The Bondboy

George W. Ogden

THE BONDBOY

/>'// (/. II'. Oydcn

Trail's F.n.l

Claim Number One

The Land of ].i\>l Chance

The Ru.-tler of \Viiul River

Tlie Duke of ('.liiinney Unite

The Floekmaster of Poi-uii Creek

CHICAGO

A. C. McCLURG & CO.

1922

Copyright

A. C. McClurg & Co. 1922

Published October, 1922

Copyrighted in Great Britain

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I Delivered Into Bondage 1

II A Dry-Salt Man 21

III The Spark in the Clod 47

IV A Stranger at the Gate 66

V The Secret of the Clover 84

VI Blood 99

VII Deliverance 114

VIII Will He Tell? 126

IX The Scaled Envelope 152

X Let Him Hang 136

XI Peter's Son 171

XII The Sunbeam on the Wall 188

XIII Until the Day Break 210

XIV Deserted 228

XV The State vs. Newbolt 241

XVI "She Cometh Not" He Said 249

XVII The Blow of a Friend 259

XVIII A Name and a Message 276

XIX The Shadow of a Dream 304

XX "The Penalty Is Death!" 311

XXI Ollic Speaks 325

XXII A Summons of the Night 341

XXIII Lest I Forget . 359

2137502

The Bondboy

CHAPTER I

DELIVERED INTO BONDAGE

SARAH NEWBOLT enjoyed in her saturnine, brood ing way the warmth of April sunshine and the stirring greenery of awakening life now beginning to soften the brown austerity of the dead winter earth. Beside her kitchen wall the pink cones of rhubarb were showing, and the fat buds of the lilacs, which clustered coppicelike in her door3'ard, were ready to unlock and flare forth leaves. On the porch with its southern exposure she sat in her low, splint-bottomed rocker, leaning forward, her elbows on her knees.

The sun tickled her shoulders through her linsey dress, and pictured her, grotesquely foreshortened, upon the nail- drawn, warped, and beaten floor. Her hands, nursing her cheeks, chin pivoted in their palms, were large and toil- distorted, great- jointed like a man's, and all the feminine softness with which nature had endowed her seemed to have been overcome by the masculine cast of frame and face which the hardships of her life had developed.

She did not seem, crouched there like an old cat warm ing herself in the first keen fires of spring, conscious of any thing about her ; of the low house, with its battered eaves, the sprawling rail-fence in front of it, out of which the gate was gone, like a tooth ; of the wild bramble of roses, or the generations of honeysuckle which had grown, layer upon

1

The Hondboy

layer — the under stratum all dead and brown — over the decaying arbor which led up to the cracked front door. She did not seem conscious that time and poverty had wasted the beauties of that place; that shingles were gone from the outreaching eaves, torn away bv March winds; that stones had fallen from the chimney, squatting broad-shoul dered at the weathered gable; that panes were missing from the windows, their places supplied by boards and tacked-on cloth, or that pillows crowded into them, making it seem a house that stopped its ears against the unfriendly things which passengers upon the highway might speak of it.

Time and poverty were pressing upon Sarah Newbolt also, relaxing there that bright hour in the sun, straying away from her troubles and her vexations like an autumn butterrlv among the golden leaves, unmindful of the frost which soon must cut short its day. For, poor as she was in all that governments put imposts upon, and men list in tax returns and carry to steel vaults to hoard away, Sarah Newbolt had her dreams. She had no golden past; there was no golden future ready before her feet. There was no review for her in those visions of happy davs and tender memories, over which a woman half closes her eyes and smiles, or over the incense of which a man's heart softens. Behind her stretched a wake of turbulence and strife; ahead of her lay the banked clouds of an unsettled and insecure future.

But she had her dreams, in which even the poorest of us may indulge when our taskmaster in the great brick works of this hot and heavy world is not hard by and press ing us forward with his lash. She had her dreams of what never was and never could be ; of old longings, old heart- hungers, old hopes, and loves which never had corne near for one moment's caress of her toil-hardened hand. Dreams which roved the world and soothed the ache in her heart by their very extravagance, which even her frugal conscience

Delivered Into Bondage

could not chide ; dreams which drew hot tears upon her cheeks, to trickle down among her knotted fingers and tinc ture the bitterness of things unrealized.

The crunch of wheels in the road now startled her from her profitless excursions among the mist of visions and dreams. She lifted her head like a cow startled from her peaceful grazing, for the vehicle had stopped at the gap in the fence where the gate should have stood warder be tween its leaning posts.

" Well, he's come," said she with the resignation of one who finds the long expected and dreaded at hand.

A man got out of the buggy and hitched his horse to one of the old gate-posts, first trying it to satisfy himself that it was trustworthy, for stability in even a post on those premises, where everything was going to decay, seemed un reasonable to expect. He turned up the path, bordered by blue flags, thrusting their swordpoints through the ground, and strode toward the house, with that uncouth giving at the knees which marks a man who long has followed the plow across furrowed fields.

The visitor was tall and bony, brown, dry-faced, and frowning of aspect. There was severity in every line of his long, loose body; in the hard wrinkles of his forehead, in his ill-nurtured gray beard, which was so harsh that it rasped like wire upon his coat as he turned his head in quick appraisement of his surroundings. His feet were bunion- distorted and lumpy in his great coarse shoes ; coarse black hair grew down upon his broad, thick-jointed hands; a thicket of eyebrows presented, like a chevaux-de-frise, bris tling when he drew them down in his peering squint.

Sarah Newbolt rose to meet him, tall in the vigor of her pioneer stock. In her face there was a malarial smokiness of color, although it still held a trace of a past brightness, and her meagcrness of feature gave her mouth a set of de-

The Rondboi/

termination which stood like a false index at the beginning of a book or a misleading sign upon a door. Her eves were Mack, her brows small and delicate. Back from her narrow forehead she had drawn her plentiful dark hair in rigid unloveliness ; over it she wore a knitted shawl.

"Well, Mr. Chase, you've come to put us out, I reckon?" said she, a little tremor in her chin, although her voice was steady and her eyes met his with an appeal which lay too near the soul for words.

Isom Chase drew up to the steps and placed one knotted foot upon them, standing thus in silence a little while, as if thinking it over. The dust of the highroad was on his broad black hat, and gray upon his grizzly beard. In the attitude of his lean frame, in the posture of his foot upon the step, he seemed to be asserting a mastery over the place which he had invaded to the sad dispersion of Sarah Xew- bolt's dreams.

4% I hate to do it," he declared, speaking hurriedly, as if he held words but frail vehicles in a world where deeds counted with so much greater weight, "but I've been easy on vou, ma'am ; no man can say that I haven't been easy."

''I know vour monev's long past due," she sighed, "but if vou was to give Joe another chance, Mr. Chase, we could pav you off in time."

"Oh, another chance, another chance!" said he im patiently. "What could you do with all the chances in the world, you and him — what did your husband ever do with his chances? lie had as many of 'em as I ever did, and what did he ever do but scheme away his time on fool things that didn't pan out when he ought 'a' been in the field! Xo, you and Joe couldn't pay back that loan, ma'am, not if I was to give you forty years to do it in."

"Well, maybe not," said she, drawing a sigh from the well of her sad old heart.

Delivered Into Bondage

" The interest ain't been paid since Peter died, and that's more than two years now," said Chase. " I can't sleep on mv rights that way, ma'am ; I've got to foreclose to save myself."

" Yes, you've been easy, even if we did give you up our last cow on that there inter-est," she allowed. " You've been as kind and easy over it, I reckon, Mr. Chase, as a body could be. Well, I reckon me and Joe we'll have to leave the old place now."

" Lord knows, I don't see what there is to stay for ! " said Chase feelingly, sweeping his eyes around the wired-up, gone- to-the-devil-looking place.

" When a body's bore children in a place," she said earnestly, " and nusscd 'em, and seen 'em fade away and die ; and when a body's lived in a house for upward of forty years, and thought things in it, and everything —

" Bosh ! " said Isom Chase, kicking the rotting step.

" I know it's all shacklety now," said she apologetically, " but it's home to me and Joe ! "

Her voice trembled over the words, and she wiped her eyes with the corner of her head-shawl ; but her face re mained as immobile as features cast in metal. When one has wept out of the heart for years, as Sarah Newbolt had wept, the face is no longer a barometer over the tempests of the soul.

Isom Chase was silent. He stood as if reflecting his com ing words, trying the loose boards of the siding with his blunt thumb.

" Peter and I, we came here from Kentucky," said she, looking at him with a sidelong appeal, as if for permission to speak the profitless sentiments of her heart, " and people was scarce in this part of Missouri then. I rode all the way a-horseback, and I came here, to this very house, a bride."

6 The Bondboy

"I didn't take a mortgage on sentiment — I took it on the land," said Chase, out of humor with this reminiscent history.

" You can't understand how I feel, Mr. Chase," said she, dropping her arms at her sides hopelessly. "Peter — he planted them laylocks and them roses."

"Better 'a' planted corn — and tended to it!" grunted Chase. "Well, you can gruh 'em all up and take 'em away with you, if you want 'em. They don't pay interest — I suppose you've found that out."

" Not on money," said she, reaching out her hand toward a giant lilac with a caressing, tender air.

" Sit down," said he in voice of command, planting him self upon the porch, his hack against a post, " and let's you and I have a little talk. Where do you expect to go when you leave here; what plans have you got for the future? "

" Lord, there's not a clap-hoard in this world that I can poke my head under and lay claim to its shelter!" said she, sitting again in her low rocker, shaking her head sadly.

" Your hoy Joe, he'll not he ahle to command man's wages for three or four years vet," said Chase, studying her averted face as if to take possession of even her thoughts. " He'll not be ahle to do much toward supportin' you, even if he could light on to a steady, all-the-year job, which he can't, the way times is."

" No, I don't reckon he could," said she.

"And if I was to let you two stay on here I wouldn't be any nearer lx>in' paid back that four hundred dollar loan in two or three years than I am now. It's nearly five hundred now, with the interest pilin' up, and it'll be a thou sand before you know it. It'd take that boy a lifetime to pay it off."

" Peter failed," she nodded ; " it was a burden on him that

Delivered Into Bondage

hackled him to the grave. Yes, I reckon you're right. But there's no tellin' how Joe he'll turn out, Mr. Chase. He may turn out to be a better manager than his pap was."

"How old is he?" asked Chase.

" Most nineteen," said she, some kind of a faraway hope, indefinable and hazy, lifting the cloud of depression which had fallen over her, " and he's uncommon big and stout for his age. Maybe if you'd give Joe work he could pay it off, interest and all, by the time he's twenty-one."

"Not much need for him," said Chase, shaking his head, "but I might — well, I might figure around so I could take him over, on certain conditions, you understand? It all de pends on your plans. If you haven't anywhere to go when you leave this house, you're bound to land on the county."

"Don't tell me that, Mr. Chase — don't tell me that!" she begged, pressing her battered hands to her eyes, rocking and moaning in her chair.

" What's the use of puttin' the truth back of you when you're bound to come face up to it in the end?" he asked. " I was talkin' to Judge Little, of the county court, about you this morning. I told him I'd have to foreclose and take possession of this forty to save myself.

" ' It'll throw her and that boy on the county,' he says. * Yes, I reckon it will,' I told him, * but no man can say I've been hard on 'em.' '

" Oh, you wouldn't throw me on the county at the end of my days, Mr. Chase!" she appealed. "Joe he'll take care of me, if you'll only give him a chance — if you'll only give him a chance, Mr. Chase ! "

" I meant to take that up with you," said he, " on the conditions I spoke of a minute ago."

He turned to her, as if for her consent to give expression to his mysterious terms. She nodded, and he went on:

" In the winter time, ma'am, to tell you the plain truth,

8 The Bondboy

Joe wouldn't be worth wages to me, and in the summer not very much. A boy that si/c and age eats his head oil', you might sav.

" But I'll make YOU this offer, out of consideration of my friendship for Peter, and your attachment for the old place, and all of that shift': I'll take Joe over, under writ ing, till lie's twenty-one, at ten dollars a month and all found, winter and summer through, and allow you to stay right on here in the house, with a couple of acres for your chickens and garden patch and your posies and all the things you set store on and pri/c. I'll do this for you. Missis Xewbolt, but I wouldn't do it for any other human being alive."

She turned slowly to him, an expression of mingled amaze ment and fear on her face.

'"You mean that you want me to bind Joe out to you till he's his own man?" said she.

"Well, some call it by that name," nodded Chase, "but it's

nothing more than any apprenticeship to any trade, except

— oh, well, there ain't no difference, except that there's few

trades that equal the one the boy '11 learn under me, ma'am."

"You're askin' me to bind my little son — my only child left to me of all that I bore — you want me to bind him out to you like a nigger slave!"

Her voice fell away to a whisper, unable to bear the horror that grew into her words.

"Better boys than him have been bound out in this neigh borhood!" said Chase sharply. "If you don't want to do it, don't do it. That's all I've got to say. If you'd rather go to the poorhousc than sec your son in steady and honorable employment, in a good home, and learning a business under a man that's made some success of it, that's your lookout, not mine. But that's where you'll land the minute you set your foot out in that road. Then the county court'll take your boy and bind him out to somebody, and you'll have no

Delivered Into Bondage 9

word to say in the matter, at all. But you can suit yourself."

"It — kind of — shook me," she muttered, the mother- love, the honor and justice in her quailing heart shrinking back before the threat of that terrible disgrace — the poor- house.

