"JIM, how's your courting getting on?" Henley asked his clerk, half teasingly, one sultry afternoon, as the two were finishing a game of checkers on a board from which the squares were almost obliterated by the constant sliding of the black and white pants-buttons which were used for checkers.
"Don't ask me, Alf," Cahews answered, with a sickly smile. "I'm afraid she's too much for me. We ain't a bit nigher the altar than we was a year ago when I begun. Sometimes I think she is willing, and then ag'in I don't."
"I kinder thought you looked worried the last time you took her to ride," said Henley, sympathetically. "I felt sorry for you. She looked mighty chipper in her finery as you whisked by, but you was down in the mouth. Looked like you was on duty, and that was all."
"Somehow I don't much blame her," Cahews sighed, "but it looks to me like she is having too good a time running here and there to want to settle down. Sometimes I git blue and think she is just holding me as a safe thing to land on while she looks the field over. I have to stay here and attend to business and see her gallivanting in her ruffles and flounces with every drummer and lightning-rod agent that comes along."
"Maybe you ought to sorter lay down the law, at least on that particular point," Henley submitted, delicately. "I've heard my step-daddy-in-law say that a woman wasborn to be commanded, and when they ain't they hop to t'other extreme and just loll about in their abuse of a feller's good-nature. I don't know—that's the old man's view. You might give out a decided order or two, Jim, and see how—"
"Not to a woman you are tryin' to marry," said the clerk, quite firmly. "Sech a thing might be done to an army of soldiers or a red-handed mob at a lynchin'-bee, but not to a gal that makes you feel like you are sinking down in a mire whenever she looks you in the eyes. No, Alf, not to a gal as purty and sweet as a bunch of roses, and that knows it, and is in the habit o' being told of it as regular as eatin' and sleepin'. A gal like that sort o' feels 'er oats, as the feller said. She knows she's the stuff, and she loves to be told of it as much as a cat loves to sleep in the sun."
"Well, I'll be dadblamed if I'd tag after her withoutsomesubstantial hope," Henley opined, wisely. "Life is long and life is earnest, and beauty is only skin deep, anyways. It seems to me—now, at least—that if I was out on the hunt for a helpmeet I'd look to thesolidqualities in a woman just as I would in a man I wanted to work with. I'd study her character, her pluck under trying circumstances, her industry, and her all-round good-nature. The shape and face and furbelows, eyebrows and color of bangs, would be the last consideration."
"I never hear that from any but married men," Jim said. "They sing that song till they bury their wives, and then they turn to boys again and pick the youngest and prettiest they can lay their hands on."
"I was just thinking, Jim"—Henley seemed unwilling to combat the last assertion. His eyes rested thoughtfully on a sunny spot before the open door—"you see, I've got a little neighbor that—"
"I know—Dixie Hart! I know who you mean," theclerk broke in. "She's all wool and a yard wide, but I never run across her till after I'd got in with old man Hardcastle's daughter. I wouldn't talk to just any stray person this away, Alf, but me and you was boys together, and you've always been my friend. She's got me, Alf—I don't exactly know how—but she could crook her little finger at me and I'd make for her side—yes, sir, I would, through flame and smoke, if the world was coming to an end."
The talk had grown serious; there was a moist gleam in Cahew's blue eyes, and he snuffed as if he had a cold. Henley was glad of the interruption brought about by the arrival of a stranger who entered the front door and came back to them with swift, steady strides. He was fat, middle-aged, short, had a round, smooth face, and in removing his straw hat to fan his pink brow he disclosed a very bald head.
"I don't know whether you gentlemen are in need of anything in my line," he said, as he drew a big book of illustrations from beneath his arm and opened it on Henley's desk. "But I was givin' yore town and vicinity the one and only chance of its life to git the only true and artistic thing in marble. I'm agent for the Adamantyne Tombstone Company, of Tennessee. We own the only quarry of snow-white, non-grit, pristyne Parian rock on this side of the blue ocean, and we have in our employ the best and most world-renowned chisel-artists that ever breathed the spark of life into inanimate matter. Now, just set where you are, gentlemen—don't move—and I'll show you a beauty—a tombstone that will make a man want to die—if he's able to pay the price."
He held his book of illustrations open before Henley, whose eyes were twinkling mischievously as they rested on his clerk.
"I'm not in the market," he said, without a smile."I wouldn't buy any but a second-handed one, and then it would have to be so cheap that a dead man would kick it off of his grave in disgust. You've got in the wrong box. If you'll look about amongst the junk I've got in my back-yard you may find one or two lying about."
"I see you've got a streak of fun in you," the agent said, good-naturedly, and at this instant old Jason Wrinkle entered and sauntered back to the group. He seemed to recognize the stranger, for the two exchanged nods of greeting. "I'm still at it, you see," the salesman said. "I'm going to give all a chance. How about you, sir?" and he turned to Cahews. "I may find you serious, if this man ain't. Death is beautiful when it is properly looked at and provided for."
"I don't need anything in that line," Cahews said, with a flush.
"Youmight, Jim," Henley broke in, with a grin, "if you don't git cured of that complaint you was telling me about just now," and Henley winked almost imperceptibly to any one not familiar with the tricks of his face. He bent his head and smiled behind his broad hand. "I'll tell you, sir," he went on to the salesman, after another sly wink at Cahews, "none of us here happen to want anything in your line, but there is a rich old codger across the way—Mr. Silas Welborne—who will trade if you'll stick to him long enough. He's got dead kin with no sort o' tags on 'em. You might have to talk to him all the evening, and even follow him home, but you'll sell him if you understand your business. He's powerful soft-hearted, for one thing, and if you'll tell him a tale or two in the eloquent tongue you was rolling off just now he'll place a dandy order. I'll give you that as a pointer."
"Well, I'm much obliged to you, sir, and thank you kindly," the agent said, as he closed his book. "I'll lookhim up. I'm doing a big business here. Your people don't seem to have had a chance to invest in my line in no telling how long. Good-day."
"Good-day," Henley echoed, and he endeavored to hide the mischievous smile that was playing about his mouth. In a chuckling undertone he said to Wrinkle and Cahews: "I'd give a pretty to see this oily-tongued chap holding down that crusty old miser. A tombstone is the last thing on earth that Welborne would want to think about or talk about. I'd love to be there and see 'em meet."
Cahews laughed and sauntered toward the front, and old Wrinkle sat down in the chair just vacated and tilted it back against the door-jamb.
"That is a sorter good joke," he said, his small eyes on Henley, "considering the man you mean it for, but as I stood thar hearin' you concoct it I couldn't help thinking if you knowed what a joke this self-same peddler had got off on you you'd not be exactly in the mood for fun—at least not in the grave-rock line."
"What joke are you talking about?" Henley asked, incredulously, his face falling into seriousness. "I have never laid eyes on this chap before."
"I reckon not, but you'll know him the next time you see him; I'll be bound you do, even if you are a mile down the road an' he's round the bend with his back turned to you. The truth is, I just followed him down here to see who he'd strike next. He's been to our house, Alf. He slid in there just after you come off, and set on the porch and begun his palaver. He has a different way with women than he has with men. He seems to know that women are soft on some lines, and chiefly on preachin' and buryin'. He'd picked up a list of folks round about here that had lost kin, and he had me and Jane down on it on account of Dick. Now, it seems that when he gits to a place he goes to the graveyardand looks for stones to tally with his dead list, and when he don't find any he makes a note of it; so, you see, havin' Dick's name down, an' not knowin' the full particulars, he hunted us up, thinkin' we was unsupplied in his line. So, you see, that's why he made sech a leech of hisse'f on our porch."
