they said, when he should be strong enough to stand it, as a means of further investigation.

Meantime his expenses, though made fairly nominal to her, cut into the money which Johnnie could send to her mother, and she was full of anxiety for the helpless little family left without head or protector up in that gash of the wind-grieved mountains on the flank of Big Unaka.

In these days Shade Buckheath vacillated from the suppliant attitude to the threatening. Johnnie never knew when she met him which would be uppermost; and since he had wearied out her gratitude and liking, she cared little. One thing surprised and touched her a bit, and that was that Shade used to meet her of an evening when she would be coming from the hospital, and ask eagerly after the welfare of Uncle Pros. He finally begged her to get him a chance to see the old man, and she did so, but his presence seemed to have such a disturbing effect on the patient that the doctors prohibited further visits.

“Well, I done just like you told me to, and them cussed sawboneses won’t let me go back no more,” Shade reported to Pap Himes that evening. “Old Pros just swelled hisself out like a toad and hollered at me time I got in the room. He’s sure crazy all right. He looks like he couldn’t last long, but them that heirs what he has will git the writin’ that tells whar the silver mine’s at. Johnnie’s liable to find that writin’ any day; or he may come to hisself and tell her.”

“Well, for God’s sake,” retorted Pap Himes testily, “why don’t you wed the gal and be done with it? You wed Johnnie Consadine and get that writin’, and I’ll never tell on you ’bout the old man and such; and you and me’ll share the mine.”

Shade gave him a black look.

“You’re a good talker,” he said sententiously. “If I could _do_ things as easy as you can _tell_ ’em, I’d be president.”

“Huh!” grunted the old man. “Marryin’ a fool gal–or any other woman–ain’t nothin’ to do. If I was your age I’d have her Miz Himes before sundown.”

“All right,” said Buckheath, “if it’s so damn’ easy done–this here marryin’–do some of it yourself. Thar’s Laurelly Consadine; she’s a widow; and more kin to Pros than Johnnie is. You go up in the mountains and wed her, and I’ll stand by ye in the business.”

A slow but ample grin dawned on the old man’s round, foolish face. He looked admiringly at Shade.

“By Gosh!” he said finally. “That ain’t no bad notion, neither. ‘Course I can do it. They all want to wed. And thar’s Laurelly–light-minded fool–ain’t got the sense she was born with–up thar without Pros nor Johnnie–I could persuade her to take off her head and play pitch-ball with it–Lord, yes!”

“Well, you’ve bragged about enough,” put in Buckheath grimly. “You git down in the collar and pull.”

The old man gave him no heed. He was still grinning fatuously.

“It ‘minds me of Zack Shalliday, and the way he got wedded,” came the unctuous chuckle. “Zack was a man ’bout my age, and his daughter was a-keepin’ house for him. She was a fine hand to work; the best butter maker on the Unakas; Zack always traded his butter for a extry price. But old as Sis Shalliday was–she must ‘a’ been all of twenty-seven –along comes a man that takes a notion to her. She named it to Zack. ‘All right,’ says he, ‘you give me to-morrow to hunt me up one that’s as good a butter maker as you air, and I’ve got no objections.’ Then he took hisself down to Preacher Blaylock, knowin’ in reason that preachers was always hungry for weddin’ fees, and would hustle round to make one. He offered the preacher a dollar to give him a list of names of single women that was good butter makers. Blaylock done so. He’d say, ‘Now this ‘n’s right fine-looking, but I ain’t never tasted her butter. Here’s one that ain’t much to look at, but her butter is prime–jest like your gal’s; hit allers brings a leetle extry at the store. This ‘n’s fat, yet I can speak well of her workin’ qualifications,’ He named ’em all out to Zack, and Zack had his say for each one. ‘The fat ones is easy keepers,’ he says for the last one, ‘and looks don’t cut much figger in this business–it all depends on which one makes the best butter anyhow.’

“Well, he took that thar string o’ names, and he left. ‘Long about sundown, here he is back and hollerin’ at the fence. ‘Come out here, preacher–I’ve got her,’ He had a woman in his buggy that Blaylock had never put eyes on in all his born days. ‘Wouldn’t none o’ them I sent ye to have ye?’ the preacher asked Zack in a kind of whisper, when he looked at that thar snaggle-toothed, cross-eyed somebody that Shalliday’d fetched back. ‘I reckon they would,’ says Zack. ‘I reckon any or all of ’em would ‘a’ had me,’ he says. ‘I had only named it to three o’ the four, and I hadn’t closed up with none o’ them, becaze I wasn’t quite satisfied in my mind about the butter makin’. And as I was goin’ along the road toward the last name you give me, I come up with this here woman. She was packin’ truck down to the store for to trade it. I offered her a lift and she rid with me a spell. I chanced to tell her of what I was out after, and she let on that she was a widder, and showed me the butter she had–hit was all made off of one cow, and the calf is three months old. I wasn’t a-goin’ to take nobody’s word in such a matter, and hauled her on down to the store and seed the storekeeper pay her extry for that thar butter–and here we air. Tie the knot, preacher; yer dollar is ready for ye, and we must be gittin’ along home–it’s ‘most milkin’ time,’ The preacher he tied the knot, and Shalliday and the new Miz. Shalliday they got along home.” The old man chuckled as he had at the beginning of this tale.

“Well, that was business,” agreed Shade impatiently. “When are you goin’ to start for Big Unaka?”

The old man rolled his great head between his shoulders.

“Ye-ah,” he assented; “business. But it was bad business for Zack Shalliday. That thar woman never made a lick of that butter she was a packin’ to the settlement to trade for her sister that was one o’ them widders the preacher had give him the name of. Seems Shalliday’s woman had jest come in a-visitin’ from over on Big Smoky, and she turned out to be the laziest, no-accountest critter on the Unakas. She didn’t know which end of a churn-dasher was made for use. Aw–law–huh! Business–there’s two kinds of business; but that was a bad business for Zack Shalliday. I reckon I’ll go up on Unaka to-morrow, if Mavity can run the house without me.”