The shadow of the poorhouse had stood in her way for years. It had been the fear of Peter when he was there, and his last word was one of thankfulness to the Almighty that he had been permitted to die in a freeman's bed, under his own humble roof. That consolation was to be denied her ; the shadow of the poorhouse had advanced until it stood now at her door. One step and it would envelop her ; the taint of its blight would wither her heart.

Sarah Newbolt had inherited that dread of publicly con fessed poverty and dependence. It had come down to her through a long line of pioneer forebears who feared neither hardship, strife nor death, so that it might come to them without a master and under the free sky. Only the dis graced, the disowned, the failures, and the broken-minded made an end in the poorhouse in those vigorous days. It was a disgrace from which a family never could hope to rise again. There, on the old farm with Peter she had been poor, as poor as the poorest, but thev had been free to come and go.

" I know I've got the name of being a hard man and a money-grabber and a driver," said Chase with crabbed bit terness, "but Avho is it that gives that reputation to me? People that can't beat me and take advantage of me and work money out of me by their rascally schemes ! I'm not a hard man by nature — my actions with you prove that, don't they?"

" You've been as kind as a body could expect," she an swered. " It's only right that you should have your money back, and it ain't been your fault that we couldn't raise it. But we've done the best we could."

10 The Bondboy

"And that best only led you up to the poorhouse door," said he. " I'm offering you a way to escape it, and spend the rest of your days in the place you're attached to, but I don't seem to get any thanks for it."

"I am thankful to you for your offer- — from the bottom of my heart I'm thankful, Mr. Chase," she hastened to declare.

"Well, neither of us knows how Joe's going to turn out," said he. " Under my training he might develop into a good, sober farmer, one that knows his business and can make it pay. If he does, I promise you I'll give him a chance on this place to redeem it. I'll put him on it to farm on shares when he fills out his time under me, my share of the crops to apply to the debt. Would that be fair?"

"Nobody in this world couldn't say it wasn't generous and fair of you, and noble and kind, Mr. Chase," she declared, her face showing a little color, the courage coming back into her eyes.

''Then you'd better take up my offer without any mure foolishness," he advised.

" I'll have to talk it over with Joe," said she.

"He's got nothing to do with it, I tell you," protested Chase, brushing that phase of it aside with a sweep of his hairy hand. "You, and you alone, are responsible for him till he's twenty-one, and it's your duty to keep him ofT the county and away from the disgrace of pauperism, and your self as well."

" I ought to sec Joe about it first, Mr. Chase, I ought to talk it over with him. Let me think a minute."

She settled down to her pensive attitude, elbows on knees, chin in hands, and looked over the homely scene of riotous shrubbery, racked buildings, leaning well-curb, rotting fences. In one swift, painful moment she pictured what that spot would be after Lsom Chase had taken possession.

Delivered Into Bondage 11

He would uproot the lilacs ; he would level the house and the chimney, stone by stone ; he would fill up the well and pull down the old barn that Peter built, and drive his plow over the hearthstone where she had suckled her babies in the years of her youth and hope. He would obliterate the land marks of her bridal days, and sow his grain in the spot where Peter, fresh in the strong heat of youth, had anchored their ambitions.

It was not so much for what it had been that her heart was tender to it, for the years had been heavy there and toilsome, disappointing and full of pain ; not so much for what it had been, indeed, as what she and young Peter, with the thick black hair upon his brow, had planned to make it. It was for the romance unlived, the hope unrealized, that it was dear. And then again it was poor and pitiful, wind-shaken and old, but it was home. The thought of the desolation that waited it in the dread future struck her breast like the pangs of bereavement. Tears coursed down her face ; sobs rose in her aching throat.

.Joe, she thought, would do that much for her and the old home place ; it would be but a little more than two years of sacrifice for him, at the most, with the bright hope of inde pendence and redemption at the end. Being bound out would not be so disgraceful as going to the poorhouse. Joe would do it for her, she was sure of that. But it would be better to wait until evening and ask him.

"Joe, he'll be along home from his work about dusk," said she, " and we could let you know tomorrow."

" Tomorrow," said Isom Chase, rising stiffly, " I'll have to send the sheriff here with the papers. Tomorrow, ma'am, will be too late."

That dreadful picture swept across her inner vision once more — the chimney down, the house gone. She saw corn growing over the spot where she sat that moment ; she remem-

1-2 The

bored that Isoin Chase had plowed up a burying-ground once and sec'ded it to timothy.

''What will I have to do to bind Joe over to you?" she asked, facing him in sudden resolution.

"We'll git in the buggy," said he, with new friendliness, seeing that he had won, ''and drive over to Judge Little's. lie can make out the papers in a few minutes, and I'll pay you a month's wages in advance. That will fix you up for groceries and garden seeds and everything, and you'll be as snug and happy as any woman in the county."

In less than two hours the transaction was completed, and Sarah \ewbolt was back again in the home upon which she had secured her slipping tenure at the sacrifice of her son's liberty. As she began "stirring the pots for supper," as she called it, she also had time to stir the deep waters of reflection.

She had secured herself from the threat of the county farm, and Joe had been the price; Joe, her last-born, the sole remaining one of the six who had come to her and gone on again into the mists.

She began to fear in her heart when she stood off and viewed the result of her desperate panic, the pangs of which Isom Chase had adroitly magnified. If Joe could work for Isom Chase and thus keep her from the poorliouse, could lie not have worked for another, free to come and go as he liked, and with the same security for her?

Chase said that he had not taken a mortgage on sentiment, but be bad made capital out of it in the end, trading upon her affection for the old home and its years-long associations. As the gloomy evening deepened and she stood in the door watching for her son's return, she saw through the scheme of Isom Chase. She never would have been thrown on the countv with Joe to depend on; the question of his ability to support both of them admitted of no debate.

Delivered Into Bondage 13

Joe's industry spoke for that, and that was Isom Chase's reason for wanting him. Isom wanted him because he was strong and trustworthy, honest and faithful. And she had bargained him in selfishness and sold him in cowardice, with out a word from him, as she might have sold a cow to pay a pressing debt.

The bargain was binding. Judge Little had pressed that understanding of it upon her. It was as irrevocable as a deed signed and sealed. Joe could not break it ; she could not set it aside. Isom Chase was empowered with all the authority of absolute master.

" If he does anything that deserves thrashing for, I've got a right to thrash him, do }rou understand that?" Isom had said as he stood there in the presence of Judge Little, button ing his coat over the document which transferred Joe's serv ices to him.

Her heart had contracted at the words, for the cruelty of Isom Chase was notorious. A bound boy had died in his service not many years before, kicked by a mule, it was said. There had been mutterings at that time, and talk of an investigation, which never came to a head because the bound lad was nobody, taken out of the county home. But the fear in the widow's heart that moment was not for her son ; it was for Isom Chase.

" Lord 'a' mercy, Mr. Chase, you mustn't never strike Joe ! " she warned. " You don't know what kind of a boy he is, Mr. Chase. I'm afraid he might up and hurt you maybe, if you ever done that."

"' I'll handle him in my own way," with portentous signifi cance ; " but I want }Tou to understand my rights fully at the start."

"Yes, sir," she answered meekly.

Joe was coming now, pitchfork over his shoulder, from the field where he had been burning corn-stalks, making ready

14 The Bondboy

for the plow. She hastened to set out a basin of water on the bench beside the kitchen door, and turned then into the room to light the lamp and place it on the waiting table.

Joe appeared at the door, drying his hands on the dangling towel. He was a tall, gaunt-faced boy, big-boned, raw- jointed, the framework for prodigious strength. His shoulders all but filled the narrow doorway, his crown came within an inch of its lintel. His face was glowing from the scrubbing which he had given it with home-made lye soap, his drenched hair fell in heavy locks down his deep forehead.

"Well, Mother, what's happened?" he asked, noting her uneasiness as she sat waiting him at the table, the steaming coffee-pot at her hand.

" Sit down and start your supper, son, and we'll talk as we go along," said she.

Joe gave his hair a "lick and a promise" with the comb, and took his place at the table. Mrs. Xewbolt bent her head and pronounced the thanksgiving which that humble board never lacked, and she drew it out to an amazing and uncom fortable length that evening, as Joe's impatient stomach could bear clamorous witness.

Sarah Newbolt had a wide fame as a religious woman, and a woman who could get more hell-fire into her belief and more melancholy pleasure out of it than any hard-shell preacher in the land. It was a doleful religion, with little promise or hope in it, and a great deal of blood and suffering between the world and its doubtful reward; but Sarah Xew bolt lived according to its stern inflexibility, and sang its sorrowful hymns by day, as she moved about the house, in a voice that carried a mile. But for all the grimncss in her creed, there was not a being alive with a softer heart. She would have divided her last square of corn-bread with the wayfarer at her door, without question of his worth or unworthiness, his dissension, or his faith.

Delivered Into Bondage 15

" Mr. Chase was here this afternoon, Joe," said she as the lad began his supper.

"Well, I suppose he's going to put us out?"

Joe paused in the mixing of gravy and corn-bread — designed to be conveyed to his mouth on the blade of his knife — and lifted inquiring eyes to his mother's troubled face.

" No, son ; we fixed it up," said she.

"You fixed it up?" he repeated, his eyes beaming with pleasure. "Is he going to give us another chance?"

" You go on and eat your supper, Joe ; we'll talk it over when you're through. Lands, you must be tired and hungry after workin' so hard all afternoon ! "

He was too hungry, perhaps, to be greatly troubled by her air of uneasiness and distraction. He bent over his plate, not noting that she sipped her coffee with a spoon, touching no food. At last he pushed back with a sigh of repletion, and smiled across at his mother.

"So you fixed it up with him?"

" Yes, I went into a dishonorable deal with Isom Chase," said she, "and I don't know what you'll say when you hear what's to be told to 3Tou, Joe."

"What do you mean by 'dishonorable deal'?" he asked, his face growing white.

" I don't know what you'll say, Joe, I don't know what you'll say ! " moaned she, shaking her head sorrowfully.

" Well, Mother, I can't make out what you mean," said he, baffled and mvstified by her strange behavior.

"Wait — I'll show you>

She rose from the table and reached down a folded paper from among the soda packages and tins on the shelf. Saying no more, she handed it to him. Joe took it, wonder in his face, spread his elbows, and unfolded the document with its notarial seal.

Joe was ready at printed matter. He read fast and under-

W The llondboi/

standingly, and his face grew paler as his eyes ran on from line to line. When he came to the end, where his mother's wavering signature stood above that of Isom Chase, his head dropped a little lower, his hands lay listlessly, as if paralyzed, on the paper under his eves. A sudden dejection seemed to settle over him, blighting his youth and buoyancy.

Mrs. Xewbolt was making out to be busy over the stove. She lifted the lid of the kettle, and put it down with a clatter; she opened the stove and rammed the fire with need less severity with the poker, and it snapped back at her, shooting sparks against her hand.

"Mother, you've bound me out!" said he, his voice un steady in its accusing note.

She looked at him, her hands starting out in a little move ment of appeal. He turned from the table and sat very straight and stern in his chair, his gaunt face hollowed in shadows, his wild hair falling across his brow.

" Oh, I sold you ! I sold you ! " she wailed.

She sat again in her place at the table, spiritless and afraid, her hands limp in her lap.

" You've bound me out ! " Joe repeated harshly, his voice rasping in his throat.

" I never meant to do it, Joe," she pleaded in weak defense; " but Isom, he said nothing else would save us from the county farm. I wanted to wait and ask you, Joe, and I told him I wanted to ask you. but he said it would be too late!"

"Yes. What else did he sav?" asked Joe, his hands clenched, his eyes peering straight ahead at the wall.

She related the circumstances of Chase's visit, his threat of eviction, his declaration that she would become a county charge the moment that she set foot in the road.

"The old liar!" said Joe.

There seemed to be nothing more for her to say. She could make no defense of an act which stood before her in

Delivered Into Bondage 17

all its ugly selfishness. Joe sat still, staring at the wall beyond the stove ; she crouched forward in her chair, as if to shrink out of his sight.

Between them the little glass lamp stood, a droning, slow- winged brown beetle blundering against its chimney. Outside, the distant chant of newly wakened frogs sounded ; through the open door the warm air of the April night came straying, bearing the incense of the fields and woodlands, where fires smoldered like sleepers sending forth their dreams.

His silence was to her the heaviest rebuke that he could have administered. Her remorse gathered under it, her con trition broke its bounds.

" Oh, I sold you, my own flesh and blood ! " she cried, springing to her feet, lifting her long arms above her head.

" You knew what he was, Mother ; you knew what it meant to be bound out to him for two long years and more. It wasn't as if you didn't know."

" I knew, I knew ! But I done it, son, I done it ! And I done it to save my own mis'able self. I ain't got no excuse, Joe, I ain't got no excuse at all."

" Well, Mother, you'll be safe here, anyhow, and I can stand it," said Joe, brightening a little, the tense severity of his face softening. "Never mind; I can stand it, I guess."

" I'll never let you go to him — I didn't mean to do it — it wasn't fair the way he drove me into it ! " said she.

She laid her hand, almost timidly, on her son's shoulder, and looked into his face. " I know you could take care of me and keep off of the county, even if Isom did put us out like he said he'd do, but I went and done it, anyhow. Isom led me into it, Joe; he wasn't fair."

" Yes, and you bound me out for about half what I'm worth to any man and could demand for my services any where, Mother," said Joe, the bitterness which lie had fought down but a moment past surging up in him again.