"Huh, I see," Henley frowned—"I see."
"I can't begin to describe all the chap done or said," Wrinkle resumed. "He riz and walked and ranted, an' prayed an' sung an' mighty nigh called up mourners. I thought them two women would bust out cryin' once or twice, but they belt in tiptop through the hottest of the wrangle. Then I thought I'd put a stop to it, and I up and told him, I did, that he'd made a mistake, an' that we didn't need a thing of the sort—that Dick's body never was recovered, and so on. Then what do you think? The skunk was actually flabbergasted, and didn't know what to say. But he was game, and knowed thar was some way out of his trouble. He said, 'Wait a minute—don't bother me!' an' he shet his eyes tight, an' set thar with his head hangin' down for fully five minutes. Then he looked up an' said, 'I was jest tryin' to recall the good lady's name that had the same trouble, pine blank, as your'n, but it slips me somehow.' An' with that he said it was the custom all over civilized Christendom, in such cases as our'n, to erect a suitable monument jest the same, havin' a plot the right length an' width set aside, with both head and foot rock, and, if a sermon hadn't been preached already, one ought to be on the day the stone was put in place an' consecrated. I 'lowed sure them women would see how plumb silly it was, but they listened like they was gittin' the only directions to the Golden Shore, and begun to look at the pictures in his book like they thought the skunk was savin' 'em from death, destruction, an' disgrace."
"You don't mean to tell me they actually went andordered—" Henley began, but his voice trailed away into indistinctness. He could only stare at his tormentor hopelessly.
"Only a little one fur five hundred dollars," Wrinkle said, with evident enjoyment. "They had a lots o' trouble pickin' out the design amongst all the doves, broke-off pillars, seraphims, an' angels, but they finally got what they wanted. Not a tear was shed, if you'd stood off a few feet, out o' earshot, you couldn't 'a' told but what they was pickin' out a pattern fer a weddin'-dress or buyin' tickets fer a side-show. After they got under headway I couldn't say anything—they had sech a solemn way about it, and then I couldn't help but be fair and think if I'd been in Dick's place they would have gone through exactly the same antics, an' been jest as liberal in showing due respect. Hettie says it is all to come out of her own money that she had when she married you. She was particular to mention the fact, and I think that showed a sensible streak, for a fool would know you oughtn't to be expected to stand sech expense, and so long after you took her, and that being a thing that would naturally belong to her past career, too. After the agent had gone off I set thar, an' Hettie told me what she was goin' to do. She don't intend to spare expense to do the thing plumb right. She's goin' to send away off for a high-priced reverential orator to give the discourse, an' intends to have evergreens hung all over the church. I don't know whether she designs to have all the business houses in Chester closed that day, but she'd naturally expect you and Jim to shet up an' take it in."
"So this is the joke you said that man had got off on me, is it?" Henley snapped out, irritably.
"Well, I reckon it mought not appear exactly in the same light to you, Alf," answered Wrinkle, "as it would to somebody who'd be more inclined to laugh over athing of the sort. You was gettin' off what you called a good one on old Tight-fist just now by puttin' this chap on his track, and I reckon you'd have no call to git mad if Welborne made it tit for tat an' fired back at you. You wouldn't be justified in killin' 'im, you know, if he was to take a notion to send you a big bouquet o' flowers out o' his gyarden all tied up in black ribbon with a cyard sayin' he's sorry to hear of the sad loss in yore family, an'—"
"Ah, you make me sick, with your eternal chatter!" Henley burst out, angrily. "I don't care what them two silly women do. I'll not be here to witness such tomfoolery. I'm going to Texas, to be away several months."
"So I've heard," Wrinkle said, a trifle more mildly, "but you'll be missin' some'n out o' the general run, if I'm any judge. Thar may have been sech a thing sence the flood as a married woman callin' out all hands to solemnize her first husband's demise while she's still wearin' the weddin'-clothes bought by her second, but it's a newwrinkleon me, an' I hain't makin' what you mought call a pun, nuther."
Abruptly leaving the old man, Henley joined his clerk at the front.
"I get so mad at that old chap sometimes I could kick him," he said, in an angry undertone. "Nothing under the sun is sacred to him."
"He's gettin' old and childish," Cahews answered. "I sorter love to hear 'im chatter. Some o' the things he says about folks and their peculiarities sound powerful funny."
"Well, they don't to me," burst from Henley, "and I'll tell you another thing, Jim—enough of a thing is a plenty, and while I'm away—" but Wrinkle had approached, and, passing behind the counter, he was tiptoeing that he might reach a candy-jar on the top shelf.
"Looks like I'm about yore only candy customer,Jim," he said to Cahews. "Thar hain't been a stick took out o' this jar sence I was here Monday. I laid one crossways on top just to see. I'd order a fresh lot if I was you. This is gettin' dry and crumbly. I can suck wind through a stick the same as a pipe-stem."
ONE clear, warm morning a week later Henley stood in the little porch in front of his store and glanced up the street which gave into the road that led on to his farm. In the store Cahews was nailing the top slats on a coop of scrambling, squawking chickens, and with a pot of lampblack and brush was marking it for shipment to Atlanta. In a cloud of dust in the rear, Pomp, the negro porter and all-round servant on Henley's farm, was turning the handle of a clattering machine for the separation of chaff from grain. And while his eyes were resting on the road the storekeeper saw a horse and wagon come around a bend and slowly advance toward him. The horse was a poor beast of great age, and the wagon was none the better for wear. It had lost all its original paint, the woodwork was cracked by the weather and the sun. Its four wheels ran unevenly; some of the spokes were missing, and its bolts and rods of iron rattled in holes worn too large.
"By Gum, it's Dixie Hart, and she's fetching in a load of produce," Henley muttered; then he called out to Cahews: "Say, Jim, get through there and stop that nigger's clatter. We are going to have a visitor. The fairest of the fair will be here in a minute."
Henley stepped down to the edge of the sidewalk and bowed and smiled to her as she drew rein. In her new straw hat and clean, well-ironed gingham she looked decidedly well. She was radiantly bright, and smiledmerrily as she extended her hand and shook his over the rickety fore-wheel as she leaned forward from the dilapidated, sagging seat, the springs of which rested on the sides of the wagon-bed.
"I told you I'd be in," she laughed, "and, if the market is off to-day, back I go to my shanty. Nothing but the best prices catch me."
"About as favorable now as any time," he said. "What does your load consist of?" he ran on, jovially, as he glanced behind her at the bags, boxes, coops, pails, and jars.
"Odds and ends," she laughed. "I've got to make a payment to old Welborne on my debt. You and Jim had better give me tiptop bids all through or I'll peddle the truck from door to door and steal your trade right from under your noses."
Henley smiled good-humoredly as he walked round the wagon opening boxes and bags and making notes with a pencil on a scrap of paper. Then he told her what he would pay for each item.