CHAPTER XIV

WEDDING BELLS

A vine on Mavity Bence’s porch turned to blood crimson. Its leaves parted from the stem in the gay Autumn wind, and sifted lightly down to join the painted foliage of the two little maples which struggled for existence against an adverse world, crouching beaten and torn at the curb.

In these days Johnnie used to leave the mill in the evening and go directly to the hospital. Gray Stoddard was her one source of comfort–and terror. Uncle Pros’s injuries brought these two into closer relations than anything had yet done. So far, Johnnie had conducted her affairs with a judgment and propriety extraordinary, clinging as it were to the skirts of Lydia Sessions, keeping that not unwilling lady between her and Stoddard always. But the injured man took a great fancy to Gray. Johnnie he had forgotten; Shade and Pap Himes he recognized only by an irritation which made the doctors exclude them from his presence; but something in Stoddard’s equable, disciplined personality, appealed to and soothed Uncle Pros when even Johnnie failed.

The old mountaineer had gone back to childhood. He would lie by the hour murmuring a boy’s woods lore to Gray Stoddard, communicating deep secrets of where a bee tree might be found; where, known only to him, there was a deeply hidden spring of pure freestone water, “so cold it’ll make yo’ teeth chatter”; and which one of old Lead’s pups seemed likely to turn out the best coon dog.

When Stoddard’s presence and help had been proffered to herself, Johnnie had not failed to find a gracious way of declining or avoiding; but you cannot reprove a sick man–a dying man. She could not for the life of her find a way to insist that Uncle Pros make less demand on the young mill owner’s time.

And so the two of them met often at the bedside, and that trouble which was beginning to make Johnnie’s heart like lead grew with the growing love Gray Stoddard commanded. She told herself mercilessly that it was presumption, folly, wickedness; she was always going to be done with it; but, once more in his presence, her very soul cried out that she was indeed fit at least to love him, if not to hope for his love in turn.

Stoddard himself was touched by the old man’s fancy, and showed a devotion and patience that were characteristic.

If she was kept late at the hospital, Mavity put by a bite of cold supper for her, and Mandy always waited to see that she had what she wanted. On the day after Shade Buckheath and Gideon Himes had come to their agreement, she stopped at the hospital for a briefer stay than usual. Her uncle was worse, and an opiate had been administered to quiet him, so that she only sat a while at the bedside and finally took her way homeward in a state of utter depression for which she could scarcely account.

It was dusk–almost dark–when she reached the gate, and she noted carelessly a vehicle drawn up before it.

“Johnnie,” called her mother’s voice from the back of the rickety old wagon as the girl was turning in toward the steps.

“Sis’ Johnnie–Sis’ Johnnie!” crowed Deanie; and then she was aware of sober, eleven-year-old Milo climbing down over the wheel and trying to help Lissy, while Pony got in his way and was gravely reproved. She ran to the wheel and put up ready arms.

“Why, honeys!” she exclaimed. “How come you-all never let me know to expect you? Oh, I’m so glad, mother. I didn’t intend to send you word to come; but I was feeling so blue. I sure wanted to. Maybe Uncle Pros might know you–or the baby–and it would do him good.”

She had got little Deanie out in her arms now, and stood hugging the child, bending to kiss Melissa, finding a hand to pat Milo’s shoulder and rub Pony’s tousled poll.

“Oh, I’m so glad!–I’m so glad to see you-all,” she kept repeating. “Who brought you?” She looked closely at the man on the driver’s seat and recognized Gideon Himes.

“Why, Pap!” she exclaimed. “I’ll never forget you for this. It was mighty good of you.”

The door swung open, letting out a path of light.

“Aunt Mavity!” cried the girl. “Mother and the children have come down to see me. Isn’t it fine?”

Mavity Bence made her appearance in the doorway, her faded eyes so reddened with weeping that she looked like a woman in a fever. She gulped and stared from her father, where in the shine of her upheld lamp he sat blinking and grinning, to Laurella Consadine in a ruffled pink-and-white lawn frock, with a big, rose-wreathed hat on her dark curls, and Johnnie Consadine with the children clinging about her.

“Have ye told her?” she gasped. And at the tone Johnnie turned quickly, a sudden chill falling upon her glowing mood.

“What’s the matter?” she asked, startled, clutching the baby tighter to her, and conning over with quick alarm the tow-heads that bobbed and surged about her waist. “The children are all right–aren’t they?”

Milo looked up apprehensively. He was an old-faced, anxious-looking, little fellow, already beginning to have a stoop to his thin shoulders–the bend of the burden bearer.

“I–I done the best I could, Sis’ Johnnie,” he hesitated apologetically. “You wasn’t thar, and Unc’ Pros was gone, an’ I thest worked the farm and took care of mother an’ the little ‘uns best I knowed how. But when she–when he–oh, I wish’t you and Unc’ Pros had been home to-day.”

Johnnie, her mind at rest about the children, turned to her mother.

“Was ma sick?” she asked sympathetically. Then, noticing for the first time the unwonted gaiety of Laurella’s costume, the glowing cheeks and bright eyes, she smiled in relief.

“You don’t look sick. My, but you’re fine! You’re as spick and span as a bride.”

The old man bent and spat over the wheel, preparatory to speaking, but his daughter took the words from his mouth.

“She is a bride,” explained Mavity Bence in a flatted, toneless voice. “Leastways, Pap said he was a-goin’ up on Unaka for to wed her and bring her down–and I know in reason she’d have him.”

Johnnie’s terror-stricken eyes searched her mother’s irresponsible, gypsy face.

“Now, Johnnie,” fretted the little woman, “how long air you goin’ to keep us standin’ here in the road? Don’t you think my frock’s pretty? Do they make em that way down here in the big town? I bought this lawn at Bledsoe, with the very first money you sent up. Ain’t you a bit glad to see us?”