18 The Bomlboy

" Lord forgive me ! " she supplicated piteously. She turned suddenly to the table and snatched the paper. " It wasn't fair — he fooled me into it!" she repeated. ''I'll tear it up, I'll burn it, and we'll leave this place and let him have it, and he can go on and do whatever he wants to with it — tear it down, burn it, knock it to pieces — for any thing I care now ! "

Joe restrained her as she went toward the stove, the document in her hand.

''Wait, Mother; it's a bargain. We're bound in honor to it, we can't back down now."

"I'll never let you do it!" she declared, her voice rising beyond her control. "I'll walk the roads and beg my bread first ! I'll hoe in the fields, I'll wash folks' clothes for 'em like a nigger slave, I'll lay down mv life, Joe, before I let you go into that murdcrin' man's hands!"

lie took the paper from her hands gently.

" I've been thinking it over, Mother," said he, " and it might be worse — it might be a good deal worse. It gives me steady work, for one thing, and you can save most of my wage's, counting on the eggs you'll sell, and the few tur keys and things. After a while you can get a cow and make butter, and we'll be better olT, all around. We couldn't get out of it, anyway, Mother. He's paid you money, and you've signed your name to the contract along with Isoin. If we were to pull out and leave here, Isom could send the sheriff after me and bring me back, I guess. Even if lie couldn't do that, he could sue vou. Mother, and make no end of trouble. But we wouldn't leave if we could. It wouldn't be quite honorable, or like Xewbolts at all, to break our contract that way."

"But he'll drive you to the grave, Joe!"

A slow smile spread over his face. " I don't think Isom would find me a good driving horse," said he.

Delivered Into Bondage 19

" He said if you done well," she told him, brightening as she clutched at that small stay of justification, "he'd let you work this place on shares till you paid off the loan. That was one reason "

" Of course," said Joe, a cheerfulness in his voice which his pale cheeks did not sustain, " that was one thing I had in mind when I spoke. It'll all come out right. You've done the wisest thing there was to be done, Mother, and I'll fulfill your agreement to the last day."

" You're a brave boy, Joe ; you're a credit to the memory of your pap," said she.

" I'll go over to Isom's early in the morning," said Joe, quite sprightly, as if the arrangement had indeed solved all their troubles. He stretched his arms with a prodigious yawn. " You don't need to bother about getting up and fixing breakfast for me, for I'll get some over there."

" I hope he'll give you enough," said she.

" Don't you worry over me," he counseled kindly, " for I'll be all right at Isom's. Sunday I'll come home and see you. Now, you take a good sleep in the morning and don't bother."

" I'll be up before you leave," said she, her e}'es over flowing with tears. " Do you reckon I could lie and sleep and slumber when my last and only livin' one's goin' away to become a servant in the house of bondage? And I sold you to it, Joe, my own flesh and blood ! "

There had been little tenderness between them all their days, for in such lives of striving, poverty too often starves affection until it quits the board. But there was a certain nobility of loyalty which outlived the narrowness of their lot, and certain traditions of chivalry in the Newbolt heritage which now guided Joe's hand to his mother's head as she sat weeping and moaning with her arms flung upon the disordered table.

20 The Bondbo?/

"It'll bo all right, Mother," he cheered her, "and the time will soon pass away. What are two years to me? Not much more than a month or two to an old man like Isom. I tell YOU, this plan's the finest thing in the world for vou and me, Mother — don't you grieve over it that way.'"

She was feeling the comfort of his cheerfulness when he left her to go to bed, although she was sore in conscience and spirit, sore in mind and heart.

" The Lord never gave any woman a son like him," said she as the sound of Joe's steps fell quiet overhead, " and I've sold him into slavery and bondage, just to save my own unworthy, coward'y, sncakiii' self ! "

CHAPTER II

A DRY-SALT MAN

JOE was afoot earty. His mother came to the place in the fence where the gate once stood to give him a last word of comfort, and to bewail again her selfishness in sending him away to serve as bondboy under the hard hand of Isom Chase. Joe cheered her with hopeful pic tures of the future, when the old home should be redeemed and the long-dwelling shadow of their debt to Isom cleared away and paid. From the rise in the road which gave him the last sight of the house Joe looked back and saw her with her head bowed to the topmost rail of the fence, a figure of dejection and woe in the security which she had purchased for herself at such a heavy price.

Although Joe moved briskly along his way, his feet as light as if they carried him to some destination of certain felicity, there was a cloud upon his heart. This arrange ment which his mother had made in an hour of panic had disordered his plans and troubled the bright waters of his dreams. Plans and dreams were all his riches. They were

•/

the sole patrimony of value handed down from Peter New- bolt, the Kentucky gentleman, who had married below his state and carried his young mountain wife away to the Missouri woods to escape the censure of family and criti cism of friends.

That was the only legacy, indeed, that Joe was conscious of, but everybody else was aware that old Peter had left him something even more dangerous than dreams. That was nothing less than a bridling, high-minded, hot-blooded pride — a thing laughable, the neighbors said, in one so bitterly and hopelessly poor.

21

22 Tlic Bondboy

" Tlic pore folks," the neighbors called the Ncwbolts in speaking of them one to another, for in that community of fairly prosperous people there was none so poor as they. The neighbors had magnified their misfortune into a re proach, and the "pore folks" was a term in which they found much to compensate their small souls for the slights which old IYtt.T, in his conscious superiority, unwittingly put upon them.

To the end of his days Peter never had been wise enough to forget that nature had endowed him, in many ways, above the le el of the world to which Fate had chained his feet, and his neighbors never had been kind enough to forget that he was poor.

Even after Peter was dead Joe suffered for the family pride. He was still spoken of, far and near in that com munity, as the "pore folks's boy." Those who could not rise to his lofty level despised him because he respected the gerund, and also said iccrc where they said teas, and there arc, where usage made it they is. It was old Peter's big-headedness and pride, they said. What business had the pore folks's boy with the speech of a school-teacher or minister in his mouth? His "coming" and his "going," indeed! Huh, it made 'em sick.

Joe had lived a lonely, isolated life on account of the family poverty and pride. He was as sensitive as a poet to the booiish brutality, and his poor, unlettered, garrulous mother made it worse for him by her boasting of his parts. She never failed to let it be known that he had read the Bible through, "from back to back," and the Cottage Encyclopedia, and the Imitation of Christ, the three books in the Xewbolt library.

People had stood by and watched Peter Xewbolt at his schemes and dreams for many a year, and all the time they had seen him growing poorer and poorer, and marveled that

A Dry-salt Man 23

he never appeared to realize it himself. Just as a great many men spend their lives following the delusion that they can paint or write, and waste their energies and resources on that false and destructive idea, Peter had held the dream that he was singled out to revolutionize industry by his inventions.

He had invented a self-winding clock which, outside his own shop and in the hands of another, would not wind; a self-binding reaper that, in his neighbor's field, would not perform its part ; and a lamp that was designed to manu facture the gas that it burned from the water in its bowl, but which dismally and ignobly failed. He had contrived and patented a machine for milking cows, which might have done all that was claimed for it if anybody — cows included — could have been induced to give it a trial, and he had fiddled around with perpetual motion until the place was a litter of broken springs and rusty wheels.

Nothing had come of all this pother but rustic enter tainment, although he demonstrated the truth of his calcula tions by geometry, and applied Greek names to the things which he had done and hoped to do. All this had eaten up his energies, and his fields had gone but half tilled. Perhaps back of all Peter's futile strivings there had lain the germ of some useful thing which, if properly directed, might have grown into the fortune of his dreams. But he had plodded in small ways, and had died at last, in debt and hopeless, leaving nothing but a name of reproach which lived after him, and even hung upon his son that cool April morning as he went forward to assume the penance that his mother's act had set for him to bear.

And the future was clouded to Joe Newbolt now, like a window-pane with frost upon it, where all had been so clear in his calculations but a day before. In his heart he feared the ordeal for Isom Chase was a man of evil repute.

24 The liondboi/

Long ago Chase's first wife had died, without issue, cursed to her grave because she had borne him no sons to labor in his fields. Lately he had married another, a woman of twenty, although he was well along the road to sixty-five himself. His second wife was a stranger in that community, the daughter of a farmer named Harrison, who dwelt beyond the county-seat.

Chase's homestead was a place pleasant enough for the abode of happiness, in spite of its grim history and sordid reputation. The mark of thrift was about it, orchards bloomed upon its fair slopes, its hedges graced the high ways like cool, green walls, not a leaf in excess upon them, not a protruding bramble. How Isom Chase got all the work done was a matter of unceasing wonder, for nothing tumbled to ruin there, nothing went to waste. The secret of it was, perhaps, that when Chase did hire a man he got three times as much work out of him as a laborer ordinarily performed.

There were stories abroad that Chase was as hard and cruel to his young wife as he had been to his old, but there was no better warrant for them than his general reputation. It was the custom in those days for a woman to suffer greater indignities and cruelties than now without public complaint. There never had been a separation of man and wife in that community, there never had been a suit for divorce. Doubtless there were as many unhappy women to the square mile there as in other places, but custom ruled that they must conceal their sorrows in their breasts.

To all of these things concerning Isom Chase, Joe New- bolt was no stranger. He knew, very well indeed, the life that lay ahead of him as the bondboy of that old man as he went forward along the dew-moist road that morning.

Karlv as it was, Isom Chase had been out of bed two hours or more when Joe arrived. The scents of frying food

A Dry-salt Man 25

came out of the kitchen, and Isom himself was making a splash in a basin of water — one thing that he could afford to be liberal with three times a day — on the porch near the open door.

Joe had walked three miles, the consuming fires of his growing body were demanding food. The odors of break fast struck him with keen relish as he waited at the steps of the porch, unseen by Isom Chase, Avho had lifted his face from the basin with much snorting, and was now drying it on a coarse brown towel.

" Oh, you're here," said he, seeing Joe as he turned to hang up the towel. "Well, come on in and eat your break fast. We ought to 'a' been in the field nearly an hour ago."

Hungry as he was, Joe did not advance to accept the invitation, which was not warmed by hospitality, indeed, but sounded rather like a command. He stood where he had stopped, and pushed his flap-brimmed hat back from his forehead, in nervous movement of decision. Chase turned, half-way to the door, looking back at his bound boy with impatience.

" No need for you to be bashful. This is home for a good while to come," said he.

" I'm not so very bashful," Joe disclaimed, placing the little roll which contained his one extra shirt on the wash- bench near the door, taking off his hat, then, and standing serious and solemn before his new master.

" Well, I don't want to stand here waitin' on you and dribble away the day, for I've got work to do!" said Isom sourly.

" Yes, sir," said Joe, yielding the point respectfully, but standing his ground; "but before I go across your door step, and sit at your table and break bread with you, I want you to understand my position in this matter."

26 The Roudboy

"It's all settled between your mother and me," said Chase impatiently, drawing down his bayoneted eyebrows in a frown, " there's no understanding to come to between me and you — you've got nothing to say in the transaction. You're bound out to me for two years and three months at ten dollars a month and all found, and that settles it."

" Xo, it don't settle it," said Joe with rising heat ; " it only begins it. Before I put a bite in mv mouth in this house, or set my hand to any work on this place, I'm going to lay down the law to you, Mr. Chase, and you're going to listen to it, too!"

"Now, Joe, you've got too much sense to try to stir up a row and rouse hard feelin's between us at the start," said Isom, coining forward with his soft-soap of flattery and crafty conciliation.

" If I hadn't 'a' known that you was the smartest boy of vour age anywhere around here, do you suppose I'd have taken you in this way?"

'• You scared mother into it ; you didn't give me a chance to sav anything, and you took an underhanded hold," charged Joe, his voice trembling with scarce-controlled anger. " It wasn't right, Isom, it wasn't fair. You know I could hire out any day for more than ten dollars a month, and you know I'd never let mother go on the county as long as I was able to lift a hand."

"Winter and summer through, Joe — -you must consider that," argued Isom, giving his head a twist which was meant to be illustrative of deep wisdom.

*' You knew she was afraid of being thrown on the county," said Joe, "you sneaked in when I wasn't around and scared her up so she'd do most anything."

"Well, you don't need to talk so loud," cautioned Isom, turning an uneasv, cross look toward the door, from which the sound of a light step iled.

A Dry-salt Man 27

" I'll talk loud enough for you to hear me, and under stand what I mean," said Joe. " I could run off and leave you, Isom, if I wanted to, but that's not my way. Mother made the bargain, I intend to live up to it, and let her have what little benefit there is to be got out of it. But I want you to know what I think of you at the start, and the way I feel about it. I'm here to work for mother, and keep that old roof over her head that's dearer to her than life, but I'm not your slave nor your servant in any sense of the word."

" It's all the same to mo," said Isom, dropping his sham front of placation, lifting his finger to accent his words, "but you'll work, understand that — you'll rc'or/i/"

" Mother told me," said Joe not in. the least disturbed by this glimpse of Isom in his true guise, "that you had that notion in your mind, Isom. She said you told her you could thrash me if you wanted to do it, but I want to tell you —

•'It's the law," cut in Isom. "I can do it if I sec fit."

"Well, don't ever try it," said Joe. drawing a long breath. " That was the main thing I wanted to say to you, Isom — don't ever try that ! "

i; I never intended to take a swingle-tree to you, Joe," said Isom, forcing his dry face into a grin. " I don't see that there ever need be any big differences between me and you. You do what's right by me and I'll do the same by you."

Isom spoke with lowered voice, a turning of the eyes toward the kitchen door, as if troubled lest this defiance of his authority might have been heard within, and the seeds of insubordination sown in another bond-slave's breast.