"Is that as good as you can do?" It was a question she always asked, and she did so now more from habit than for any intention of disagreeing with him.
"That's the top-notch, Dixie," he said. "We couldn't do that, but we've got customers that simply won't eat butter and eggs that don't have your brand on 'em."
"I believe you," she said, laconically. "I've met 'em myself. They pass by the house from Carlton sometimes in their fine rigs and ask me why I don't start a milk-and-butter farm. I may do it if I ever get out of debt. I've got sense enough to know it would pay, and pay big, considering that there ain't no such business established. Well, Alfred, I'll take your offer. I don't like to dicker with first one store and then another, and I know you've been straight with me in all my dealings.I'll trade out part of the amount. I've got a few tricks to buy in your line."
"Well, alight and come in and set down," he said. "Jim and Pomp will unload and weigh and measure. I'll make Pomp mind your hoss."
"Oh, old Bob will stand all right!" she laughed, as she put her gloved hand on Henley's shoulder and sprang lightly to the ground. "He's moved all he wants to to-day. It would take a switch-engine to budge him an inch. See 'im nod? He knows what we are talking about."
Henley led her through the long room to his desk in the rear, and gave her a seat near the open door as the clerk and the porter went out to the wagon. She took off her hat and pushed back her luxuriant hair with her fingers.
"You go on with your work," she said; "don't mind me."
He applied himself to some writing he had to do till Cahews came with a slip of paper on which he had noted the weights, quantities, and values of the things she had brought, and with a polite bow he handed it to her.
"Look it over, Dixie," Henley jested. "Old man Hardcastle's daughter has rubbed a rabbit-foot on Jim so that he can hardly add two and two. Besides, he is always rattled when he's waiting on a pretty girl."
"Well, he won't rattle any more than a green gourd round me, if that's the case," Dixie said, as she began to run over the figures, her lips moving as she counted on her fingers. "I know in reason it's correct," she said, extending the slip to Cahews. "No, wait a minute," drawing it back and looking at it again. "If I'm not powerfully mistaken, Jim, you are swindling yourself out of twenty cents on the string-beans. There was one peck instead of two."
"I told you Jim was rattled," Henley continued tojest. "But I won't discharge 'im. I'd pardon him if he was to set the store afire, under the circumstances. I've seen him wash his hands in the kerosene tank and wipe 'em on his clothes just after Julia Hardcastle driv' by in a hug-me-tight buggy with a drummer."
"Well, I wouldn't blame him much," Dixie smiled in her sympathy for the embarrassed clerk. "She is nice and pretty, and one town-girl that isn't stuck up. I like her. She wants to have a good time; she likes attention and good clothes, and I'm sure I'd be just like her if I had half the chance. She called to see me the other day, and Ma and Aunt Mandy fell in love with her. They think she has lots of common-sense, and they know. I had another call. Carrie Wade waited till she saw me go to the field to work, then she come over and asked if I was at the house. Ma told her where I was, and she come over the clods grumbling like a spoilt baby about getting dust on her shoes. What do you reckon she wanted?"
"I can't imagine," Henley answered, as Cahews, flushing with delight over the compliment to the maid of his choice, moved away.
"She come to cut at me," Dixie said, as she took the pile of silver into her hand which Henley was extending. "As she stood there between the corn-rows holding up her skirt she said she was going over to the lumber-camp again with Martha Sims to another big all-day blow-out. She said she was to start early and had so much fixing to do that she wondered if I'd spare the time to wash and iron a muslin dress for her. She said she'd pay well for it, because my things always looked so nice."
"Impudent thing!" Henley said; "she ought to have, knowed better than that."
"Shedidknow better, and that's exactly why she said it. She intended to let me know where she was going, thinking it would break my heart. She admits she isbent on getting married, and says she knows I'll live and die an old maid. She hates me, Alfred; with all her soul she hates me. She will never rest satisfied till she sees me plumb down and out. It all started through no fault of mine, too. You remember that young preacher, Mr. Wrenn, that boarded about in the families three years ago. Well, she made a dead set at him. She literally tagged after him everywhere he went till folks here in Chester was laughing about it and calling her his little dog Fido. They say he got so he'd run and hide every time she'd turn a corner. Well, he stayed at our house two weeks, and, of course, we all tried to make him as comfortable as we could. I give you my word that I never was alone with the fellow more than five minutes in all the time he was there, but I'll admit he hung around considerable—that is, with us all."
"I remember the fellow," Henley said, deeply interested. "I had a talk with your Pa about him not a month before he died. Your Pa said he couldn't see why you was so offish. The fellow made no beans about how he felt, and when the report went out that you had turned him down folks wondered powerful, for all the girls was setting their caps for him."
"I was too young to have good sense, I reckon," the girl said, shrugging her shoulders. "Pa was alive, and we did not want for anything. I never dreamt I'd have such a load on me as I've got now. Then I had a foolish notion about love, anyway. I'd been reading novels, and got an idea in my silly head that when a girl met the right person she went through some sort of dazzling regeneration; and as I didn't feel anyways peculiar when Mr. Wrenn was about I thought I ought to wait, and I told him so. I'll never forget that young man's face. I've thought of it thousands of times, and been sorry."
"And Carrie Wade found out about it?" Henley was leading her along gently and sympathetically.
"Why, he told her himself—told her to her face in a crowd of young folks at Sunday-school the next day, and the worst part of it was somebody in the bunch that didn't like Carrie joked her about it. The whole thing has gone out o' folks' minds by this time, I reckon; but Carrie never laid it aside. It rankled and still rankles. She gloats over my hardships and makes a point of flaunting her good luck in my face, and is eternally telling me of her chances to get married. She's half crazy on the subject, and thinks every one else is like her. I know one thing, Alfred Henley, when I do slip off the coil of single blessedness she'll be madder than a wet hen without shelter on a cold December day. And she won't have long to wait neither—there! I've gone and let the cat out of the bag, but I don't care. I'd trust a friend like you with my life. You talk pretty free to me, and I can to you."
"You don't—you can't mean to—to say that you have got some 'n of the sort in view, Dixie?"
"Well, you just lie low and watch," she laughed, significantly. "I let one chance pass me, and I don't intend to be such a fool again. I can use a stout, willing, and able-bodied man in my line of business. I've got two old women to support and a big debt to pay, and I'm about to the limit of my endurance. I might have put it off, but I'm itching to see my prime enemy's face when I march him out to meeting. It's all on the quiet, and is going to be a big surprise. I never let my folks on to it till just the other day. That reminds me. I want one of your blank envelopes. I've written to him, and I'm clean out of envelopes and want to mail the letter before I go home."
She flushed slightly, and her long lashes rested on her pink cheeks as she drew a folded paper from her pocket and held it in her lap with the money he had given her.
"You don't mean it!" Henley cried in astonishment."Why, you take my breath away; but, of course, I'm glad. I certainly can congratulate the lucky fellow."
"Ask 'im whether it would be in order before you do." She reached for his pen and dipped it, and began to address the envelope as it lay on her knee.
"And that letter is to him, you say?" Henley said, wonderingly.
"Well, it ain't to nogirl," Dixie smiled, with an arch, upward glance. "Stamps and paper cost too much such times as these to waste 'em on women."