The lip trembled, the tragic dark brows lifted in their familiar slant.

“Come on in the house,” said Johnnie heavily, and she led the way with drooping head.

Called by the unusual disturbance, Mandy left the supper she was putting on the table for Johnnie and ran into the front hall. Beulah Catlett and one or two of the other girls had crowded behind Mavity Bence’s shoulders, and were staring. Mandy joined them in time to hear the conclusion of Mavity’s explanation.

She came through the door and passed the new Mrs. Himes on the porch.

“Why, Johnnie Consadine” she cried. “Is that there your ma?”

Johnnie nodded. She was past speech.

“Well, I vow! I should’ve took her for your sister, if any kin. Ain’t she pretty? Beulah–she’s Johnnie’s ma, and her and Pap has just been wedded.”

She turned to follow Johnnie, who was mutely starting the children in to the house.

“Well,” she said with a sigh, “some folks gits two, and some folks don’t git nary one.” And she brought up the rear of the in-going procession.

“Ain’t you goin’ to pack your plunder in?” inquired the bridegroom harshly, almost threateningly, as he pitched out upon the path a number of bundles and boxes.

“I reckon they won’t pester it till you git back from puttin’ up the nag,” returned Laurella carelessly as she swung her light, frilled skirts and tripped across the porch. “You needn’t werry about me,” she called down to the old fellow where he sat speechlessly glaring. “Mavity’ll show me whar I can sit, and git me a nice cool drink; and that’s all I’ll need for one while.”

Pap Himes’s mouth was open, but no words came.

He finally shut it with that click of the ill-fitting false teeth which was familiar–and terrible–to everybody at the boarding-house, shook out the lines over the old horse, and jogged away into the dusk.

“And this here’s the baby,” admired Mandy, kneeling in front of little Deanie, when the newcomers halted in the front room. “Why, Johnnie Consadine! She don’t look like nothin’ on earth but a little copy of you. If she’s dispositioned like you, I vow I’ll just about love her to death.”

Mavity Bence was struggling up the porch steps loaded with the baggage of the newcomers.

“Better leave that for your paw,” the bride counselled her. “It’s more suited to a man person to lift them heavy things.”

But Mavity had not lived with Pap Himes for nearly forty years without knowing what was suited to him, in distinction, perhaps, from mankind in general. She made no reply, but continued to bring in the baggage, and Johnnie, after settling her mother in a rocking-chair with the cool drink which the little woman had specified, hurried down to help her.

“Everybody always has been mighty good to me all my life,” Laurella Himes was saying to Mandy, Beulah and the others. “I reckon they always will. Uncle Pros he just does for me like he was my daddy, and my children always waited on me. Johnnie’s the best gal that ever was, ef she does have some quare notions.”

“Ain’t she?” returned Mandy enthusiastically, as Johnnie of the “quare notions” helped Mavity Bence upstairs with the one small trunk belonging to Laurella.

“Look out for that trunk, Johnnie,” came her mother’s caution, with a girlish ripple of laughter in the tones. “Hit’s a borried one. Now don’t you roach up and git mad. I had obliged to have a trunk, bein’ wedded and comin’ down to the settlement this-a-way. I only borried Mildred Faidley’s. She won’t never have any use for it. Evelyn Toler loaned me the trimmin’ o’ this hat–ain’t it sightly?”

Johnnie’s distressed eyes met the pale gaze of Aunt Mavity across the little oilcloth-covered coffer.

“I would ‘a’ told you, Johnnie,” said the poor woman deprecatingly, “but I never knowed it myself till late last night, and I hadn’t the heart to name it at breakfast. I thort I’d git a chance this evenin’, but they come sooner’n I was expectin’ ’em.”

“Never mind, Aunt Mavity,” said Johnnie. “When I get a little used to it I’ll be glad to have them all here. I–I wish Uncle Pros was able to know folks.”

The children were fed, Milo, touchingly subdued and apologetic, nestling close to his sister’s side and whispering to her how he had tried to get ma to wait and come down to the Settlement, and hungrily begging with his pathetic childish eyes for her to say that this thing which had come upon them was not, after all, the calamity he feared. Snub-nosed, nine-year-old Pony, whose two front teeth had come in quite too large for his mouth, Pony, with the quick-expanding pupils, and the temperament that would cope ill with disaster, addressed himself gaily to his supper and saw no sorrow anywhere. Little Melissa was half asleep; and even Deanie, after the first outburst of greeting, nodded in her chair.

“I got ready for ’em,” Mavity told Johnnie in an undertone, after her father returned. “I knowed in reason he’d bring her back with him. Pap always has his own way, and gits whatever he wants. I ‘lowed you’d take the baby in bed with you, and I put a pallet in your room for Lissy.”

Johnnie agreed to this arrangement, almost mechanically. Is it to be wondered at that her mind was already busy with the barrier this must set between herself and Gray Stoddard? She had never been ashamed of her origin or her people; but this–this was different.

Next morning she sent word to the mill foreman to put on a substitute, and took the morning that she might go with her mother to the hospital. Passmore was asleep, and they were not allowed to disturb him; but on the steps they met Gray Stoddard, and he stopped so decidedly to speak to them that Johnnie could not exactly run away, as she felt like doing.

“Your mother!” echoed Stoddard, when Johnnie had told him who the visitor was. He glanced from the tall, fair-haired daughter to the lithe little gypsy at her side. “Why, she looks more like your sister,” he said.

Laurella’s white teeth flashed at this, and her big, dark eyes glowed.

“Johnnie’s such a serious-minded person that she favours older than her years,” the mother told him. “Well, I give her the name of the dead, and they say that makes a body solemn like.”

It was very evident that Stoddard desired to detain them in conversation, but Johnnie smilingly, yet with decision, cut the interview short.