" I'll carry out mother'? agreement with you to the best of my ability," said Joe, moving forward as if ready now to begin.

" Then come on in and cat your breakfast," said Isom.

28 The Bondboy

Isom led the way into the smoky kitchen, inwardly more gratified than displeased over this display of spirit. Accord ing to the agreement between them, he had taken under bond service the Widow Xewbolt's "minor male child," but it looked to him as if some mistake had been made in the delivery.

"He's a man!'' exulted Isom in his heart, pleased be yond measure that he had bargained better than he had known.

Joe put his lean brown hand into the bosom of his shirt and brought out a queer, fat little book, leather-bound and worn of the corners. This he placed on top of his bundle, then followed Chase into the kitchen where the table was spread for breakfast.

Mrs. Chase was busy straining milk. She did not turn her head, nor give the slightest indication of friendliness or interest in Joe as he took the place pointed out by Chase. Chase said no word of introduction. lie turned his plate over with a businesslike flip, took up the platter which contained two fried eggs and a few pieces of bacon, scraped off his portion, and handed the rest to Joe.

In addition to the one egg each, and the fragments of bacon, there were sodden biscuits and a broken-nosed pitcher holding molasses. A cup of roiled coffee stood ready poured beside each plate, and that was the breakfast upon which Joe cast his curious eyes. It seemed absurdly inadequate to the needs of two strong men, accustomed as Joe was to four eggs at a meal, with the stays of life which went with them in proportion.

Mrs. Chase did not sit at the table witli them, nor re plenish the empty platter, although Joe looked expectantly and hungrily for her to do so. She was carrying pans of milk into the cellar, and did not turn her head once in their direction during the meal.

A Dry-salt Man 29

Joe rose from the table hungry, and in that uneasy state of body began his first day's labor on Isom Chase's farm. He hoped that dinner might repair the shortcomings of breakfast, and went to the table eagerly when that hour came.

For dinner there was hog-jowl and beans, bitter with salt, yellow with salt, but apparently greatly to the liking of Isom, whose natural food seemed to be the very essence of salt.

" Help yourself, eat plenty," he invited Joe.

Jowls and beans were cheap ; he could afford to be lib eral with that meal. Generosity in regard to that five- year-old jowl cost him scarcely a pang.

" Thank you," said Joe politely. " I'm doing very well."

A place was laid for Mrs. Chase, as at breakfast, but she did not join them at the table. She was scalding milk crocks and pans, her face was red from the steam. As she bent over the sink the uprising vapor moved her hair upon her temples like a wind.

"Ain't you goin' to eat your dinner, Ollie?" inquired Isom with considerable lightness, perhaps inspired by the hope that she was not.

" I don't feel hungry right now," she answered, bending over her steaming pan of crocks.

Isom did not press her on the matter. He filled up his plate again with beans and jowl, whacking the grinning jaw bone with his knife to free the clinging shreds of meat.

Accustomed as he had been all his life to salt fare, that meal was beyond anything in that particular of seasoning that Joe ever had tasted. The fiery demand of his stomach for liquid dilution of his saline repast made an early drain on his coffee ; when he had swallowed the last bean that he was able to force down, his cup was empty. He cast his eyes about inquiringly for more.

30 The Bondboy

"We only drink one cup of coffee at a meal here," ex plained Isoin, a rel)uke in his words for the extravagance of those whose loose habits carried them beyond that ab stemious limit.

" All right ; I guess I can make out on that," said Joe.

There was a pitcher of water at his hand, upon which he drew heavilv, with Hie entire good-will and approbation of Isoni. Then he took his hat from the floor at his feet and went out, leaving Isoin hammering again at the jou-j, this tune with the handle of his fork, in the hope of dis lodging a bit of gristle which clung to one end.

.Joe's hope leaped ahead to supper, unjustified as the flight was by the day's developments. Human creatures could not subsist longer than a meal or two on such fare as that, lie argued; there must be a change very soon, of course.

It was a heavv afternoon for .Toe. lie was wearv from the absolute lack of nourishment when the last of the chores was done long after dusk, and Isoin announced that they would go to the house for supper.

The supper began with soup, made from the left-over beans and the hog's jaw of dinner. There it swam, tint fleshless, long-toot lied, salt-reddened bone, the most hateful piece of animal anatomv that Joe ever fixed his hungry eyes upon. And supper ended as it began ; with soup. There was nothing else behind it, save some hard bread to soak in it, and its only savor was salt.

Isoin seemed to be satisfied with, even cheered by, his liquid refreshment. His wife came to her place at the table when they were almost through, and sat stirring a bowl of the mixture of bread and thin soup, her eyes set in ab stracted stare in the middle of the table, far bcvond the work of her hands. She did not speak to Joe; he did not undertake anv friendly approaches.

Joe never had seen Mrs. Chase before that day, neigh-

A Dry-salt Man 31

bors though they had been for months. She appeared un usually handsome to Joe, with her fair skin, and hair colored like ripe oats straw. She wore a plait of it as big as his wrist coiled and wound around her head.

For a little while after finishing his unsatisfying meal, Joe sat watching her small hand turning the spoon in her soup. He noted the thinness of her young cheeks, in which there was no marvel, seeing the fare upon which she was forced to live. She seemed to be unconscious of him and Isom. She did not raise her eyes.

Joe got up in a little while and left them, going to the porch to look for his bundle and his book. They were gone. He came back, standing hesitatingly in the door.

''They're in your room upstairs," said Mrs. Chase with out turning her head to look at him, still leaning forward over her bowl.

" I'll show you where it is," Isom offered.

He led the way up the stairs which opened from the kitchen, carrying a small lamp in his hand.

Joe's room was over the kitchen. It was bleak and bare, its black rafters hung with spiderwehs, plastered with the nests of wasps. A dormer window jutted toward the east like a hollow eye, designed, no doubt, and built by Isom Chase himself, to catch the first gleam of morning and throw it in the eyes of the sleeping hired-hand, whose bed stood under it.

Isom came down directly, took his lantern, and went to the barn to look after a new-born calf. Where there was profit, such as he counted it, in gentleness, Isom Chase could be as tender as a mother. Kind words and caresses, accord ing to his experience, did not result in any more work out of a wife so he spared them the young woman at the table, as he had denied them the old one in her grave.

As Isom hurried out into the soft niijht, with a word

32 The Bondboy

about the calf, Ollie made a bitter comparison between her lot and that of the animals in the barn. Less than six months before that gloomy night she had come to that house a bride, won by the prospect of ease and independence which Chase had hold out to her in the brief season of his adroit courtship. The meanest men sometimes turn out to be the nimblest cock-pheasants during that interesting period, and, like those vain birds of the jungles, they strut and dance and cut dazzling capers before the eyes of the ladies when they want to strike up a matrimonial bargain.

Isom Chase had done that. He had been a surprising lover for a dry man of his years, spurring around many a younger man in the contest for Ollie's hand. Together with parental encouragement and her own vain dreams, she had not found it hard to say the word that made her his wife. But the gay feathers had fallen from him very shortly after their wedding day, revealing the worm which they had hidden ; the bright colors of his courtship parade had faded like the fustian decorations of a carnival in the rain.

Isom was a man of bone and dry skin, whose greed and penury had starved his own soul. He had brought her there and put burdens upon her, with the assurance that it would be only for a little while, until somebody could be hired to take the work off her hands. Then he had advanced the plea of hard times, when the first excuse had worn out ; now he had dropped all pretenses. She was serving, as ho had married her to serve, as he had brought her there in unrecompensed bondage to serve, and hope was gone from her horizon, and her tears were undried upon her cheeks.

Isom had profited bv a good day's work from Joe, and he had not been obliged to drive him to obtain it. So he was in great spirits when he came back from the barn, where he had found the calf coming on sturdily and with great prom ise. He put out the lantern and turned the lamp down a shade

A Dry-salt Man 33

seeing that it was consuming a twentieth more oil than nec essary to light Ollie about her work. Then he sat down beside the table, stretching his long legs with a sigh.

Ollie was washing the few dishes which had served for supper, moving between table and sink with quick com petence, making a neat figure in the somber room. It was a time when a natural man would have filled his pipe and brought out the weekly paper, or sat and gossiped a com fortable hour with his wife. But Isom never had cheered his atrophied nerves with a whiff of tobacco, and as for the county paper, or any paper whatever except mortgages and deeds, Isom held all of them to be frauds and extravagances which a man was better off without.

"Well, what do 3rou think of the new hand?" asked Isom, following her with his eyes.

" I didn't pay any particular notice to him," said she, her back toward him as she stood scraping a pan at the sink.

" Did you hear what he said to me this morning when he was standin' there by the steps?"

"No, I didn't hear," listlessly, indifferently.

"H-m — I thought you was listening."

"I just looked out to see who it was."

" No difference if }rou did hear, Ollie," he allowed gen erously — for Isom. " A man's wife ought to share his busi ness secrets, according to my way of lookin' at it ; she's got a right to know what's going on. Well, I tell you that chap talked up to me like a man ! "

Isom smacked his lips over the recollection. The promise of it was sweet to his taste.

Ollie's heart stirred a little. She wondered if someone had entered that house at last who would be able to set at de fiance its stern decrees. She hoped that, if so, this breach in the grim wall might let some sunlight in time into her own

34 The Kondboy

bleak heart. But she said nothing to Isoni, and he talked on.

" I made a good pick when I lit on that boy/' said he, with that old wise twist of the head; "the best piek in this county, by a long shot. I choose a man like I pick a horse, for the blood he shows. A blooded horse will endure where a plug will fall down, and it's the same way with a man. Ollie, don't YOU know that, boy's got as good a strain in him as you'll iind in this part of the country ?"

k* I never saw him before today, I don't know his folks,'* said -she-, apparently little interested in her husband's find.

Iso:n sat silent for a while, looking at the worn iloor.

" Well, he's bound out to me for two years and more," said he, the comfort of it: in his hard, plain face. "I'll have a steady hand thai: I can depir.d oa now. That's a boy that'll do his duty; 1:0 until. t in my mind about that. If may go against the gram once in a while, Olhe, like our duty does for all of us sometimes; but, no matter how il tastes to him, that boy Joe, he'll face it.

"He's not one of the kind that'll shirk on me when my back's turned, or steal from me if he gets a chance, or betray any trusr I put in him. lie's as poor as blue-John and as j rend as l.ucifer. but he's as straight as the barrel of thaL old gun. lie's goi; Kentucky blood in him, and the best of it. too."

"lie brought a funny little Bible with him," .said Oliie in low \o:ce. as if communing with herself.

"Funny?" said Isom. "Is that so?"

"So little and fat." she explained. "I never saw one like it before. It was there on the bench this morning with his bundle. I put it up by his bed."

"JIum-m," said Isom reflectively, as if considering it deeply. Then: "Well, I guess it's all right."

Isom sat a good while, fingering his stiff beard. lie gave no surface indication of the thoughts which were- working

A Dry-salt Man 35

within him, for he was unlike those sentimental, plump, thin- skinned people who cannot conceal their emotions from the world. Isom might have been dreaming of gain, or he might have been contemplating the day of loss and panic, for all that his face revealed. Sun and shadow alike passed over it, as rain and blast and summer sun pass over and beat upon a stone, leaving no mark behind save in that slow and painful wear which one must live a century to note. He looked up at his wife at length, his hand still in his beard, and studied her silently.

"I'm not a hard man, Ollie, like some people give me the name of being," he complained, with more gentleness in his voice than she had heard s'nce he was courting her. He stiil studied her, as if he expected her to uphold com mon report and protest that lie was hard and cruel-driving in his way. She said nothing; Isom proceeded to give him self flic good rating which the world denied.

" I'm not half as mean as some envious people would make out, if they could find anybody to take stock in what they say. If I'm not as honey-mouthed as some, that's because I've got more sense than to diddle-daddle my time away in words when there's KG much to do. I'll show you that I'm as kind at heart, (Mile, as any man in this county, if you'll stand by me and do your part of what's to be done with out black looks and grumbles .". n(< growls.

"I'm a good many years older than } ou, and maybe I'm not as light-footed and light-headed as you'd like a hus band to be, but I've got weight to me where it counts. I could buy out two-thirds of the young fellers in this county, Ollie, all' in a bunch."

"Yes, Isom, I guess you could," she allowed, a weary drag in her voice.

" I'll put a woman in to do the work here in the fall, when I make a turn of my crops and money comes a little

36 The Bondboy

freer than it does right now," he promised. " Interest on my loans is behind in a good many cases, and there's no use crowdin' 'em to pay till they sell their wheat and hogs. If I had the ready money in hand to pay wages, Ollie, I'd put a nigger woman in here tomorrow and leave you nothing to do but oversee. You'll have a fine easy time of it this fall, Ollic, when I turn my crops."

Ollie drained the dishpan and wrung out the cloths. These she hung on a line to dry. Isom watched her with ap proval, pleased to see her so housewifely and neat.

" Ollie, you've come on wonderful since I married you," said he. "When you come here — do you recollect? — you couldn't hardly make a mess of biscuits that was fit to eat, and you knew next to nothing about milk and butter for all that you was brought up on a farm."

"Well, I've learned my lesson," said she, with a bitter ness which passed over Isom's head.

Her back was turned to him, she was reaching to hang a utensil on the wall, so high above her head that she stood on tiptoe. Isom was not insensible to the pretty lines of her back, the curve of her plump hips, the whiteness of her naked arms. lie smiled.