"I'm curious to know what sort o' chap you've decided on," said Henley. "What does he look like?"
"He's a pig in a poke." She had finished writing and was drawing the gummed flap of the envelope across her smiling lips. "I never laid eyes on 'im in my life. What do you think of that? But that part must never get out. I want Carrie and all the rest to—to think, you see, that I got acquainted with him in—in the regular way. She never would get through talking if she knew the full truth, and that is nobody's business but his and mine. You may think I am a born fool, Alfred, but for the past six months I've been corresponding with a fellow in Florida. But he's all right. Don't you worry; he'ssafe, and that is a lot to say in this day of trickery and strife. It all come about by accident. I've got a cousin—Tobe Chasteen—working down there in an orange-grove, and now and then he writes me a letter. Well, in one he wrote that a nice fellow down there wanted to write to some girl up in Georgia, and asked me if I'd answer. So, just for fun, and to kill time, I agreed, and so it started. He writes a good, flowing hand, and has plenty to say, and I got interested in the whole thing. He sent his picture, and wanted one of me. So I put on my best outfit and had a tintype struck off under that tent on the square and sent it to him. It was a frightful daub, I tell you; but he liked it, or said he did;he said it was fine, and if the goods come up to the sample that was all he could ask. I've got his in my pocket. I don't tote it about all the time, but it happened to be in the pocket of this dress. My two women want it to stay in the clock, so they can get it out and peep at it when I'm in the field. They are more crazy about him than I am. They sneak and read my letters, and ask ten thousand questions about him. There are some of his long epistles that I wouldn't show 'em for money—they are so silly. At first we just wrote about what was going on, but he kept edging closer and closer, and I never, in so many words, told him to let up. Once he drew a round ring in the middle of a blank page and asked under it if I couldn't guess what was in the middle of it. I looked close and could see a greasy splotch when it was held sidewise in the light. That kinder disgusted me, and I drew a ring in my answer, and told him there wasn't anything in mine, and never would be. He must have liked what I said, for he wrote back that it was cute, and that he'd bet I was one girl that never had been kissed. Well, he can think that, too, if he wants to. It won't do him any harm. I say all this was going on, but I never dreamt of closing the deal till I got in this present money-tight. You see, I wrote him about my financial trouble, and he said he had saved up some money and that he could wipe out all my obligations, and that me and him together would make a fine team on the farm. He wrote so kind, too, about Ma and Aunt Mandy, and said he'd always want 'em with us. You see, I felt grateful, and, considering everything, I think I acted wise—don't you?"
Henley half nodded, and tried to meet her frankness with a smile that was free from doubt. At this juncture Pomp came back with a telegram. It was an order from an Atlanta hotel for a quantity of eggs and butter. Henley read it and handed it back. "Tell Jimto quote the lowest cash prices," he said, absent-mindedly.
"But it's a order, suh," said the negro.
"Oh yes; I see it is. Well, ship it; it's all right."
"Would you like to see his picture?" Dixie asked. She had taken the crude tintype from her pocket and held it in her lap.
"Yes, I would," Henley replied, and he took the picture and looked at it. He didn't like it. A keen, quick reader of men's faces, he saw what had escaped her less experienced eye. There was something that bespoke prodigious vanity and lack of principle in the low brow, over which the coarse, black hair was plastered down so smoothly; in the heavy, carefully waxed, curled, and perhaps dyed mustache; in the small, conscious eyes, set close together; in the grossly sensuous mouth, from which a weak chin receded.
"He ain't as purty as he thinks he is by a long shot," Dixie remarked, rather lamely, for she was slightly chilled by Henley's failure to comment favorably on the picture, "but he has a good heart. He is a church member in fair standing, and has a Bible class of young ladies in Sunday-school, and was once proposed for superintendent, and lost out because he was unmarried and too young. Oh, I've thought it all over. I'm not jumping without looking for a spot to light on. I thought I could carry my load through, but I had to give in. I can't perform miracles, Alfred; I'm just clay, and the wrong gender of that. If I could keep temptation out of my way I might keep on, but I can't run against Carrie Wade's sneers. I'd rather strut by her house with a husband that was able to take me in out of the wet than anything else I know of, and I want to rest. I want to sleep one night without dreaming of old Welborne's flabby jaws, blinking eyes, and harsh voice snarling at me. Folks may say such an arrangement ain'tcustomary—that it is out of the common—but it seems to me that everything about me is out of the common, anyway, and why shouldn't this fall in line? Customs are just what the most folks want to do. Custom don't look after the under dog in the pack. But when right is on a body's side there is no need to fear, and there won't be a shade of wrong in this if I have anything to do with it. I've made up my mind to do a wife's part in every sense of the word, and let it go at that—nothing risk, nothing have. I never used to think I'd ever marry a man I never saw—in fact, when I was young and silly I used to see myself strutting by whole regiments of fellers all making signs to me to come be his darling, but that was when my eyelids was glued down and before they was jerked open by trouble. Marrying with me in this case is an open-and-shut business proposition. I read somewhere that it is worked that way among high-up folks in France—though the dickering takes place between the parents of the contracting parties; and as I know a sight more about what to do than Ma, why, it was all right for me to take it in hand. Peter is an orphan, and I'm the head of a family, and so there was nobody else concerned. My two women are getting old and plumb helpless—more like children than grown-ups. They may live a long time. I certainly hope they will, for they are all I've got; but they are actually getting so that they don't want to budge out of the house, even as far as the fence. They are afraid a little sun will kill 'em dead. But, Alfred, I don't somehow like the way you look about it. You don't take it like I thought you would. I know in reason that you wish me well, and—"
"I don't know that I have a right to say a thing agin it," Henley broke into her now hesitating words. "But I must confess I'm sorter stunned, Dixie. I've always felt like a big brother to you, and pitied you a good deal,and now—well, you see, I reckon it is natural for me to be sorter afraid that you may be making a mistake in what you are doing. I feel like begging you not to do it, and then ag'in I don't, for I've always made up my mind that marrying was one thing no outsider could decide about. I have been dead agin marriages that afterwards turned out tiptop, and you know I didn't show such far-reaching wisdom in my own case as to set myself up as a judge."
"Well, you needn't have any fears on my account," Dixie smiled, assuringly. "I know what I am about, and I ain't the back-out kind. It's too late, anyway; the day has been set. For the last two weeks I've been giving every spare minute to the making of my outfit. It is a good one. I was determined to give Miss Wade a treat. I do things right, and I've spent some cash. My trousseau will attract attention, and I reckon Peter won't be ashamed. But it is to be kept quiet. Don't you say a word to a soul. A week from to-day I'll drive in and meet the up-train and haul my bridegroom home in my wagon. We'll eat dinner at our house and then drive over to Preacher Sanderson's and have him tie the knot. Now I'll go down in front and buy a few things and mail my letter and hurry home."
"Wait a minute, Dixie." She was moving away, and he stopped her, standing before her, a grave look in his eyes. "Surely it ain't as dead sure as that?"
"Yes, it is, Alfred; it's settled—plumb settled."
"But—but," he pursued, anxiously, "if you didn't like him when you see him, you wouldn't marry him?"