“I don’t see why you hurried me a-past that-a-way,” the little mother said resentfully, when they had gone a few steps. “I wanted to stay and talk to the gentleman, if you didn’t. I think he’s one of the nicest persons I’ve met since I’ve been in Cottonville. Mr. Gray Stoddard–how come you never mentioned him to me Johnnie?”

She turned to find a slow, painful blush rising in her daughter’s face.

“I don’t know, ma,” said Johnnie gently. “I reckon it was because I didn’t seem to have any concern with a rich gentleman such as Mr. Stoddard. He’s got more money than Mr. Hardwick, they say–more than anybody else in Cottonville.”

“Has he?” inquired Laurella vivaciously. “Well, money or no money, I think he’s mighty nice. Looks like he ain’t studying as to whether you got money or not. And if you was meaning that you didn’t think yourself fit to be friends with such, why I’m ashamed of you, Johnnie Consadine. The Passmores and the Consadines are as good a family as there is on Unaka mountains. I don’t know as I ever met up with anybody that I found was too fine for my company. And whenever your Uncle Pros gets well and finds his silver mine, we’ll have as much money as the best of ’em.”

The tears blinded Johnnie so that she could scarcely find her way, and the voice wherewith she would have answered her mother caught in her throat. She pressed her lips hard together and shook her head, then laughed out, a little sobbing laugh.

“Poor ma–poor little mother!” she whispered at length. “You ain’t been away from the mountains as I have. Things are–well, they’re a heap different here in the Settlement.”

“They’re a heap nicer,” returned Laurella blithely. “Well, I’m mighty glad I met that gentleman this morning. Mr. Himes was talking to me of Shade Buckheath a-yesterday. He said Shade was wishful to wed you, Johnnie, and wanted me to give the boy my good word. I told him I wouldn’t say anything–and then afterward I was going to. But since I’ve seen this gentleman, and know that his likes are friends of your’n, well–I–Johnnie, the Buckheaths are a hard nation of people, and that’s the truth. If you wedded Shade, like as not he’d mistreat you.”

“Oh mother–don’t!” pleaded Johnnie, scarlet of face, and not daring to raise her eyes.

“What have I done now?” demanded Laurella with asperity.

“You mustn’t couple my name with Mr. Stoddard’s that way,” Johnnie told her. “He’s never thought of me, except as a poor girl who needs help mighty bad; and he’s so kind-hearted and generous he’s ready to do for each and every that’s worthy of it. But–not that way–mother, you mustn’t ever suppose for a minute that he’d think of me in that way.”

“Well, I wish’t I may never!” Laurella exclaimed. “Did I mention any particular way that the man was supposed to be thinking about you? Can’t I speak a word without your biting my head off for it? As for what Mr. Gray Stoddard thinks of you, let me tell you, child, a body has only to see his eyes when he’s looking at you.”

“Mother–Oh, mother!” protested Johnnie.

“Well, if he can look that way I reckon I can speak of it,” returned Laurella, with some reason.

“I want you to promise never to name it again, even to me,” said Johnnie solemnly, as they came to the steps of the big lead-coloured house. “You surely wouldn’t say such a thing to any one else. I wish you’d forget it yourself.”

“We-ell,” hesitated Laurella, “if you feel so strong; about it, I reckon I’ll do as you say. But there ain’t anything in that to hinder me from being friends with Mr. Stoddard. I feel sure that him and me would get on together fine. He favours my people, the Passmores. My daddy was just such an upstanding, dark-complected feller as he is. He’s got the look in the eye, too.”

Johnnie gasped as she remembered that the grandfather of whom her mother spoke was Virgil Passmore, and called to mind the story of the borrowed wedding coat.

CHAPTER XV

THE FEET OF THE CHILDREN

The mountain people, being used only to one class, never find themselves consciously in the society of their superiors. Johnnie Consadine had been unembarrassed and completely mistress of the situation in the presence of Charlie Conroy, who did not fail after the Uplift dance to make some further effort to meet the “big red-headed girl,” as he called her. She was aware that social overtures from such a person were not to be received by her, and she put them aside quite as though she had been, according to her own opinion, above rather than beneath them. The lover-like pretensions of Shade Buckheath, a man dangerous, remorseless, as careless of the rights of others as any tiger in the jungle, she regarded with negligent composure. But Gray Stoddard–ah, there her treacherous heart gave way, and trembled in terror. The air of perfect equality he maintained between them, his attitude of intimacy, flattering, almost affectionate, this it was which she felt she must not recognize.

The beloved books, which had seemed so many steps upon which to climb to a world where she dared acknowledge her own liking and admiration for Stoddard, were now laid aside. It took all of her heart and mind and time to visit Uncle Pros at the hospital, keep the children out of Pap’s way in the house, and do justice to her work in the factory. She told Gray, haltingly, reluctantly, that she thought she must give up the reading and studying for a time.

“Not for long, I hope,” Stoddard received her decision with a puzzled air, turning in his fingers the copy of “Walden” which she was bringing back to him. “Perhaps now that you have your mother and the children with you, there will be less time for this sort of thing for a while, but you haven’t a mind that can enjoy being inactive. You may think you’ll give it up; but study–once you’ve tasted it–will never let you alone.”

Johnnie looked up at him with a weak and pitiful version of her usual beaming smile.

“I reckon you’re right,” she hesitated finally, in a very low voice. “But sometimes I think the less we know the happier we are.”

“How’s this? How’s this?” cried Stoddard, almost startled. “Why, Johnnie–I never expected to hear that sort of thing from you. I thought your optimism was as deep as a well, and as wide as a church.”

Poor Johnnie surely had need of such optimism as Stoddard had ascribed to her. They were weary evenings when she came home now, with the November rain blowing in the streets and the early-falling dusk almost upon her. It was on a Saturday night, and she had been to the hospital, when she got in to find Mandy, seated in the darkest corner of the sitting room, with a red flannel cloth around her neck–a sure sign that something unfortunate had occurred, since the tall woman always had sore throat when trouble loomed large.