"Well, it's worth money to you to know all these things," said lie, "and I don't know but it's just as well for you to go on and do the work this summer for the benefit of what's to be got out of it ; vou'll be all the better able to oversee a nigger woman when I put one in, and all the belter qualified to take things into your own hands when I'm done and in the grave. For I'll have to go, in fifteen or twenty years more," he sighed.

Ollie made no reply. She was standing with her back still turned toward him, stripping down her sleeves. Hut the sigh which she gave breath to sounded loud in Isom's

A Dry-salt Man 37

Perhaps he thought she was contemplating with concern the day when he must give over his strivings and hoardings, and leave her widowed and alone. That may have moved him to his next excess of generosity.

" I'm going to let Joe help you around the house a good deal, Ollie," said he. " He'll make it a lot easier for you this summer. He'll carry the swill down to the hogs, and water 'em, and take care of the calves. That'll save you a good many steps in the course of the day."

Ollie maintained her ungrateful silence. She had heard promises before, and she had come to that point of hope lessness where she no longer seemed to care. Isom was accustomed to her silences, also ; it appeared to make little difference to him whether she spoke or held her peace.

He sat there reflectively a little while ; then got up, stretch ing his arms, yawning with a noise like a dog.

" Guess I'll go to bed," said he.

He looked for a splinter on a stick of stove-wood, which he lit at the stove and carried to his lamp. At the door he paused, turned, and looked at Ollie, his hand, hovering like a grub curved beside the chimney, shading the light from his eyes.

"So he brought a Bible, did he?"

"Yes."

" Well, he's welcome to it," said Isom. " I don't care what anybody that works for me reads — just so long as he works! "

Isom's jubilation over his bondboy set his young wife's curiosity astir. She had not noted any romantic or noble parts about the youth in the casual, uninterested view which she had given him that day. To her then he had appeared only a sprangling, long-bodied, long-legged, bony-shouldered, unformed lad whose hollow frame indicated a great capacity for food. Her only thought in connection with him had

The Bomlboy

been that it meant another mouth to dole Isom's slender allowance out to, more scheming on her part to make the rations go round. It meant another one to wash for, another bed to make1.

She had thought of those things wearily that morning when she heard the new voice at the kitchen door, and she had gone there for a moment to look him o\er; for strange faces, even those of loutish farm-hands, were refreshing in her isolated life. She had not heard what the lad was saying to Isom, {'<>;• the kitchen was large and the stove far away from the door, but she had the passing thought that there was a good deal of earnestness or passion in the harangue for a farm-hand to be laying on his early morning talk.

When she found the Hihlc Iving there on top of Joe's hickory shirt, she h;:d concluded that he had been talking religion. She hoped that he would not preach at his meals. The only religion that Ollie knew anything of, and not much of that, wa> a glum and melancholy kind, with frenzied shoutings of the preacher in it. and portentous snaking of the beard in the shudderful pictures of the anguish of unre pentant death. So she hoped that lie would no! preach at his meals, for the house was sad enough, and terrible and gloomily hopeless enough, without the kind of religion that made the night deeper and the day longer in its dread.

Now Isom's talk about the lad's blood, and h;s expression of high confidence in his IValtv, gave her a pleasant topic of speculation. Did good blood make men different from those who came of mongrel strain, in other points than that of endurance alone? Did it give men nobility and sym pathy and loftiness, or was it something prized by those who hired them, as Isom seemed to value it in Joe, because it lent strength to the arms?

Ollie sat on the kitchen steps and turned all this over in her thoughts after Isom had <rone to bed.

A Dry-salt Man 39

Perhaps in the new bondboy, who had come there to serve vith her, she would find one with whom she might talk and sometimes ease her heart. She hoped that it might be so, for she needed chatter and laughter and the common sym pathies of youth, as a caged bird requires the seed of its wild life. There was hope in the new farm-hand which swept into her heart like a refreshing breeze. She would look him over and sound him when he worked, choring between kitchen and barn.

Ollie had been a poor man's child. Isom had chosen her as he would have selected a breeding-cow, because nature, in addition to giving her a form of singular grace and beauty, had combined therein the utilitarian indications of ability to plentifully reproduce her kind. Isom wanted her because she was alert and quick of foot, and strong to bear the burdens of motherhood ; for even in the shadow of his decline he still held to the hope of his youth — that he might leave a son behind him to guard his acres and bring down his name.

Ollic was no deeper than her opportunities of life had made her. She had no qualities of self-development, and while she had graduated from a high school and still had the ornate diploma among her simple treasures, learning had passed through her pretty ears like water through a funnel. It had swirled and choked there a little while, just long enough for her to make her "points" required for passing, then it had sped on and left her unencumbered and free.

Her mother had always held Ollie's beauty a greater asset than mental graces, and this early appraisement of it al its trading value had made Ollic a bit vain and ambitious to mate above her family. Isom Chase had held out to her all the allurements of whicli she had dreamed, and she had married him for his money. She had as well taken a stone

40 The Bondbo?/

to her soft bosom in the hope of warming it into yielding a flower.

Isom was up at four o'clock next morning. A few minutes after him Ollic stumbled down the stairs, heavy with the pain of broken sleep. Joe was snoring above-stairs ; the sound penetrated to the kitchen down the doorless casement.

" Listen to that feller sawin' gourds ! " said Isom crabbedly.

The gloom of night was still in the kitchen ; in the corner where the stove stood it was so dark that Ollic had to grope her way, yawning heavily, feeling that she would willingly trade the last year of her life for one more hour of sleep that moist spring morning.

Isom mounted the kitchen stairs and roused Joe, lumber ing down again straightway and stringing the milk-pails on his arms without waiting to see the result of his summons.

" Send him on down to the barn when he's ready," directed Isom, jangling away in the pale light of early day.

Ollie fumbled around in her dark corner for kindling, and started a fire in the kitchen stove with a great rattling of lids. Perhaps there was more alarm than necessary in this primitive and homely task, sounded with the friendly inten tion of carrying a warning to Joe, who was making no move to obey his master's call.

Ollie went softly to the staircase and listened. Joe's snore was rumbling again, as if he traveled a heavy road in the land of dreams. She did not fcvl that she could go and shake him out of his sleep and warn him of the penalty of such remission, but she called softly from where she stood:

"Joe! You must get up, Joe!"

But. her voice was not loud enough to wake a bird. Joe slept on, like a heavy-headed boor, and she went back to the stove to put the kettle on to boil. The issue of his recal- citration must be left between him and Isom. If he had

A Dry-salt Man 41

good blood in him, perhaps he would fight when Isom lifted his hand and beat him out of his sleep, she reflected, hoping simply that it would turn out that way.

Isom came back to the house in frothing wrath a quarter of an hour later. There was no need to ask about Joe, for the bound boy's nostrils sounded his own betrayal.

Isom did not look at Ollie as he took the steep stairs four treads at a step. In a moment she heard the sleeper's bed squeaking in its rickety old joints as her husband shook him and cut short his snore in the middle of a long flourish.

" Turn out of here ! " shouted Isom in his most terrible voice — which was to Ollie's ears indeed a dreadful sound — " turn out and git into your duds ! "

Ollie heard the old bed give an extra loud groan, as if the sleeper had drawn himself up in it with suddenness ; following that came the quick scuffling of bare feet on the floor.

" Don't you touch me ! Don't you lay hands on me ! " she heard the bound boy warn, his voice still husky with sleep.

" I'll skin you alive ! " threatened Isom. " You've come here to work, not to trifle your days away sleepin'. A good dose of strap-oil's what you need, and I'm the man to give it to you, too ! "

Isom's foot was heavy on the floor over her head, mov ing about as if in search of something to use in the flagella tion. Ollie stood with hands to her tumultuous bosom, pity welling in her heart for the lad who was to feel the vigor of Isom's unsparing arm.

There was a lighter step upon the floor, moving across the room like a sudden wind. The bound boy's voice sounded again, clear now and steady, near the top of the stairs where Isom stood.

"Put that down! Put that down, I tell you!" he com-

42 The lion dbo i/

inandcd. " I warned you never to lift your hand against me. If you hit MR- \viih that I'll kill YOU in Your tracks!" '

Olhc's heart leaped at the words; hot blood came into her face with a surge. She clasped her hands to her bn-a.-t in new fervor, and lifted her face as one speeding a thankful prayer. She had heard Isoin Chase I h real ened and defied in Ins own house1, and the knowledge that one lived with the courage to do what she had longed to do, lifled her heart and made it glad.

She heard Isom growl something in his throat, muffled and low, which she could not separate into words.

"Well, then, I'll let it pass — flu's time," said Joe. "Hut don't you ever do it any more. I'm a heavy sleeper SOUR t:mes, and this is an hour or two earlier than I am used to gel ! ing up; hut if You'll call me loud enough, and talk like A ou were calling a man and not a dog, you'll have n<> trouble with me. Now gi-t or. t of here!"

Ollie could have shouted in the triumph of that moment. She shared the hound hov's victory and exulted in his high independence. Isom had swallowed it like a coward; now be was coming down the stairs, snarling in his heard, bir his knotted fist had not enforced discipline; his coarse, distorted foot had not been lifted against his new slave She felt that the dawn was breaking over that house, tha' one had come into it who would ease her of its terrors.

Joe came along after Isom in a little while, slipping his suspenders over his lank .shoulders as he went out of (}}•• kitchen floor. lie did not turn to Ollie with the morning's greetings, but held his face from her and hurried on, she thought, as if ashamed.

Ollie ran to the door on her nimble toes, the dawn of a smile on her face, now rosy with its new light, and looked after him as he hurried away in the brightening day. She

A Dry-salt Man 43

stood with her hands clasped in attitude of pleasure, again lifting her face as if to speed a prayer.

" Oh, thank God for a man! " said she.

Isom was in a crabbed way at breakfast, sulky and silent. But his evil humor did not appear to weigh with any shadow of trouble on Joe, who ate what was set before him like a hungry horse and looked around for more.

Ollie's interest in Joe was acutely sharpened by the inci dent of rising. There must be something uncommon, indeed, in a lad of Joe's years, she thought, to enable him to meet and pass off such a serious thing in that untroubled way. As she served the table, there being griddle-cakes of corn- meal that morning to flank the one egg and fragments of rusty bacon each, she studied the boy's face carefully. She noted the high, clear forehead, the large nose, the fineness of the heavy, black hair which lay shaggy upon his temples. She studied the long hands, the grave line of his mouth, and caught a quick glimpse now and then of his large, serious gray eyes.

Here was an uncommon boy, with the man in him half showing; Isom was right about that. Let it be blood or what it might, she liked him. Hope of the cheer that he surely would bring into that dark house quickened her cheek to a color which had grown strange to it in those heavy months.

Joe's efforts in the field must have been highly satisfactory to Isom that forenoon, for the master of the house came to the table at dinner-time in quite a lively mood. The morn ing's unpleasantness seemed to have been forgotten. Ollie noticed her husband more than once during the meal measuring Joe's capabilities for future strength with cal culating, satisfied eyes. She sat at the table with them, taking minute note of Joe at closer range, studying him curiously, awed a little by the austerity of his young face,

4

44 TJic Hondbo?/

and tlic melancholy of his eyes, in which there seemed to lie the concentrated sorrow of many forebears who had suffered and died with burdens upon their hearts.

" Couldn't you manage to pick us a mess of dandelion for supper, Ollic?" asked Isom. "I notice it's comin' up thick in the yard."

"I might, if I could find the time,*' said Ollie.

"Oh, I guess you'll have time enough," said Isom, severely.

Her face grew pale; she lowered her head as if to hide her fear from Joe.

"Cook it with a jowl," ordered Isom; "they go fine to gether, and it's good for the blood.*'

Joe was beginning to yearn forward to Sunday, when he could go home to his mother for a satisfying meal, of which he was sharply feeling the need. It was a mystery to him how Isom kept up on that fare, so scant and un satisfying, but he reasoned that it must be on account of there being so little of him but gristle and bone.

Joe looked ahead now to the term of his bondage under Isom; the prospect gave him an uneasy concern. lie was afraid that the hard fare and harder work would result in stunting his growth, like a young tree that has come to a period of drought green and promising, and stands checked and blighted, never again to regain the hardy qualities which it needs to raise it up into the beauty of maturity.

The work gave him little concern; he knew that he could live and put on strength through that if he had the proper food. So there would have to be a change in the fare, con cluded Joe, as he sat there while Isom discussed the merits of dandelion and jowl. It would have to come very early in his term of servitude, too. The law protected the bond man in that, no matter how far it disregarded his rights and human necessities in other ways. So thinking, he pushed awav from the table and left the room.

A Dry -salt Man 45

Isom drank a glass of water, smacked his dry lips over its excellencies, the greatest of them in his mind being its cheapness, and followed it by another.

" Thank the Lord for water, anyhow ! " said he.

"Yes, there's plenty of that," said Ollie meaningly.

Isom was as thick-skinned as he was sapless. Believing that his penurious code was just, and his frugality the first virtue of his life, he was not ashamed of his table, and the outcast scraps upon it. But he looked at his young wife with a sharp drawing down of his spiked brows as he lingered there a moment, his cracked brown hands on the edge of the table, which he had clutched as he pushed his chair back. He seemed about to speak a rebuke for her extrava gance of desire. The frown on his face foreshadowed it, but presently it lifted, and he nodded shrewdly after Joe.

" Give him a couple of eggs mornings after this," said he, " they've fell off to next to nothing in price, anyhow. And eat one yourself once in a while, Ollie. I ain't one of these men that believe a woman don't need the same fare as a man, once on a while, anyhow."