"Oh, that's a gray horse of another color," she smiled. "I think I'll like him; but if I didn't—well, if I didn't, I'd pay his way back to Florida, and beg off."
Henley made no further protest. He sat at his deskand bowed his head in troubled thought as she tripped lightly away.
"What a pity!" he mused. "She deserves the best in the land, and this fellow looks like a worthless scamp."
THAT evening after supper, while the sultry dusk hung heavily over the land, shutting out the few lights of the village and obscuring the near-by mountain, Henley took his chair into the passage, and, without his coat, he leaned back against the weather-boarding and lighted his pipe. He had not been there long when his wife, having finished her duties in the kitchen, came out and stood over him. Accustomed to her varying moods, he saw by her attitude that she was displeased.
"Pa told me something I don't like," she began. "I tried not to pay attention to it, but it was so unexpected, so unheard-of, so plumb disrespectful, that it hurt me. He said you told him you was going to Texas to keep from being here during the—the memorial service next month."
"I told him no such thing," Henley retorted, with an effort to control his rising temper. "I can't be responsible for the slap-dash way he puts things. I don't like his eternal gab, nohow."
"Well, you must have saidsomething," Mrs. Henley pursued, probingly. "He never makes up things out of whole cloth. He is not that way."
"Well, I suppose I did say something," Henley reluctantly admitted. "He was nagging the life out of me at the store about what you intended to do, and holding me up to ridicule, and I reckon I did say that Iwouldn't be here—that my business would keep me in Texas. As for that matter, I told you about the trip long before this queer—long before you decided to do this—this thing."
"I know just how you said it," the woman threw back, sharply. "I know what you've thought all along about Pa and Ma being here, and me loving 'em and caring for 'em. You do your best to hide it, but you can't."
"Well, if I do my best, what more could you expect?" Henley asked, with more logic than patience.
"I'd want you to keep your promise to me," Mrs. Henley said, crisply, and she bent lower over him and fixed her offended eyes on his. "You told me before we were married that you'd promise never to object—you even said you admired me for my feelings, and that it proved to you that I had stability and strength of character—that you wouldn't have a wife that would ever forget her dead husband."
"Well, I have kept my promise," Henley said. "I am not sure that I knowed just precisely what I was doing when I made it, but I've kept it. As for attending his—his funeral services at such a late day, that is another thing. I don't see how you could expect it."
"You don't?" she flared up. "Will you tell me if there would be anything to be ashamed of in your being there? Would a divine service of that sort disgrace you? Would it besmirch your character?"
"No, and nobody said it would," Henley managed to fish from his addled brain. "But I simply thought, somehow, that it would look better for me to be out of the way. Funerals and the like are generally attended by mourners, and, well, where would I come in? I reckon my proper seat would be with you and the—the rest of the family on the front bench, if it was anywhere. It would look funny for me just to be a looker-on from the back part of the house, and I'd feel like a dern foolin front. A dern fool—you may not know what that is from experience, but you ought to from observation; you've had one under your eye for some time."
"Well, you simply don't approve of it," the woman returned, resentfully. "You can set there, blessed with good health and life, and plenty to eat and wear, and actually begrudge the little mite of respect that is paid to the helpless dead. In being overpersuaded and marrying you I was untrue to him and his memory, and now you make it worse by opposing a simple little ordinance that is due every person on earth, high or low."
"It ought to have been done earlier, and before I got—got mixed up in it, if it was done at all," Henley said, trying to speak mildly and, even, pacifically.
"I know that now," Mrs. Henley said, in a tone of such deep self-reproach that her stare softened and wavered; "but it wasn't thought of. I never knew it was the style till this man come along and told me; but that is no reason I shouldn't make amends, late as it is. It is all the better proof that Dick is remembered. But you can go to Texas." The stare hardened and became fixed again. "Folks will say you are jealous and mean, and that I was an unfaithful fool for listening to you, but I will have to stand it."
"Well, I'll simply be obliged to be away," Henley said, doggedly. "The business won't be put off, and—and—"
"And you are a heartless brute!" the gaunt woman cried, as she whirled from him and strode into the house.
A few minutes later there emerged from the near-by door of the kitchen the real instigator of the present dispute. He trudged across the passage, drawn down on one side by the weight of a dripping swill-pail which he was taking to the pigpen, descended the short flight of steps, and turned back toward Henley. He stood for a moment hesitatingly, the pail wiping its dripping exterioragainst his baggy jean trousers. Then he said: "I've got a thing or two to say to you, Alf, if you will oblige me by steppin' down to my pen so I can stop that hog's squealin' long enough to hear myself talk. One at a time, I say, an' let it be me."
"By all means," Henley answered, ambiguously, and he joined Wrinkle on the grass and they walked down the path together to the pigpen in a corner of the rail-fenced cow-lot.
"No use enterin' a talkin'-match with the whistle of a crazy steam-engine," the stepfather-in-law strained his lungs to say, and he grunted as he raised the pail to the top rail of the pen and cautiously tilted it to let the contents run into the wooden trough.
"Now, that's more like it," he said, his voice rising above the suction-pump noise of the hungry animal. He lowered the empty pail to the ground, and with a paddle began to dig out the mushy sediment from the bottom and throw it into the trough, as a mason might mortar from a trowel. "The truth is, Alf, I've got an apology to make to you, and I didn't want to do it up thar before them women. The other day when I said that about old Welborne a-sendin' you a bunch o' flowers to decorate Dick's grave I wasn't actually thinkin' about you as much as I was about Welborne an' his close-fisted ways. Of course, now I think of it again, itwouldbe a good way for 'im to git back at you for yore joke in sendin' the tombstone man to him, and I catch myself lafin' every time I think of it, and the way you'd look if he did, but—"
"What the devil do you mean?" Henley broke in, testily. "Here you are startin' in to apologize for a thing and going over it again word for word? Have you plumb lost your senses?"
"Was I doin' that?" Wrinkle asked, blandly, though even in the twilight Henley could see that his eyes weretwinkling. "Well, I'm sorry again, and I'm just man enough to say so, Alf. I'll apologize as many times as you like. I'll keep on till youaresatisfied. But you must listen. You are a-gittin' powerful touchy here lately, and it ain't becomin' in a man of yore dignity. It will git so after a while that I can't express any sort of opinion to you without a fist-fight. I was goin' on to say that I was jest thinkin' of old Welborne's quick wit in every emergency that set me to wonderin' that day how he might act in sech a case. They say everything is grist to his mill—that he turns every single thing that drifts his way into profit great or small. And that day after you railed out at me in the store I went across the Square to see how yore joke would terminate. The door of his dingy little office was open, an' I could see the grave-rock man inside bendin' over old Welborne at his little table, pointin' at the pictures in his book and sweatin' like a nigger in a cotton-gin. But what struck me most of all was the glazed look in old Welborne's eye; he looked like he wasn't hearin' a word the fellow was spoutin', but was thinkin' o' some'n else plumb different. I walked on and hung about outside till the tombstone man come out. He was as mad as Hector. I seed he was, an' stopped 'im in a offhand way and axed him what luck.
"'Luck hell,' says he—he used the word, I didn't—'I talked to that dried-up old mummy,' says he, 'fer an hour jest to find that he was settin' thar all the time figurin' in his head about a speculation I'd made 'im think of while I was talkin' to him.'