“What’s the matter?” asked Johnnie, coming close and laying a hand on the bent shoulder to peer into the drooping countenance.

“Don’t come too nigh me–you’ll ketch it,” warned Mandy gloomily. “A so’ th’oat is as ketchin’ as smallpox, and I know it so to be, though they is them that say it ain’t. When mine gits like this I jest tie it up and keep away from folks best I can. I hain’t dared touch the baby sence hit began to hurt me this a-way.”

“There’s something besides the sore throat,” persisted Johnnie. “Is it anything I can help you about?”

“Now, if that ain’t jest like Johnnie Consadine!” apostrophized Mandy. “Yes, there is somethin’–not that I keer.” She tossed her poor old gray head scornfully, and then groaned because the movement hurt her throat. “That thar feisty old Sullivan gave me my time this evenin’. He said they was layin’ off weavers, and they could spare me. I told him, well, I could spare them, too. I told him I could hire in any other mill in Cottonville befo’ workin’ time Monday–but I’m afeared I cain’t.” Weak tears began to travel down her countenance. “I know I never will make a fine hand like you, Johnnie,” she said pathetically. “There ain’t a thing in the mill that I love to do–nary thing. I can tend a truck patch or raise a field o’ corn to beat anybody, and nobody cain’t outdo me with fowls; but the mill–“

She broke off and sat staring dully at the floor. Pap Himes had stumped into the room during the latter part of this conversation.

“Lost your job, hey?” he inquired keenly.

Mandy nodded, with fearful eyes on his face.

“Well, you want to watch out and keep yo’ board paid up here. The week you cain’t pay–out you go. I reckon I better trouble you to pay me in advance, unless’n you’ve got some kind friend that’ll stand for you.”

Mandy’s lips parted, but no sound came. The gaze of absolute terror with which she followed the old man’s waddling bulk as he went and seated himself in front of the air-tight stove, was more than Johnnie could endure.

“I’ll stand for her board, Pap,” she said quietly.

“Oh, you will, will ye?” Pap received her remark with disfavour. “Well, a fool and his money don’t stay together long. And who’ll stand for you, Johnnie Consadine? Yo’ wages ain’t a-goin’ to pay for yo’ livin’ and Mandy’s too. Ye needn’t lay back on bein’ my stepdaughter. You ain’t acted square by me, an’ I don’t aim to do no more for you than if we was no kin.”

“You won’t have to. Mandy’ll get a place next week–you know she will, Pap–an experienced weaver like she is. I’ll stand for her.”

Himes snorted. Mandy caught at Johnnie’s hand and drew it to her, fondling it. Her round eyes were still full of tears.

“I do know you’re the sweetest thing God ever made,” she whispered, as Johnnie looked down at her. “You and Deanie.” And the two went out into the dining room together.

“Thar,” muttered Himes to Buckheath, as the latter passed through on his way to supper; “you see whether it would do to give Johnnie the handlin’ o’ all that thar money from the patent. Why, she’d hand it out to the first feller that put up a poor mouth and asked her for it. You heard anything, Buck?”

Shade nodded.

“Come down to the works with me after supper. I’ve got something to show you,” he said briefly, and Himes understood that the desired letter had arrived.

At first Laurella Consadine bloomed like a late rose in the town atmosphere. She delighted in the village streets. She was as wildly exhilarated as a child when she was taken on the trolley to Watauga. With strange, inherent deftness she copied the garb, the hair dressing, even the manner and speech, of such worthy models as came within her range of vision–like her daughter, she had an eye for fitness and beauty; that which was merely fashionable though truly inelegant, did not appeal to her. She was swift to appreciate the change in Johnnie.

“You look a heap prettier, and act and speak a heap prettier than you used to up in the mountains,” she told the tall girl. “Looks like it was a mighty sensible thing for you to come down here to the Settlement; and if it was good for you, I don’t see why it wasn’t good for me–and won’t be for the rest of the children. No need for you to be so solemn over it.”

The entire household was aghast at the bride’s attitude toward her old husband. They watched her with the fascinated gaze we give to a petted child encroaching upon the rights of a cross dog, or the pretty lady with her little riding whip in the cage of the lion. She treated him with a kindly, tolerant, yet overbearing familiarity that appalled. She knew not to be frightened when he clicked his teeth, but drew up her pretty brows and fretted at him that she wished he wouldn’t make that noise–it worried her. She tipped the sacred yellow cat out of the rocking-chair where it always slept in state, took the chair herself, and sent that astonished feline from the room.

It was in Laurella’s evident influence that Johnnie put her trust when, one evening, they all sat in Sunday leisure in the front room–most of the girls being gone to church or out strolling with “company”–Pap Himes broached the question of the children going to work in the mill.

“They’re too young, Pap,” Johnnie said to him mildly. “They ought to be in school this winter.”

“They’ve every one, down to Deanie, had mo’ than the six weeks schoolin’ that the laws calls for,” snarled Himes.

“You wasn’t thinking of putting Deanie in the mill–not _Deanie_–was you?” asked Johnnie breathlessly.

“Why not?” inquired Himes. “She’ll get no good runnin’ the streets here in Cottonville, and she can earn a little somethin’ in the mill. I’m a old man, an sickly, and I ain’t long for this world. If them chaps is a-goin’ to do anything for me, they’d better be puttin’ in their licks.”

Johnnie looked from the little girl’s pink-and-white infantile beauty–she sat with the child in her lap–to the old man’s hulking, powerful, useless frame. What would Deanie naturally be expected to do for her stepfather?

“Nobody’s asked my opinion,” observed Shade Buckheath, who made one of the family group, “but as far as I can see there ain’t a thing to hurt young ‘uns about mill work; and there surely ain’t any good reason why they shouldn’t earn their way, same as we all do. I reckon they had to work back on Unaka. Goin’ to set ’em up now an make swells of ’em?”