His generous outburst did not appear to move his wife's gratitude. She did not thank him by word or sign. Isom drank another glass of water, rubbed his mustache and beard back from his lips in quick, grinding twists of his doubled hand.

" The pie-plant's comin' out fast," said he, " and I sup pose we might as well eat it — nothing else but humans will eat it — for there's no sale for it over in town. Seems like everybody's got a patch of it nowadays."

" Well, it's fillin', as the old woman said when she swal lowed her thimble, and that boy Joe he's going to be a drain on me to feed, I can see that now. I'll have to fill him up on something or other, and I guess pie-plant's about as good as anything. It's cheap."

46 The Bondboy

" Yes, but it takes sugar," ventured Ollie, rolling some crumbs between her fingers.

" You can use them molasses in the blue barrel," in structed Isom.

"It's about gone," said she.

"Well, put some water in the barrel and slosh it around — it'll come out sweet enough for a mess or two."

Isom got up from the table as he gave these economic directions, and stood a moment looking down at his wife.

" Don't you worry over fcedin' that feller, Ollie," he ad vised. "I'll manage that. I aim to keep him stout — I never saw a stouter feller for his age than Joe — for I'm goin' to git a pile of work out of him the next two years. I saw you lookin' him over this morning," said he, approv ingly, as he might have sanctioned her criticism of a new horse, " and I could see you was lightin' on his points. Don't you think he's all I said he was ? "

"Yes," she answered, a look of abstraction in her eyes, her fingers busy with the crumbs on the cloth, "all you said of him — and more!"

CHAPTER III

THE SPARK IN THE CLOD

IT DID not cost Isom so many pangs to minister to the gross appetite of his bound boy as the spring weeks marched into summer, for gooseberries followed rhubarb, then came green peas and potatoes from the garden that Ollie had planted and tilled under her husband's orders.

Along in early summer the wormy codlings which fell from the apple-trees had to be gathered up and fed to the hogs by Ollie, and it was such a season of blighted fruit that the beasts could not eat them all. So there was apple sauce, sweetened with molasses from the new barrel that Isom broached.

If it had not been so niggardly unnecessar}', the faculty that Isom had for turning the waste ends of the farm into profit would have been admirable. But the suffering attend ant upon this economy fell only upon the human creatures around him. Isom's beasts wallowed in plenty and grew fat in the liberality of his hand. For himself, it looked as if he had the ability to extract his living from the bare sur face of a rock.

All of this green truck was filling, as Isom had said, but far from satisfying to a lad in the process of building on such generous plans as Joe. Isom knew that too much skim- milk would make a pot-bellied calf, but he was too stubborn in his rule of life to admit the cause when he saw that Joe began to lag at his work, and grow surly and sour.

Isom came in for quick and startling enlightenment in the middle of a lurid July morning, while he and Joe were at work with one-horse cultivators, " laying by " the corn.

47

48 The Bondboy

Joe threw his plow down in the furrow, cast the lines from his shoulders, and declared that he was starving. He vowed that he would not cultivate another row unless as sured, then and there, that Isom would make an immediate enlargement in the bill-of-fare.

Isom stood beside the handles of his own cultivator, there being the space of ten rows between him and Joe, and took the lines from around his shoulders, with the deliberate, stern movement of a man who is preparing for a fight.

"What do you mean by this kind of capers?" he de manded.

" I mean that you can't go on starving me like you've been doing, and that's all there is to it ! " said Joe. " The law don't give you the right to do that."

" Law ! Well, I'll law you," said Isom, coming forward, his hard body crouched a little, his lean and guttered neck stretched as if he gathered himself for a run and jump at the fence. " I'll feed you what comes to my hand to feed you, you onery whelp ! You're workin' for me, you belong to me!"

"I'm working for mother — I told you that before," said Joe. " I don't owe you anything, Isom, and you've got to feed me better, or I'll walk away and leave you, that's what I'll do!"

"Yes, I see you walkin' away!" said Isom, plucking at his already turncd-up sleeve. "I'm goin' to give you u tannin' right now, and one you'll not forget to your dyin' day ! "

At that moment Isom doubtless intended to carry out his threat. Here was a piece of his own property, as much his property as his own wedded wife, defying him, facing him with extravagant demands, threatening to stop work unless more bountifully fed! Truly, it was a state of in surrection such as no upright citizen like Isom Chase could

The Spark in the Clod 49

allow to go by unreproved and unquieted by castigation of his hand.

" You'd better stop where you are," advised Joe.

He reached down and righted his plow. Isom could see the straining of the leaders in his lean wrist as he stood gripping the handle, and the thought passed through him that Joe intended to wrench it off and use it as a weapon against him.

Isom had come but a few steps from his plow. He stopped, looking down at the furrow as if struggling to hold him self within bounds. Still looking at the earth, he went back to his implement.

" I'll put you where the dogs won't bite you if you ever threaten my life ag'in ! " said he.

" I didn't ihreaten your life, Isom, I didn't say a word," said Joe.

"A motion's a threat," said Isom.

" I3ut I'll tell you now," said Joe, quietly, lowering his voice and leaning forward a little, " you'd better think a long time before you ever start to lay hands on me again, Isom. This is twice. The next time "

Joe set his plow in the furrow with a push that sent the swingletree knocking against the horse's heels. The animal started out of the doze into which it had fallen while the quarrel went on. Joe grinned, thinking how even Isom's dumb creatures took every advantage of him that oppor tunity offered. But he left his warning unfinished as for words.

There was no need to say more, for Isom was cowed. He was quaking down to the tap-root of his salt-hardened soul, but he tried to put a different face on it as he took up his plow.

"I don't want to cripple you, and lay you up," he said. " If I was to begin on you once I don't know where I'd leave

50 The Bondboij

off. Git back to your work, and don't give me any more of your sass! "

" I'll go back to work when you give me your word that I'm to have meat and eggs, butter and milk, and plenty of it," said Joe.

" I orto tie you up to a tree and lash you ! " said Isom, jerking angrily at his horse. "I don't know what ever made me pity your mother and keep her out of the poorhouse by takin' in a loafer like you ! "

"Well, if you're sick of the bargain go and tell mother. Maybe she is, too," Joe suggested.

"No, you'll not git out of it now, you'll stick right here and put in your time, after all the trouble and expense I've been put to teachin' you what little you know about farmin'," Isom declared.

lie took up his plow and jerked his horse around into the row. Joe stood watching him, with folded arms, plainly with no intention of following. Isom looked back over his shoul der.

"Git to work !" he yelled.

"You didn't promise me what I asked," said Joe, quietly.

" Xo, and that ain't all!" returned Isom.

The tall corn swallowed Isom and his horse as the sea swallowed Pharaoh and his host. When he returned to the end of the h'eld where the rebellion had broken out, he found Joe silting on the beam of his plow and the well-pleased horse asleep in the sun.

Isom said nothing, but plunged away into the tall corn. When he came back next time Joe was unhitching his horse.

" Xow, look a-liere, Joe," Isom began, in quite a changed tone, "don't you fly up and leave an old man in the lurch that way."

" You know what I said," Joe told him.

"I'll give in to you, Joe; I'll give you everything you ask

The Spark in the Clod 51

for, and more," yielded Isom, seeing that Joe intended to leave. "I'll put it in writing if you want me to Joe — I'll do anything to keep }Tou, son. You're the only man I ever had on this place I wouldn't rather see goin' than comin'."

Isom's word was satisfactory to Joe, and he returned to work.

That turned out a day to be remembered in the household of Isom Chase. If he had come into the kitchen at noon with all the hoarded savings of his years and thrown them down before her eyes, Ollie could not have been more surprised and mystified than she was when he appeared from the smoke house carrying a large ham.

After his crafty way in a tight pinch Isom turned neces sity into profit by making out that the act wTas free and voluntary, with the pleasure and comfort of his pretty little wife underlying and prompting it all. He grinned as if he would break his beard when he put the ham down on the table and cut it in two at the middle joint as deftly as a butcher.

" I've been savin' that ham up for you, Ollie. I think it's just about right now," said he.

" That was nice of you, Isom," said she, moved out of her settled taciturnity by his little show of thought for her, " I've been just dying for a piece of ham!"

" Well, fry us a big skillctful of it, and some eggs along with it, and fetch up a crock of sweet milk, and stir it up cream and all," directed Isom.

Poor Ollie, overwhelmed by the suddenness and freedom of this generosity, stood staring at him, her eyes round, her lips open. Isom could not have studied a more astounding sur prise. If he had hung diamonds on her neck, rubies on her wrists, and garnets in her hair, she could quicker have found hei- tongue.

" It's all right, Ollie, it's all right," said Isom pettishly. "We're going to have these things from now on. Might as

52 The Rondboy

well eat 'em, and git some of the good of what we produce, as let them city people fatten off 'em."

Isom went out with that, and Ollie attacked the ham with the butcher knife in a most savage and barbarous fashion.

Isom's old wife must have shifted in her grave at sight of the prodigal re-past which Ollie soon spread on the kitchen table. Granting, of course, that people in their graves are cogni/ant of such things, which, according to this old stand ard of comparison in human amazement, thcv must be.

But whether the old wife turned over or lav quiescent in the place where they put her when they folded her tired old hands upon her shrunken breast, it is indisputable that the new one eased the pangs of many a hungry dav in that boun tiful meal. And Joe's face glowed from the fires of it, and his eyes sparkled in the satisfaction of his long-abused stomach.

Next day a more startling thing happened. Twice each week there passed through the country, from farm to farm, a butcher's wagon from Shelbyville, the county-seat, a few miles away. Isom Chase never had been a customer of the fresh meat purveyor, and the traveling merchant, knowing from the old man's notoriety that he never could expect him to become one, did not waste time in stopping at his house. His surprise was almost apoplectic when Isom stopped him and bought a soup-bone, and it almost became fatal when the order was made a standing one. It was such a remarkable event that the meat man told about it at every stop. It went round the country like the news of a wedding or a death.

Isom seemed to be satisfied with the new dietary regula tions, for hams were cheap that summer, anyhow, and the season was late. Besides that, the more that Joe ate the harder he worked. It seemed a kind of spontaneous effort on the lad's part, as if it was necessary to burn up the energy in surplus of the demand of his growing bone and muscle.

The Spark in the Clod 53

Ollie had picked up and brightened under the influence of ham and milk also, although it was all a foolish yielding to appetite, as Isom very well knew. He had beaten that weak ness in himself to death with the club of abstinence ; for him self he could live happily on what he had been accustomed to eating for thirty years and more. But as long as the investment of ham and milk paid interest in kitchen as well as field, Isom was grudgingly willing to see them consumed.

Ollie's brightening was only physical. In her heart she was as gloomily hopeless as before. After his first flash of fire she had not found much comfort or hope of comradeship in the boy, Joe Newbolt. He was so respectful in her pres ence, and so bashful, it seemed, that it almost made her uncomfortable to have him around.

Man that he was in stature, he appeared no more than a timid boy in understanding, and her little advances of friend liness, her little appeals for sympathy, all glanced from the unconscious armor of his youthful innocence and reserve. She was forced to put him down after many weeks as merely stupid, and she sighed when she saw the hope of comradeship in her hard lot fade out and give way to a feeling bordering upon contempt.

On Sunday evenings, after he came back from visiting his mother, Ollie frequently saw Joe reading the little brown Bible which he had carried with him when he came. She had taken it up one day while making Joe's bed. It brought back to her the recollection of her Sunday-school days, when she was all giggles and frills ; but there was no association of religious training to respond to its appeal. She wondered what Joe saw in it as she put it back on the box beside his bed.

It chanced that she met Joe the next morning after she had made that short incursion between the brown covers of his book, as she was returning from the well and he was setting

54 The Bondboy

out for the hog-lot between two pails of sour swill. He stood out of the path to let her pass without stepping into the long, dewy grass. She put her bucket down with a gasp of weariness, and looked up into his eyes with a smile.

The buckets were heavy in Joe's hands ; he stood them down, meeting her friendly advances with one of his rare smiles, which came as seldom to his face, thought she, as a humming bird to the honeysuckle on the kitchen porch.

" Whew, this is going to be a scorcher ! " said she.

"I believe it is,'' he agreed.

From the opposite sides of the path their eyes met. Both smiled again, and felt better for it.

"My, but you're a mighty religious boy, aren't you?" she asked suddenly.

"Religious?" said he, looking at her in serious surprise.

She nodded girlishly. The sun, long slanting through the cherry-trees, fell on her hair, loosely gathered up after her sleep, one free strand on her check.

" Xo, I'm not religious."

" Well, you read the Bible all the time."

" Oh, well ! " said he, stooping as if to lift his pails.

"Why?" she wanted to know.

Joe straightened his long back without his pails. Beyond the orchard the hogs were clamoring shrilly for their morning draught ; from the barn there came the sound of Isom's voice, speaking harshly to the beasts.

" Well, because I like it, for one thing," said he, " and because it's the only book I've got here, for another."

" Mv, I think it's a\vful slow!" said she.

"Do you?" he inquired, as if interested in her likes and dislikes at last.

" I'd think you'd like other books better — detective stories and that kind," she ventured. "Didn't you ever read any other book? "

The Spark in the Clod 55

" Some few," he replied, a reflection as of amusement in his eyes, which she thought made them look old and under standing and wise. " But I've always read the Bible. It's one of the books that never seems to get old to you."

"Did you ever read True as Steel?"

" No, I never did."