"The agent was so mad that he wouldn't explain what the speculation was, but I heard it that evenin'. Hank Bradley was tellin' it to a crowd at the post-office. You know Hank makes all manner of sport of his uncle behind the old skunk's back. He told a tale, too, that I'd never heard. It seems that old Welborne's mother-in-lawdied, and Welborne went to a undertaker to buy 'er coffin. He picked out a fifty-dollar one, and talked and talked till he finally got the pore devil down to forty. Then he said:
"'You'd sell two for seventy-five, wouldn't you?'
"'I reckon I might,' the undertaker said, 'but you only want one.'
"'I'll need another 'fore many months,' old Welborne said. 'My father-in-law won't last long. I'll take one now at thirty-seven-fifty and the other when the time comes.'"
Henley laughed, despite his displeasure. "That is just like him," he said, "and I believe every word of it."
"His present speculation takes the rag off'n the bush," said Wrinkle. "The talk of the gravestone man started him to thinkin' about what thar might be in that line for him, and he recalled that he owned ten acres of ground on a rise in the edge of town which he had bought at a tax-sale for twenty-five dollars. The very next mornin' he had a feller diggin' post-holes an' puttin' a fence around it with a main gate that had a big curvin' sign over it with the words 'Sunnyside Cemetery' on it, and I'm told that he has been all over town tellin' folks that theoldgraveyard is too low and soggy to be half decent, and that his'n was a great improvement. He intimated, too, that nobody but blue-bloods could git the'r names enrolled, and thar has been a powerful scramble for places, even by folks that have no idea of dyin' yet a while. You see, Alf, I got a good many particulars at fust hand, for he was out here to see Hettie in regard to accommodations for Dick, and I heard all that was said. Accordin' to Welborne thar is to be a wholesale movin' right away and choice quarters will be scarce, right when they are in the most demand."
"I suppose she—I suppose my wife—"
"Yes, she bit, Alf, and took a full mouthful at that.Welborne told her he was givin' her the pick of the whole thing because she was startin' the ball rollin', an' her fine marble would set the place off. She selected twenty foot square under a weepin'-willow, which he said had a rock bottom and the best view of the town. It only set her back two hundred round plugs, but she had that much left in the bank, and seems powerful well, satisfied. I wouldn't 'a' fetched all this up, but I 'lowed you'd like to know what a big thing growed out of yore little joke that day. I love a good joke myself, but when one's turned on you in a sort o' wholesale way, it don't feel the best in the world."
"There is no joke about it; it's outright stealing!" Henley had reference to Welborne's part of the transaction. "Any man can get money out of fool women, if he's mean enough to take advantage of their silly whims."
"I often wonder about you an' me an' the whole bunch of us here at the house," Wrinkle said. "Not one of the four is blood kin to the other, and yet here we are all wedged together as tight as young catbirds in a nest. Folks say the hardest question on earth is how to live, and yet to me it's been as easy as fallin' off a log into soft sand. Me 'n Jane never counted on Dick for any sort of aid, an' yet it was through him that we are provided for—in fact, he was so wishy-washy and helpless that we was glad to have him tie up with a woman that had a few dollars. He went in for a high old time, and he had it. I couldn't object—I was that way myself. He was as bad after gals as a drummer, and in his sparkin' days, as maybe you know, he could have had his pick. I couldn't keep from hearin' you an' Hettie talkin' in the passage jest now, and when she come into the light mad enough to bite a tenpenny nail in two I saw thar had been a row. Her notion to have you on hand at sech a time as that may seem odd, but women are all odd. They want what other women can't have, andI reckon Het thinks it would be a sort o' feather in 'er cap to mourn in public over one husband while she's leanin' agin another that is ready an' willin' in every way."
"I reckon we've talked long enough about it," Henley said, frigidly, and he glanced toward the lights in the farm-house.
"Yes, I reckon so," returned the gadfly. "As for me, I never was able to see how Het could accuse you of bein' jealous of Dick, when—"
"Jealous fiddlesticks!" Henley snorted. "I never was jealous of aliveman, much less a dead one."
"It wouldseemthat way," was all the support Wrinkle would give to the claim, as he took up his pail and started back to the house. "I didn't say youwas, but Het seems to size it up that way."
Left alone, and with hot fires of resentment raging in his breast, Henley sauntered along the fence till he was behind his barn. His change of position brought him within a few yards of Dixie Hart's cottage, and he suddenly heard her voice. She was speaking to some one. Peering through the deepening darkness, which was broken only by the gleams of a few random stars, he saw her inside her yard at the gate, and leaning on the fence from the outside was the tall, well-clad form of Hank Bradley.
"You are not going to treat a feller as mean as that," Bradley was heard to say, in a gruff, pleading tone, "when I've been begging you so many times."
"I can't let you come in now, and I can't go to ride with you, either," Henley heard her answer, as she stood well away from the fence. "I've got good and sufficient reasons, and I hope you won't ask me any more."
"I'll keep on asking till the crack of doom," Bradley said, in a voice that shook. "You know I'm not the weak-kneed kind. The Bradley stock hold on likebulldogs. When they take a notion to anything they want it, and they keep on till they get it. So look out, Dixie Hart. I'm not to blame; your eyes burn holes in me and set me on fire. The more you turn me down the more I think about you."
"Well, you mustn't come any more," Dixie said, firmly. "Good-night."
Henley saw her move across the grass and vanish in the cottage. He heard Bradley stifle a surly exclamation of disappointment, and saw him turn and walk off slowly toward his uncle's house.
"Poor girl!" Henley said to himself. "In all her troubles she has to ward off a dirty, designing scamp like that; but she's doing it like a queen, an' no harm can touch 'er. And she's going to get married! She is going into the treacherous thing absolutely blindfolded, and the Lord only knows what will come of it. It's a risk for the best, and under the best conditions—it may prove to be the final stroke that will knock out her wonderful courage. God have mercy on her!"
ON the day set for Dixie's wedding Henley had occasion to go to the little express office, adjoining the old-fashioned brick car-shed in the village, to see about a shipment of produce which had been incorrectly marked. And as he was returning he saw the girl seated in her wagon in the open space between the station and the hotel.
Henley knew what it meant. She had come to meet her lover. She happened to have her glance fixed on some point in the opposite direction from him and did not know that he was near. He hesitated for an instant, and then decided that he would not intrude upon her privacy. There was something in her attitude of bland and helpless expectancy that probed the deepest fount of his sympathy.
"Poor, brave little woman!" he mused, as he turned his back upon the scene and moved on toward his store. "She's having her dream like all the rest. She may get a fair cut of the cards, and she may not. He ain't very promising material from the looks of his picture, but it wouldn't be fair to judge him by that. He may do his part, and the Lord knows she needs help. I'm too big a failure in the marrying line to object or offer advice."
Reaching his desk, he applied himself to the writing of some letters pertaining to his intended trip to Texas, but the pathetic sight he had of the girl at the station thrust itself between him and his task. She was hisfaithful friend. He loved her almost as if she had been a sister; she had confided in him; only he and she and her little family knew of what was to take place to-day. How strange to think that she would no longer be as she was! The wife of a man she had never seen, of a man whose full name Henley had not even heard.