Johnnie looked bitterly at him but made no reply.

“They won’t take them at the Hardwick mill,” she said finally. “Mr. Stoddard has enforced the rule that they have to have an affidavit with any child the mill employs that it is of legal age; and there’s nobody going to swear that Deanie’s even as much as twelve years old–nor Lissy–nor Pony–nor Milo. The oldest is but eleven.”

Laurella had bought a long chain of red glass beads with a heart-shaped pendant. This trinket occupied her attention entirely while her daughter and husband discussed the matter of the children’s future.

“Johnnie,” she began now, apparently not having heard one word that had been said, “did you ever in your life see anything so cheap as this here string of beads for a dime? I vow I could live and die in that five-and-ten-cent store at Watauga. There was more pretties in it than I could have looked at in a week. I’m going right back thar Monday and git me them green garters that the gal showed me. I don’t know what I was thinkin’ about to come away without ’em! They was but a nickel.”

Pap Himes looked at her, at the beads, and gave the fierce, inarticulate, ludicrously futile growl of a thwarted, perplexed animal.

“Mother,” appealed Johnnie desperately, “do you want the children to go into the mill?”

“I don’t know but they might as well–for a spell,” said Laurella Himes, vainly endeavouring to look grown-up, and to pretend that she was really the head of the family. “They want to go, and you’ve done mighty well in the mill. If it wasn’t for my health, I reckon I might go in and try to learn to weave, myself. But there–I came a-past with Mandy t’other evenin’ when she was out, and the noise of that there factory is enough for me from the outside–I never could stand to be in it. Looks like such a racket would drive me plumb crazy.”

Pap stared at his bride and clicked his teeth with the gnashing sound that overawed the others. He drew his shaggy brows in an attempt to look masterful.

“Well, ef you cain’t tend looms, I reckon you can take Mavity’s place in the house here, and let her keep to the weavin’ stiddier. She’ll just about lose her job if she has to be out and in so much as she has had to be with me here of late.”

“I will when I can,” said Laurella, patronizingly. “Sometimes I get to feeling just kind of restless and no-account, and can’t do a stroke of work. When I’m that-a-way I go to bed and sleep it off, or get out and go somewheres that’ll take my mind from my troubles. Hit’s by far the best way.”

Once more Pap looked at her, and opened and shut his mouth helplessly. Then he turned sullenly to his stepdaughter, grumbling.

“You hear that! She won’t work, and you won’t give me your money. The children have obliged to bring in a little something–that’s the way it looks to me. If the mills on the Tennessee side is too choicy to take ’em–and I know well as you, Johnnie, that they air; their man Connors told me so–I can hire ’em over at the Victory, on the Georgy side.”

The Victory! A mill notorious in the district for its ancient, unsanitary buildings, its poor management, its bad treatment of its hands. Yes, it was true that at the Victory you could hire out anything that could walk and talk. Johnnie caught her breath and hugged the small pliant body to her breast, feeling with a mighty throb of fierce, mother-tenderness, the poor little ribs, yet cartilagenous; the delicate, soft frame for which God and nature demanded time, and chance to grow and strengthen. Yet she knew if she gave up her wages to Pap she would be no better off–indeed, she would be helpless in his hands; and the sum of them would not cover what the children all together could earn.

“Oh, Lord! To work in the Victory!” she groaned.

“Now, Johnnie,” objected her mother, “don’t you get meddlesome just because you’re a old maid. Your great-aunt Betsy was meddlesome disposed that-a-way. I reckon single women as they get on in years is apt so to be. Every one of these children has been promised that they should be let to work in the mill. They’ve been jest honin’ to do it ever since you came down and got your place. Deanie was scared to death for fear they wouldn’t take her. Don’t you be meddlesome.”

“Yes, and I’m goin’ to buy me a gun and a nag with my money what I earn,” put in Pony explosively. “‘Course I’ll take you-all to ride.” He added the saving clause under Milo’s reproving eye. “Sis’ Johnnie, don’t you want me to earn money and buy a hawse and a gun, and a–and most ever’thing else?”

Johnnie looked down into the blue eyes of the little lad who had crept close to her chair. What he would earn in the factory she knew well–blows, curses, evil knowledge.

“If they should go to the Victory, I’d be mighty proud to do all I could to look after ’em, Johnnie,” spoke Mandy from the shadows, where she sat on the floor at Laurella Consadine’s feet, working away with a shoe-brush and cloth at the cleaning and polishing of the little woman’s tan footwear. “Ye know I’m a-gittin’ looms thar to-morrow mornin’. Yes, I am,” in answer to Johnnie’s deprecating look. “I’d ruther do it as to run round a week–or a month–‘mongst the better ones, huntin’ a job, and you here standin’ for my board.”

Till late that night Johnnie laboured with her mother and stepfather, trying to show them that the mill was no fit place for the children. Milo was all too apt for such a situation, the very material out of which a cotton mill moulds its best hands and its worst citizens. Pony, restless, emotional, gifted and ambitious, craving his share of the joy of life and its opportunities, would never make a mill hand; but under the pressure of factory life his sister apprehended that he would make a criminal.

“Uh-huh,” agreed Pap, drily, when she tried to put something of this into words. “I spotted that feller for a rogue and a shirk the minute I laid eyes on him. The mill’ll tame him. The mill’ll make him git down and pull in the collar, I reckon. Women ain’t fitten to bring up chillen. A widder’s boys allers goes to ruin. Why, Johnnie Consadine, every one of them chaps is plumb crazy to work in the mill–just like you was–and you’re workin’ in the mill yourself. What makes you talk so foolish about it?”

Laurella nodded an agreement, looking more than usually like a little girl playing dolls.