"Or Tempest and Sunshine? "

He shook his head.

" Oh-h," said she, fairly lifting herself by the long breath which she drew, like the inhalation of a pleasant recollection, " you don't know what you've missed ! They are lovely ! "

"Well, maybe I'd like them, too."

He stooped again, and this time came up with his pails.

" I'm glad you're not religious, anyhow," she sighed, as if heaving a trouble off her heart.

"Are you?" he asked, turning to her wonderingly.

" Yes ; religious people are so glum," she explained. " I never saw one of them laugh."

" There are some that way," said Joe. " They seem to be afraid they'll go to hell if they let the Almighty hear them laugh. Mother used to be that way when she first got her religion, but she's outgrowing it now."

" The preachers used to scare me to death," she declared. " If I could hear some comfortable religion I might take up with it, but it seems to me that everybody's so sad after they get it. I don't know why."

Joe put down the pails again. Early as the day was, it was hot, and he was sweating. He pushed his hat back from his forehead. It was like lifting a shadow from his serious young face. She smiled.

"A person generally gets the kind of religion that he hoars preached," said he, " and most of it you hear is kind of heavy, like bread without rising. I've never seen a laughing preacher yet."

56 Tlic Hondboy

"There must be sonic, though," she reflected.

" I hope so/' said Joe.

"I'm (jlnd you're not full of that kind of religion," said she. " For a long time I thought you were."

"You did? Why?"

"Oh, because— " said she.

Her cheek was toward him; he saw that it was red, like the first tint of a cherry. She snatched up her bucket then and sped along the path.

Joe walked on a little way, stopped, turned, and looked after her. He saw the flick of her skirt as her nimble heels flew up the three steps of the kitchen porch, and he wondered why she was glad that he was not religious, and why she had gone away like that, so fast. The pigs were clamoring, shriller, louder. It was no hour for a youth who had not yet wetted his feet in manhood's stream to stand looking after a pair of heels and try to figure out a thing like that.

As Joe had said, he was not religious, according to cate chisms and creeds. lie could not have qualified in the least exacting of the many faiths. All the religion that he had was of his own making, for his mother's was altogether too fero cious in its punishments and too dun and foggy in its rewards for him.

He read the Bible, and he believed most of it. There was as much religion, said he, in the Commandments as a man needed ; a man could get on with that much very well. Beyond that he did not trouble.

He read the adventures of David and the lamentations of Jeremiah, and the lofty exhortations of Isaiah for the sonority of the phrasing, the poetry and beauty. For he had not been sated bv manv tales nor blunted by manv books. If he could manage to live according to the Commandments, he sometimes told his mother, he would not feel uneasy over a better wav to die.

The Spark in the Clod 57

But he was not giving this matter much thought as he emptied the swill-pails to the chortling hogs. He was think ing about the red in Ollie's cheeks, like the breast of a bright bird seen through the leaves, and of her quick flight up the path. It was a new Ollie that he had discovered that morning, one unknown and unspoken to before that day. But why had her face grown red that way, he wondered? Why had she run away?

And Ollie, over her smoking pan on the kitchen stove, was thinking that something might be established in the way of comradeship between herself and the bound boy, after all. It took him a long time to get acquainted, she thought ; but his friendship might be all the more stable for that. There was comfort in it ; as she worked she smiled.

There was no question of the need in which Ollie stood of friendship, sympathy, and kind words. Joe had been in that house six months, and in that time he had witnessed more pain than he believed one small woman's heart could bear. While he was not sure that Isom ever struck his wife, he knew that he tortured her in endless combinations of cruelty, and pierced her heart with a thousand studied pangs. Often, when the house was still and Isom was asleep, he heard her moaning and sobbing, her head on the kitchen table.

These bursts of anguish were not the sudden gusts of a pettish woman's passion, but the settled sorrow of one who suffered without hope. Many a time Joe tiptoed to the bottom of the staircase in his bare feet and looked at her, the moonlight dim in the cheerless kitchen, her head a dark blotch upon the whiteness of her arms, bowed there in her grief. Often he longed to go to her with words of comfort and let her know that there was one at least who pitied her hard fate and sad disillusionment.

In those times of tribulation Joe felt that they could be of mutual help and comfort if they could bring themselves to

The Bondboy

speak, for lie suffered also the pangs of imprisonment and the longings for liberty in that cruel house of bondage. Yet he always turned and went softly, almost breathlessly, back to his bed, leaving her to sob and cry alone in the struggle of her hopeless sorrow.

It was a harder matter to keep his hands from the gristly throat of grim old Isom Chase, slumbering unfeelingly in his bed while his young wife shredded her heart between the burr- stones of his cruel mill. Joe had many an hour of struggle with himself, lying awake, his hot temples streaming sweat, his eyes staring at the ribs of the roof.

During those months Joe had set and hardened. The muscles had thickened over his chest and arms; his neck was losing the long scragginess of youth; his fingers were firm- jointed in his broadening hands. lie knew that Isom Chase was no match for him, man to man.

But, for all his big body and great strength, he was only a boy in his sense of justice, in his hot, primitive desire to lunge out quickly and set the maladjustments of that household straight. lie did not know that there was a thing as old as the desires of men at the bottom of Ollie's sorrow, nor understand the futility of chastisement in the case of Isom Chase.

Isom was as far as ever from his hope of a son or heir of anv description — although he could not conceive the possi bility of fathering a female child — and his bitter reproaches fell on Ollie, as they had fallen upon and blasted the woman who had trudged that somber course before her into the grateful shelter of the grave. It was a thing which Ollie could not discuss with young Joe, a thing which only a sym pathetic mother might have lightened the humiliation of or eased with tender counsel.

Isom, seeing that the book of his family must close with him, expelled the small grain of tenderness that his dry heart

The Spark in the Clod 59

had held for his wife at the beginning, and counted her now nothing but another back to bear his burdens. He mul tiplied her tasks, and snarled and snapped, and more than once in those work-crowded autumn days, when she had lagged in her weariness, he had lifted his hand to strike. The dav would come when that threatened blow would fall ; of that Ollie had no consoling doubt. She did not feel that she would resent it, save in an addition to her accumulated hate, for hard labor by day and tears by night break the spirit until the flints of cruelty no longer wake its fire.

Day after day, as he worked by the side of Isom in the fields, Joe had it foremost in his mind to speak to him of his unjust treatment of his wife. Yet he hung back out of the Oriental conception which he held, due to his Scriptural read ing, of that relationship between woman and man. A man's wife was his property in a certain, broad sense. It would seem unwarranted by an}r measure of excess short of murder for another to interfere between them. Joe held his peace, therefore, but with internal ferment and unrest.

It was in those days of Joe's disquietude that Ollie first spoke to him of Isom's oppressions. The opportunity fell a short time after their early morning meeting in the path. Isom had gone to town with a load of produce, and Joe and Ollie had the dinner alone for the first time since he had been under that roof.

Ollie's eyes were red and swollen from recent weeping, her face was mottled from her tears. Much trouble had made her careless of late of her prettincss, and now she was disheveled, her apron awry around her waist, her hair mussed, her whole aspect one of slovenly disregard. Her depression was so grc;it that Joe was moved to comfort her.

" You've got a hard time of it," said he. " If there's anything I can do to help you I wish you'd let me know."

Ollie slung a dish carelessly upon the table, and followed

(»:) TJic Hondbni/

it with Joe's coliee, which she slopped half out into the saucer.

"Oh, I feel just like I don't care any more!'' said she, her lips trembling, tears starting again in her irritated eves. "I get t rent meiit here that no decent man would give a dog!*'

Joe felt small and young in Olhe's presence, due to the fact that she was older bv a year at least than himself.

That feeling of littleness had been one of his peculiarities as long as he could remember when there were others about older than himself, and supposed from that reason to lie graver and wiser. It probably had its IK ginning in Jo> 's starting out rather spindling and undersized, and not grow ing much until he was ten or thereabout, when he took a Midden shoot ahead, like a water-sprout on an apple-tree.

And then he always had regarded matrimony as a state of gravity and maturity, into which the young and unsophisti cated did not venture. This feeling seemed to place between them in Joe's mind a boundless gulf, across which he could oiler her only the sympathy and assistance of a boy. Th< re was nothing in his mind of sympathy from an equality of years and understanding, only the chivalric urging of succor to the oppressed.

"It's a low-down way for a man to treat a woman, es; e- ciallv his wife," said Joe, his indignation mounting at si;;ht of her tears.

"Yes. and he'd whip you, too, if he dared to do it," s, id she, siiiir.;; in Isom's place at the end <;f the table, wh* re she could look across into Joe's face. "I can see that in h:m when he watches you cat.*'

"I hope he'll never try it," said Joe.

"You're not afraid of him?"

'*Mavbe not." admitted Joe.

"Then why do you say vou hope he'll never try it?" .-fie pressed.

The Spark in the Clod

" Oh, because I do," said Joe, bending over his plate.

" I'd think you'd be glad if he did try it, so you could pay him off for his meanness," she said.

Joe looked across at her seriously.

"Did he slap you this morning?" he asked.

Ollic turned her head, making no reply.

" I thought I heard you two scuffling around in the kitchen as I came to the porch with the milk," said he.

" Don't tell it around ! " she appealed, her eyes big and terrified at the recollection of what had passed. " No, he didn't hit me, Joe; but he choked me. He grabbed me by the throat and shook me — his old hand's as hard as iron!"

Joe had noticed that she wore a handkerchief pinned around her neck. As she spoke she put her hand to her throat, and her tears gushed again.

'* That's no way for a man to treat his wife," said Joe indignantly.

" If you knew everything — if you knew everything! " said she.

Joe, being young, and feeling younger, could not see how she was straining to come to a common footing of under standing with him, to reach a plane where his sympathy would be a balm. He could not realize that her orbit of thought was similar to his own, that she was nearer a mate for him, indeed, than for hairy-limbed, big- jointed Isom Chase, with his griz/led hair and beard.

" It was all over a little piece of ribbon I bought yesterday when I took the eggs up to the store," she explained. " I got two cents a do/en more than I expected for them, and I put the extra money into a ribbon — only half a yard. Here it is," said she, taking it from the cupboard; "I wanted it to wear on my neck."

She held it against her swathed throat with a little uncon scious play of coquetry, a sad smile on her lips.

62 The liottdbo?/

" It's nice, and becoming to you, too," said Joe, speaking after the manner of the countryside etiquette on such things.

" Isoin said I ought to have put the money into a package of soda, and when I wouldn't fuss with him about it, that made him madder and madder. And then he — he — did that!"

" You wouldn't think Isom would mind ten cents," said Joe.

"He'd mind one cent," said she in hitter disdain. "One cent- -hu'i! he'd mind one egg! Some people might not. believe it, but I tell you, Joe, that man counts the eggs every day, and lie weighs every pound of butter I churn. If I wanted to, even, I couldn't hide away a pound of butter or a do/cn of eggs any more than I could hide away that stove.''

"But I don't suppose Isom means to be hard on you or anybody," said Joe. " It's his wav to be close and stingv, and he may do better by you one of these days."

" Xo, he'll never do any better," she sighed. " If anything, he'll do worse — if he can do any worse. I look for him to strike me next ! "

"He'd better not try that when I'm around!" said Joe hotly.

"What would you do to him, Joe?" she asked, her yoice lowered almost to a whisper. She leaned eagerly toward him as she spoke, a flush on her face.

"Well, I'd stop him, I guess," said Joe deliberately, as if he had considered his words. As lie spoke he reached dov, n for his hat, which he always placed on the floor beside h;s chair when he took his meals.

"If there was a soul in this world that cared for me- — if I had anywhere to go, I'd leave him this hour!" dec-land Ollie, her face burning with the hate of her oppressor.

Joe got up from his chair and left the table; she rose wjfh him and came around the side, lie stopped on his way to

TJie Spark in the Clod 03

the door, looking at her with awkward bashfulness as she stood there flushed and brilliant in her tossed state, scarcely a yard between them.

" But there's nobody in the world that cares for me," she complained sorrowfully.

Joe was lifting his hat to his head. Midway he stayed his hand, his face blank with surprise.

"Why, you've got your mother, haven't you?" he asked.

" Mother ! " she repeated scornfully. " She'd drive me back to him ; she was crazy for me to marry him, for she thinks I'll get all his property and money when he dies."

" Well, he may die before long," consoled Joe.

'"Die!" said she; and again, "Die! He'll never die!"

She leaned toward him suddenly, bringing her face within a few inches of his. Pier hot breath struck him on the cheek ; it moved the clustered hair at his temple and played warm in the doorway of his ear.

" He'll never die," she repeated in low, quick voice, which fell to a whisper in the end, " unless somebody he's tramped on and ground down and cursed and driven puts him out of the way ! "

Joe stood looking at her with big eyes, dead to that fem inine shock which would have tingled a mature man to the marrow, insensible to the strong effort she was making to wake him and draw him to her. He drew back from her, a little frightened, a good deal ashamed, troubled, and mys tified.

"Why, you don't suppose anybody would do that?" said he.

Ollie turned from him, the fire sinking down in her face.

" Oh, no ; I don't suppose so," she said, a little distant and cold in her manner.

She began gathering up the dishes.

Joe stood there for a little while, looking at her hands as

The

they iiew from plate to plate like white butterflies, as if some-thing had stirred in him that he did not understand. Presently he wen! his way to take up his work, no more word-; passing between them.