Just then the still air was stirred by the sportive whippoorwill's call with which the young engineer of that particular train always announced with the locomotive's whistle his approach to Chester, and later there was a sound of escaping steam and the slow clanging of a bell as the train drew up in the shed. Only a moment's pause, and the train was off again.
It occurred to Henley that as his store was on the most direct way to her home Dixie would naturally drive past it on her return, so he went to the front, taking pains to stand back a few feet from the entrance that his position might not appear to be by design. He was glad that Cahews and Pomp were busy in the rear, and he became conscious of the hope that no stray customer would interrupt him at what seemed such a grave and important moment. Time passed, and still old Bob and the ramshackle wagon were not in sight. Henley cautiously ventured to the door, whence he glanced down the street. He saw the wagon. It was now at the door of the post-office, but no one was in it. With his hip-joint loose the animal swayed and sagged against one of the shafts, the reins hanging from his rump to the ground.
"They've stopped to get the mail," Henley said in his tight throat; "they'll be out in a minute. I'll take one peep at 'im, anyway."
But Dixie emerged from the narrow doorway of the little building alone. She was reading a letter, and she groped slowly across the sidewalk to the wagon, where she stood till she had finished it. Even at that distance Henley could see that she was pale, and he fancied thather hand and step were unsteady as she mounted to the spring seat and reached for the reins. Henley receded farther into the store, actuated by a vague intuition that she might not care to be seen, and he was glad that he had not intruded upon her, for, as she drove past the store, she did not glance toward it, but instead looked steadily in the opposite direction.
"The fellow didn't come, and she's had bad news besides," Henley mused, and he now stood in the doorway and looked after the shackly vehicle as it moved slowly away in the beating sunshine. "She's bad hit by something or other," he said, anxiously. "I've never seen her look like that before. Some'n has gone wrong."
He did not see her for three days. On the evening of the third day he was standing at the door of his barn. It was growing dark. The coming night had robed the mountain-peaks in gray, and put them out of sight. Old Wrinkle was singing "How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord!" as he trudged back to the house, swinging his empty swill-pail. The door of Dixie Hart's cottage opened, and in a narrow frame of firelight she stood peering out toward him. Then he saw that she was coming. She moved swiftly, and with a sure step, till she paused at the fence which separated her land from his.
"I've been wanting to see you, Alfred," she said, in a low, changed voice. "I had no excuse to go to the store, and—well, I didn't think that was exactly the place, anyway to—to say what I had to say. You haven't spoke about what I told you to anybody—I know in reason that you haven't, but—"
"I'd cut off my right arm first," he declared, earnestly. "What you said that day was as sacred to me as if it had come from on high and my very salvation depended on it."
"I knew that," she said, softly. "I only said thatto—to sort o' get started. I'm all upset, Alfred; I'll get right after a while, but things are all crooked now. I've had trouble—I reckon a girl might call it that and still have self-respect. I've had heaps of unexpected trouble."
"I was afraid some'n had gone wrong," Henley found himself able to say, "not hearing any more, you see, about—about what you talked of that day."
"I'm going to tell you, and then dismiss it," Dixie said, her pretty lip twitching, the dark curves under her eyes lending sharp contrast to their fathomless lustre. "I had everything ready, and went to meet him, but he didn't come. I went to the post-office and got a letter. He was—was taken sick—so the letter said. He was pretty bad off. In fact, Alfred, the truth is, he's dead; the—the fellow is dead."
Her head was down; she had folded her arms on the top rail of the fence, and she rested her brow on them. He was wondering if she was crying and what there was for him to say, when she suddenly, and quite dry-eyed, looked up and said: "But that must be a secret, too. Nobody knows about it except my home folks, and nobody must. I'd give plumb up if Carrie Wade was to flaunt that in my face and start it going over hill and dale."
"It's too bad," Henley ventured, as nearly upon what he considered consolation as his knowledge of her rather questionable bereavement would justify. "What was his complaint?"
"You mean, what ailded him?" Dixie asked, an incongruous flush battling with the pallor of her face and becoming observable even in the starlight. "Why, you see, Alfred, I didn't get full particulars—a body never can, you know, at a time like that—and in just a letter—but you can depend upon it that it was sudden."
"Maybe it was what they say is so common now," Henley pursued, awkwardly—"heart failure."
"Or weakness of the backbone." He was sure that she smiled impulsively, for she quickly covered her mouth with her hand and lowered her head to the fence again, and for a moment he stood staring at her and wondering if the calamity had caused her to be hysterical. Suddenly she looked up again and said:
"I reckon you think I ought to act different—that I ought to cry and take on—but I can't. You must make what allowance you can. You see, I never saw him in my life, and, well, it was just a wild-goose chase that started in nothing and ended the same way."
"I see," Henley ventured, "but I'm sorry. Death is bad enough, in any case, but to be called away without a minute's notice and on the eve of—"
"Well, you needn't be sorry for me—you needn't waste pity on me," Dixie broke in with irrelevant warmth. "You'll find me doing business at the same old stand, man or no man. If we can just keep this silly caper from getting out I'll be thankful. So far, I've got along by myself, and, outside of wanting to flaunt a husband in Carrie Wade's face, I don't know as I'll be particularly disappointed. I can keep on at the plough and hoe, rain or shine, and—" Her voice had trailed away into indistinctness, and he saw her lower lip quivering. She suddenly turned and hurried away.
He saw her vanish in the lighted doorway, and he stood overwhelmed with blended perplexity and sympathy.
"She's trying to keep a stiff upper lip, but she's hit, and hit hard—harder'n I thought possible in her case," he mused. "She never saw the feller, but she may have had a sort of a idea in her head of what he was like, an' the loss is as keen as if she had knowed him a long time, maybe keener, for the gloss hain't been rubbed off by actual acquaintance, as it has been off of me and most other married folks. I reckon my wife has put the gloss back on Dick Wrinkle, if it was ever off, and I've got arival in the spirit-world that nothing earthly could ever hope to match. They say absence works that way, and when I get to Texas maybe she will look back on all I've done to keep peace and harmony betwixt us and appreciate me more than she is doing now. I say maybe, for, on t'other hand, she may be glad to have me away, and when I get back I may find that her whole heart is in the empty grave she is bent on digging and adorning at such a great outlay."
THE next afternoon, as Henley was on his way home from the store, and was passing a corn-field owned by Sam Pitman—a farmer of weak character and sullen disposition who had been a moonshiner as long as the law had permitted the business to yield profits—he was surprised to see Dixie near the centre of the field. She was bending over something or somebody, and, fearing that an accident had happened, he hastily climbed the fence and walked rapidly over the ploughed soil toward her. He could not make out what the object of her attention was till he was quite near, and then he saw that it was a little boy about ten years of age who was seated on the ground and, till now, hidden by the corn-stalks and their succulent blades, which, as he sat, rose higher than his yellow, ill-kempt head. Dixie heard Henley's step and turned a very grave face on him.