“I reckon Mr. Himes knows best, Johnnie, honey,” was her reiterated comment.

Cautiously Johnnie approached the subject of pay; her stepfather had already demanded her wages, and expressed unbounded surprise that she was not willing to pass over the Saturday pay-envelope to him and let him put the money in the bank along with his other savings. Careful calculation showed that the four children could, after a few weeks of learning, probably earn a little more than she could; and in any case Himes put it as a disciplinary measure, a way of life selected largely for the good of the little ones.

“If you just as soon let me,” she said to him at last, “I believe I’ll take them over to the Victory myself to-morrow morning.”

She had hopes of telling their ages bluntly to the mill superintendent and having them refused.

Pap agreed negligently; he had no liking for early rising. And thus it was that Johnnie found herself at eight o’clock making her way, in the midst of the little group, toward the Georgia line and the old Victory plant, which all good workers in the district shunned if possible.

As she set her foot on the first plank of the bridge she heard a little rumble of sound, and down the road came a light, two-seated vehicle, with coloured driver, and Miss Lydia Sessions taking her sister’s children out for an early morning drive. There was a frail, long-visaged boy of ten sitting beside his aunt in the back, with a girl of eight tucked between them. The nurse on the front seat held the youngest child, a little girl about Deanie’s age.

As they came nearer, the driver drew up, evidently in obedience to Miss Sessions’s command, and she leaned forward graciously to speak to Johnnie.

“Good morning, John,” said Miss Sessions as the carriage stopped. “Whose children are those?”

“They are my little sisters and brothers,” responded Johnnie, looking down with a very pale face, and busying herself with Deanie’s hair.

“And you’re taking them over to the mill, so that they can learn to be useful. How nice that is!” Lydia smiled brightly at the little ones–her best charity-worker’s smile.

“No,” returned Johnnie, goaded past endurance, “I’m going over to see if I can get them to refuse to take this one.” And she bent and picked Deanie up, holding her, the child’s head dropped shyly against her breast, the small flower-like face turned a bit so that one blue eye might investigate the carriage and those in it. “Deanie’s too little to work in the mill,” Johnnie went on. “They have night turn over there at the Victory now, and it’ll just about make her sick.”

Miss Lydia frowned.

“Oh, John, I think you are mistaken,” she said coldly. “The work is very light–you know that. Young people work a great deal harder racing about in their play than at anything they have to do in a spooling room–I’m sure my nieces and nephews do. And in your case it is necessary and right that the younger members of the family should help. I think you will find that it will not hurt them.”

Individuals who work in cotton mills, and are not adults, are never alluded to as children. It is an offense to mention them so. They are always spoken of–even those scarcely more than three feet high–as “young people.”

Miss Sessions had smiled upon the piteous little group with a judicious mixture of patronage and mild reproof, and her driver had shaken the lines over the backs of the fat horses preparatory to moving on, when Stoddard’s car turned into the street from the corner above.

“Wait, Junius, Dick is afraid of autos,” cautioned Miss Lydia nervously.

Junius grinned respectfully, while bay Dick dozed and regarded the approaching car philosophically. As they stood, they blocked the way, so that Gray was obliged to slow down and finally to stop. He raised his hat ceremoniously to both groups. His pained eyes went past Lydia Sessions as though she had been but the painted representation of a woman, to fasten themselves on Johnnie where she stood, her tall, deep-bosomed figure relieved against the shining water, the flaxen-haired child on her breast, the little ones huddled about her.

That Johnnie Consadine should have fallen away all at once from that higher course she had so eagerly chosen and so resolutely maintained, had been to Gray a disappointment whose depth and bitterness somewhat surprised him. In vain he recalled the fact that all his theories of life were against forcing a culture where none was desired; he went back to it with grief–he had been so sure that Johnnie did love the real things, that hers was a nature which not only wished, but must have, spiritual and mental food. Her attitude toward himself upon their few meetings of late had confirmed a certain distrust of her, if one may use so strong a word. She seemed afraid, almost ashamed to face him. What was it she was doing, he wondered, that she knew so perfectly he would disapprove? And then, with the return of the books, the dropping of Johnnie’s education, came the abrupt end of those informal letters. Not till they ceased, did he realize how large a figure they had come to cut in his life. Only this morning he had taken them out and read them over, and decided that the girl who wrote them was worth at least an attempt toward an explanation and better footing. He had decided not to give her up. Now she confirmed his worst apprehensions. At his glance, her face was suffused with a swift, distressed red. She wondered if he yet knew of her mother’s marriage. She dreaded the time when she must tell him. With an inarticulate murmur she spoke to the little ones, turned her back and hurried across the bridge.

“Is Johnnie putting those children in the mill?” asked Stoddard half doubtfully, as his gaze followed them toward the entrance of the Victory.

“I believe so,” returned Lydia, smiling. “We were just speaking of how good it was that the cotton mills gave an opportunity for even the smaller ones to help, at work which is within their capacity.”

“Johnnie Consadine said that?” inquired Gray, startled. “Why is she taking them over to the Victory?” And then he answered his own question. “She knows very well they are below the legal age in Tennessee.”

Lydia Sessions trimmed instantly.

“That must be it,” she said. “I wondered a little that she seemed not to want them in the same factory that she is in. But I remember Brother Hartley said that we are very particular at our mill to hire no young people below the legal age. That must be it.”

Stoddard looked with reprehending yet still incredulous eyes, to where Johnnie and her small following disappeared within the mill doors. Johnnie–the girl who had written him that pathetic little letter about the children in her room, and her growing doubt as to the wholesomeness of their work; the girl who had read the books he gave her, and fed her understanding on them till she expressed herself logically and lucidly on the economic problems of the day–that, for the sake of the few cents they could earn, she should put the children, whom he knew she loved, into slavery, seemed to him monstrous beyond belief. Why, if this were true, what a hypocrite the girl was! As coarse and unfeeling as the rest of them. Yet she had some shame left; she had blushed to be caught in the act by him. It showed her worse than those who justified this thing, the enormity of which she had seemed to understand well.