"It's the poor little orphan Sam Pitman adopted by law the other day," she informed him in a gentle aside, as her hand rested tenderly on the child's head, which was supported by his frail knees in their ragged and patched covering. "I've had my eye on him all evening. He's hoed out all this since dinner." She waved an indignant hand over the patch of corn immediately about them. "I couldn't have done more myself, and I know what work is. Yes, I was watching him, and awhile ago I saw him stagger an' fall. He'd fainted fromoverheat. I come as quick as I could. I got water in his hat and dashed it on him—look how wet it made him, but it revived him. He wanted to work on, but I made him stop and set down. He's timid and shy before you, but me 'n him are great friends, ain't we, Joe? He helped me hunt eggs the other day"—she was running on now in a tender, caressing tone—"and I gave him some of my pie. He could crawl to places I never got at before, and we raked in a peck that would have been a dead loss, for I've already got too many broods."
"I heard Pitman had got a boy," Henley said, guardedly, "and I wondered what the Ordinary meant by turning such a little fellow over to a man like him. It seems like there was only one or two applications, and the boy had to be sent somewhere right off. Do you feel better now, Joe?"
"Yes, sir," the child answered. "It wasn't nothing. It didn't hurt a bit."
Henley caught Dixie's quick upward glance. "Ain't it pitiful?" she said, with a shake of her head and a catch in her full voice. "Huh, 'didn't hurt,' I say! You dear little boy!"
With a brave smile the lad stood up to the full height of his spare frame. He was still pale, and his hair was matted down over his brow by the douche it had received. His little, cotton, checked shirt was open at the neck, disclosing a rather low chest. He stooped down and picked up the hoe, which was of the regulation size and weight used by men. Dixie was protesting against his working more that day, when, looking behind her, she saw the foster-father of the boy approaching.
"What's the matter here?" the farmer growled, eying the group distrustfully with his small gray eyes under pent-house brows. He was short of stature, sinewy, and grizzled as to head and bristling beard.
"Miss Dixie says the boy fainted," Henley answered."I saw her here, and come over to see what was wrong. The little fellow don't look overly stout."
"Nothing's the matter with 'im," Pitman retorted, visibly angered by what he regarded as the interference of outsiders in his private affairs.
"Well, I know he fainted," Dixie said, calmly, "but we won't argue about it. I'll tell you one thing, though, Sam Pitman, if this thing goes on—I say, if Joe is overworked like this any more—a single other time—and it comes to my knowledge, I'll take you smack-dab to court. I don't meddle in things that don't concern me, as a general thing, but I'll take this in hand and I'll clutch it tight."
"You'll do wonders," Pitman sneered, but with a guarded glance at Henley, who had, on one occasion, knocked him down in some dispute over a debt at the store. He turned to the boy and took the hoe from him. "You go drive up that cow. I'll finish this patch myself, and don't you dare come back and say you can't find her, nuther. If you know what's good for you, you fetch 'er home."
Leaving Pitman at work in the corn, and with the boy trudging homeward, Henley and Dixie made their way out to the road. At the fence he threw down several rails and aided her to step over the remaining ones. When he had put the rails back in their places and joined her he was struck by the altered expression of her face.
"I've wanted to see you all day," she began, her grave glance on the ground, "and it looks like this meeting is providential. I want to get it all plumb out, Alfred, and have it off my mind. I don't know when a thing has bothered me so much. It seemed like such a little thing at the time, but a whopping big one now. You 'n me have been too good friends, Alfred, to let deception of any sort whatever come between us. Please don't look at me so straight; I'll never get through it if youdo. You think I'm as good as the general run of girls, I'll be bound, and yet I ain't."
"I'll take the risk on that," he laughed, incredulously. "I know what you are—you are true blue. You've just showed the stripe you're made of. In a minute you'd have fought that skunk back there like a mad wildcat. For the time, at least, you was loving that pore boy as if he was your own."
"We are not talking about that—that's nothing," she said. "No woman that is half a one could see the dreamy blue eyes of that lonely boy, and know what he's going through, and not want to hug 'im up to her breast and pet 'im and comfort 'im. I saw him the day Pitman fetched him here. He sat out under the trees all day long. I watched him from my field, and I could see 'im wiping his eyes on his sleeve. He kept it up from morning till night. Sometimes, Alfred, I doubt the goodness of God Almighty. I know it's a sin to say so, but I can't help it. I've talked a heap to Joe off and on, an' he's had more put on 'im than a grown person ought to bear. Poor thing! he misses his Ma. From what he says I judge she was good and tender. I had a queer dream the other night. I seemed to see a woman in my room; she was crying, and, as plain as I can hear yore voice this minute, I heard her say: 'Don't let 'em abuse 'im—he's weak and he can't stand it,' and with that she seemed to melt away. But that is clean off the track. I've got a confession to make to you, and I am so ashamed I hardly know what to do. Alfred Henley, I've told you a lie—a cold, deliberate lie. Can you respect anybody that will tell a lie?"
"Well, I wouldn't have much respect for myself then," he said, his eyes large in wonder over what she was driving at. "I've lied as many times as an average clock can tick in a lifetime. I've told a dozen lies to sell a pair of shoes, and forty to sell a hoss."
"Hush joking," she said. "Listen. When I told you that fellow was dead I was lying. I didn't intend to fool you, but I got in an awful tangle, and you had to take your chance along with the rest. When I went to the train that day and that fool didn't heave in sight I smelt a mouse. I went to the post-office and got a letter from him. It was the most wishy-washy concoction that was ever put on paper. He never, at any time, had marry in the back of his head. He was just seeing how far he could go with me to pass time. Some men are that way. They are powerful interested till they get a girl to commit herself, and then they begin to twist and turn or call it all off on the spot. As long as I kept this 'un in doubt he wrote the softest gush that ever flowed from a pen. But when I wrote that I was ready—actually ready and waiting—well, that was another proposition. He plumb lost his nerve."
"The scoundrel!" Henley burst out, grown red in the face. "He is below contempt. I was afraid he was a sneak the minute I saw his picture. I'd have stopped you if I'd known how."
"Well, it was nobody's fault but mine." Dixie was trying to divest her brave voice of a certain quavering. "Folks say I've got a long head on me—you amongst 'em—but if any God-forsaken female on this round globe ever made a bigger fool of herself than I did that whack I'd like to shake hands with her. I shall see myself setting in that wagon in my new togs waiting for that train to blow—I'll see that sickening sight till I draw my last whiff of air. Oh, you don't know! Being a man, you can't understand what a woman's pride is. Fate has hit me hard licks, but letting me get my outfit ready, clean up the house, and cook enough ahead to last a week, and come to town with my own hoss and wagon to haul a trifling man to the altar who wasjest joking with me—well, that's what made me lie."
"God knows, it was enough," Henley answered in his throat. "The banners toted by the angels have such mottoes as your lie on 'em."
"I was forced to it to protect myself," Dixie said. "You see, Alfred, Ma is kind o' high strung and liable to fly off the handle and talk before folks. She thinks I'm all right, and she'd have raised the roof off the house and let all the country know my plight if I hadn't acted, and acted quick. I drove home slow that day and studied up a plan. Death was the only thing that would do any good, and so I killed him. I liked that part of it, anyway. I wouldn't have lied to you, but I'd done it so often at home, and with such a straight face, that it had got to be a settled habit. But I jumped from the frying-pan into the fire in one way, for they both weep and wail over him—think o' that, and me feeling like I could pull his ears clean out of his head and stomp 'em into the ground."