“You mustn’t blame her too much,” came Lydia Sessions’s smooth voice. “John’s mother is a widow, and girls of that age like pretty clothes and a good time. Some people consider John very handsome, and of course with an ignorant young woman of that class, flattery is likely to turn the head. I think she does as well as could be expected.”

CHAPTER XVI

BITTER WATERS

Johnnie had a set of small volumes of English verse, extensively annotated by his own hand, which Stoddard had brought to her early in their acquaintance, leaving it with her more as a gift than as a loan. She kept these little books after all the others had gone back. She had read and reread them–cullings from Chaucer, from Spenser, from the Elizabethan lyrists, the border balladry, fierce, tender, oh, so human–till she knew pages of them by heart, and their vocabulary influenced her own, their imagery tinged all her leisure thoughts. It seemed to her, whenever she debated returning them, that she could not bear it. She would get them out and sit with one of them open in her hands, not reading, but staring at the pages with unseeing eyes, passing her fingers over it, as one strokes a beloved hand, or turning through each book only to find the pencilled words in the margins. She would be giving up part of herself when she took these back.

Yet it had to be done, and one miserable morning she made them all into a neat package, intending to carry them to the mill and place them on Stoddard’s desk thus early, when nobody would be in the office. Then the children came in; Deanie was half sick; and in the distress of getting the ailing child comfortably into her own bed, Johnnie forgot the books. Taking them in at noon, she met Stoddard himself.

“I’ve brought you back your–those little books of Old English Poetry,” she said, with a sudden constriction in her throat, and a quick burning flush that suffused brow, cheek and neck.

Stoddard looked at her; she was thinner than she had been, and otherwise showed the marks of misery and of factory life. The sight was almost intolerable to him. Poor girl, she herself was suffering cruelly enough beneath the same yoke she had helped to lay on the children.

“Are you really giving up your studies entirely?” he asked, in what he tried to make a very kindly voice. He laid his hand on the package of books. “I wonder if you aren’t making a mistake, Johnnie. You look as though you were working too hard. Some things are worth more than money and getting on in the world.”

Johnnie shook her head. For the moment words were beyond her. Then she managed to say in a fairly composed tone.

“There isn’t any other way for me. I think some times, Mr. Stoddard, when a body is born to a hard life, all the struggling and trying just makes it that much harder. Maybe when the children get a little older I’ll have more chance.”

The statement was wistfully, timidly made; yet to Gray Stoddard it seemed a brazen defence of her present course. It pierced him that she on whose nobility of nature he could have staked his life, should justify such action.

“Yes,” he said with quick bitterness, “they might be able to earn more, of course, as time goes on.” It was a cruel speech between two people who had discussed this feature of industrial life as these had; even Stoddard had no idea how cruel.

For a dizzy moment the girl stared at him, then, though her flushed cheeks had whitened pitifully and her lip trembled, she answered with bravely lifted head.

“I thank you very much for all the help you’ve been to me, Mr. Stoddard. What I said just now didn’t look as though I appreciated it. I ask your pardon for that. I aim to do the best I can for the children. And I–thank you.”

She turned and was gone, leaving him puzzled and with a sore ache at heart.

Winter came on, wet, dark, cheerless, in the shackling, half-built little village, and Johnnie saw for the first time what the distress of the poor in cities is. A temperature which would have been agreeable in a drier climate, bit to the bone in the mist-haunted valleys of that mountain region. The houses were mostly mere board shanties, tightened by pasting newspapers over the cracks inside, where the women of the family had time for such work; and the heating apparatus was generally a wood-burning cook-stove, with possibly an additional coal heater in the front room which could be fired on Sundays, or when the family was at home to tend it.

All through the bright autumn days, Laurella Himes had hurried from one new and charming sensation or discovery to another; she was like the butterflies that haunt the banks of little streams or wayside pools at this season, disporting themselves more gaily even than the insects of spring in what must be at best a briefer glory. When the weather began to be chilly, she complained of a pain in her side.

“Hit hurts me right there,” she would say piteously, taking Johnnie’s hand and laying it over the left side of her chest. “My feet haven’t been good and warm since the weather turned. I jest cain’t stand these here old black boxes of stoves they have in the Settlement. If I could oncet lay down on the big hearth at home and get my feet warm, I jest know my misery would leave me.”

At first Pap merely grunted over these homesick repinings; but after a time he began to hang about her and offer counsel which was often enough peevishly received.

“No, I ain’t et anything that disagreed with me,” Laurella pettishly replied to his well-meant inquiries. “You’re thinkin’ about yo’se’f. I never eat more than is good for me, nor anything that ain’t jest right. Hit ain’t my stomach. Hit’s right there in my side. Looks like hit was my heart, an’ I believe in my soul it is. Oh, law, if I could oncet lay down befo’ a nice, good hickory fire and get my feet warm!”

And so it came to pass that, while everybody in the boarding-house looked on amazed, almost aghast, Gideon Himes withdrew from the bank such money as was necessary, and had a chimney built at the side of the fore room and a broad hearth laid. He begged almost tearfully for a small grate which should burn the soft bituminous coal of the region, and be much cheaper to install and maintain. But Laurella turned away from these suggestions with the hopeless, pliable obstinacy of the weak.

“I wouldn’t give the rappin’ o’ my finger for a nasty little smudgy, smoky grate fire,” she declared rebelliously, thanklessly. “A hickory log-heap is what I want, and if I cain’t have that, I reckon I can jest die without it.”

“Now, Laurelly–now Laurelly,” Pap quavered in tones none other had ever heard from him, “don’t you talk about dyin’. You look as young as Johnnie this minute. I’ll git you what you want. Lord, I’ll have Dawson build the chimbley big enough for you to keep house in, if them’s