Ollie, from under her half raised lids, watched him go, tip toeing swiftly ;ifter h'm to the1 door as he went down the path toward the v. ell. Her breath was quick upon h< r lips; her breast was agitated. If that slow hunk could be warmed with a man's passions and desires; if sh'1 could wake Inm • if s!:e into his heart! lie was only a boy, th'

man in its .strong face behind that mask o:'

wild, long hair. If lay there wailing to moye him in wav ye! strange !o I:'-'- experience. If she might .send her whi>;<. to that s!i!i slumbering force and charge it into life a da, before its time!

She stood v 1 upon the door, trailing him wiih !

is hr pa-sed on io tin- barn. She felt that she had all but reached beyond the insulation of his adolescence in lha: burning moment wlicn her breath was on his cheek ; she knev. that the wood, even fli.i! hour, was warm tinder the fire. What ni:'j,'li! a whisper now, a smile [hen, a kindness, a word. a hand ;a:d s'.fllv upon h;s hai/. work in the davs to come: turiK-d back to h.ei- work, her mind stirred out of it.- sluggish rut, (lie swirl of her new thoughts quickening in her blood. Isom Chase would not d:<. ; he would live on and on. harder, drier, stingier vea.r by year, unless a bolt from heaven withered him or the hand of man hud him low. What might come to him. he deserved, even the anguish of deal!) with a str cord about h's neck; even ihe strong blow

of an ax as he slept on his bed. snatching from him the life that he had debased of all its beaut v, without the sav ing chance of repentance in the end.

She had thought of doing it with her own hand; a hun dred ways she had planned and contrived it in her nnnd.

The Spark in the Clod 65

goaded on nearer and nearer to it by his inhuman oppres sions day by day. But her heart had recoiled from it as a task for the hand of a man. If a man could be raised up to it, a man who had suffered servitude with her, a man who would strike for the double vengeance, and the love of her in his heart!

She went to the door again, gripping the stove-lid lifter in her little hand, as the jangle of harness came to her when Joe passed with the team. lie rode by toward the field, the sun on his broad back, slouching forward as his heavy horses plodded onward. The man in him was asleep yet, yes ; but there was a pit of fire as deep as a volcano's throat in his slumbering soul.

If she could lift him up to it, if she could pluck the heart out of him and warm it in her own hot breast, then there would stand the man for her need. For Isom Chase would not die. He would live on and on, like a worm in wood, until some strong hand fed him to the flames.

CHAPTER IV

A STRANGER AT THE GATE

RAIX overtook Isom as he was driving home from town that evening, and rain was becoming one of the few things in this world from which he would flee-. It aggravated the rheumatism in his knotted toes and stabbed his knee- joints with awl-piercing pains.

For upward of forty-live years Isom had been taking the rains as they came wherever they might find him. It made him growl to turn tail to them now, and trot to shelter from evcrv shower like a hen.

So lie was in no sweet humor as lie drew near his own barn yard gate with the early autumn downpour already finding its way through his coat. It came to him as he approached that portal of his domain that if he had a son the boy would be there, with the gate flung wide, to help him. It was only one of the thousand useful offices which a proper boy could fill around that place, thought he; but his wives had con spired in barrenness against him; no son ever would come to cheer his declining days.

Kven if he had the kind of a wife that a man should have, reflected he, she would be watching; she would come through rain and hail, thunder and wild blast, to open the gate and ease him through without that troublesome stop.

Matrimony had been a profitless investment for him, said he in bitterness. His first wife had lived long and eaten ravenously, and had worn out shoes and calico slips, and his second, a poor unwilling hand, was not worth her keep.

So, with all this sour summing up of his wasted ventures in his mind, and the cold rain spitting through his years-worn

66

67

coat, Isom was in no humor to debate the way with another man when it came to entering into his own property through his own wide gate.

But there was another man in the road, blocking it with his top-buggy, one foot out on the step, his head thrust around the side of the hood with inquiring look, as if he also felt that there should be somebody at hand to open the gate and let him pass without muddying his feet.

" Ho ! " called Isom uncivilly, hailing the stranger as he pulled up his team, the end of his wagon-tongue threatening the hood of the buggy ; " what do you want here? "

The stranger put his head out a bit farther and twisted his neck to look behind. He did not appear to know Isom, any more than Isom knew him, but there was the surliness of authority, the inhospitality of ownership, in Isom's mien, and it was the business of the man in the buggy to know men at a glance. He saw that Isom was the landlord, and he gave him a nod and smile.

" I'd like to get shelter for my horse and buggy for the night, and lodging for myself," said he.

'* Well, if you pay for it I reckon you can git it," returned Isom. " Pile out there and open that gate."

That was the way that Curtis Morgan, advance agent cf the divine light of literature, scout of knowledge, torch-bearer of enlightenment into the dark places of ignorance, made his way into the house of Isom Chase, and found himself in due time at supper in the low-ceiled kitchen, with pretty Ollie, like a bright bead in a rusty purse, bringing hot biscuits from the oven and looking him over with a smile.

Curtis Morgan was a slim and limber man, with a small head and a big mouth, a most flexible and plastic organ. Morgan wore a mustache which was cut back to stubs, giving his face a grubby look about the nose. His light hair was short and thick, curling in little love-locks about his ears.

C>8 TJic Itonrfbo?/

Morgan sold books. lie would put you in a set of twenty- seven volume's of the History of lite World for fifty-three dollars, or he would open his valise and sell you a rcady- reckoner for six hits. He carried Household Compcndiums of f'xi'ftd Knowledge and Medical Adr'ixcra; lie had poultry guides and horse hooks, and books on bees, and if he couldn't sell you one thing he would sell you another, unless you were a worm, or a greased pig, and able, by some extraordinary natural or artificial attribute, to slip out of his hands.

As- h:i-; been the case with many a greater man before him, Morgan's most profitable business was done in his smallest arliL'le of trade. In the country where men's lives were counted too short for all the work they had to do, they didn't, have any time for histories of the world and no intvrest in them, anvhow. The world was to them no more than they ciiiild see of it, and the needs of their lives and their longings — save in some adventurer who developed among them now and thru — went no farther than the limit of their vision.

The ready-reckoner was, therefore, the money-maker for Morgan, who seemed !o carry an inexhaustible supply. It told a farm-hand what his pay amounted to by days and hours down to the fraction of a cent ; it told the farmer what interest on his note would be; it showed how to find out how manv bushels of corn there were in a crib without measur ing the contents, and how many Ions of hay a stack contained ; it told how to draw up a will and write a deed, and make liniment for the mumps.

Isom drew all this information out of his guest at supper, and it did not require much r'i'ort to set the sap flowing.

Morgan talked to Isom and looked at Olhe; he asked Joe a question, and cocked his eye on Ollie's face as if he expected to iind the answer there; he pronounced shallow platitudes of philosophy aiming them at Isom, but looking at Ollie for approval or dissent.

69

Isom appeared to take rather kindly to him, if his unusual volubility indicated the state of his feelings. Pie asked Mor gan a great deal about his business, and how he liked it, and whether lie made any money at it. Morgan leaned back on the hinder legs of his chair, having finished his supper, and fumbled in his waistcoat pocket for his goose-quill pick. He winked at Isom on the footing of one shrewd man to another as he applied the quill to his big white teeth.

" Well, I pay my way," said he.

There was a great deal back of the simple words ; there was an oily self-satisfaction, and there was a vast amount of portentous reserve. Isom liked it ; he nodded, a smile moving his beard. It did him good to meet a man who could get behind the sham skin of the world, and take it by the heels, and turn it a stunning fall.

Next morning, the sun being out again and the roads promising to dry speedily, Morgan hitched up and prepared to set out on his flaming path of enlightenment. Before going he made a proposal to Isom to use that place as headquarters for a week or two, while he covered the country lying about.

Anything that meant profit to Isom looked good and fitting in his eyes. The feeding of -another mouth would entail little expense, and so the bargain was struck. Morgan was to have his breakfast and supper each day, and provender for his horse, at the rate of four dollars a week, payable in advance.

Morgan ran over his compendiums and horse books, but Isom was firm for cash; he suggested at least one rcady- rcckoncr on account, but Isom had no need of that. Isom could guess to a hundredweight the contents of a stack of hay, and there never was a banker in this world that could outfigure him on interest. He had no more need for a ready-reckoner than a centipede has of legs. Morgan, seeing that nothing but money would talk there, produced the week's

70 The Rondbo?/

charge on the spot, and drove off to his day's canvassing well satisfied.

Morgan had not been a paying guest in that house two days before the somber domestic tragedy that it roofed was as plain to him as if he had it printed and hound, and in his valise along with the compendiums of his valuable assortment.

lie found it pleasant to return to the farm early of an afternoon and sit in the kitchen door with his pipe, and watch Ollie's face clear of clouds as he talked. Consolation and cheer were strangers to her heart; it required no words from her to tell Morgan that.

Her blushing gratitude for small offices of assistance, such as fetching a pail of water or a basket of garden greens, repaid Morgan all that he missed in sales by cutting short his business day just for the pleasure of returning and talk ing with her.

Isoin was too self-centered, and unconscious of his wife's uncommon prettiness, to be jealous or suspicious of Morgan's late goings or early returns. If a man wanted to pay him four dollars a week for the pleasure of carrying up water, cutting stove-wood or feeding the calves, the fool was welcome to do it as long as his money held.

So it was that old Isoin, blind and deaf and money-mad, set with his own hand and kindled with his own breath, the insidious spark which trustful fools before his day have seen leap into flame and strip them of honor before the eyes of men.

Morgan made a long stay of it in that section, owing to the density of the population, he claimed, and the proximity of several villages which he could reach in a few miles' drive. He was in his third week when Isom was summoned on jury service to the county seat.

Twelve dollars had passed from the book agent's hands into Isom's, and Isom grinned over it as the easiest money

A Stranger a1 the Gate 71

that it ever had been his pleasure to collect. He put it away with his savings, which never had earned interest for a banker, and turned the care of the farm over to Joe.

Jury service at the county seat was an uncertain thing. It might last a day, and then it might tie a man up for two or three weeks, but Isom was able to leave home with a more comfortable feeling than ever before. He had a trustworthy servant to leave behind him, one in whose hands everything would be safe, under whose energy and conscientious effort nothing would drag or fall behind.

Isom felt that he could very well afford to spread on a little soft-soap, as flattery was provinciallv called, and invest Joe with a greater sense of his responsibility, if possible. When occasion required, Isom could rise to flattery as deftly as the best of them. It was an art at which his tongue was wonderfully facile, considering the fact that he mingled so seldom with men in the outside doings of life. His wits had no foil to whet against and grow sharp, save the hard sub stance of his own inflexible nature, for he was born with that shrewd faculty for taking men " on the blind side," as they used to call that trick in Missouri.

" I'm turnin' the whole farm over to you to look after like it was your own while I'm away," said he, "and I'm doing it with the feeling that it's in worthy hands. I know you're not the boy to shirk on me when my back's turned, for you never tried to do it to my face. You stand by me, Joe, and I'll stand by you ; you'll never lose anything by it in the end.

" I may be a crabbed old feller once in a while, and snarl around some, but my bark's worse than my bite, you know th.at by this time. So I'll put everything in your hands, with a feeling that it'll be looked after just the same as if I was here."

" I'll do the best I can by you," promised Joe, his generous heart warming to Isom a little in spite of past indignities,

The

and tlie fact that Joe knew very well the old man's talk was art ful pretense.

"I know you will,'' said Isoin, patting liis shoulder in fatherly approbation. "In case I'm held over there a week, you keep your eye on that agent, arid don't let him stay here a day overtime without another week's board in advance/'

*" I'll at lend to him." promised Joe.

Isom's hand had lingered a minute on Joe's shoulder while lie talked, and the old man's satisfaction over the depth of muscle that he felt beneath it was great, lie stood looking Joe over with quick-shifting, calculating eye*, measuring him in every part, from Hank to hock, like a farrier. lie was gratified to see how Joe had filled out in the past six months. If lu- had paid for a colt and been delivered a draft-horse, his surprise would not have1 been more pleasant.

As it was, he had bargained for thf services of a big- jomted, long-boned lad, and found himself possessed of a man. The fine part of it was that he had nearly two years more of service at ten dollars a month coming from Joe, who was worth twenty of any man's money, and could command it. just as he stood. That was business, that was bargaining.

Isom's starved soul distended over it ; the feeling was warm in his veins, like a gill of home-made brandy. Tie had him. bound bodv and limb, tied in a corner from v,hich he could not escape, to send and call, to fet ch and carr v, lor the bet tei part of two good, profitable years.

As Isom rode awav he rubbed his drv, hard hands above his saddle-horn, feeling more comfortable than h" had 1'eli for many a dav. lie gloated over the excellent bargain Ilia' he had made1 with the Widow Xewbolt ; he grinned at the roots of his old rusty beard. If e-ver a man poke el him.-i-lf in \\\< ribs in the cxevss of self-felicitatiem. Isom Chase ehd it as hi rode along e>n his e>!d buckskin horse that autumn morning. with the sun jus! lifting over the' hill.

A Stranger at the Gate 73

It was an excellent thing, indeed, for a patriot to serve his country once in a while on a jury, thought Isom, es pecially when that patriot had been shrewd in his dealings with the widow and orphan, and had thus secured himself against loss at home while his country called him abroad. Jury duty was nothing but a pleasant season of relaxation in such case.

There would be mileage and per diem, and the state would bear the expense of lodging and meals in the event of his being drawn out of the panel to serve in some long criminal case. Mileage and per diem would come in very nicely, in addition to the four dollars a week that loose-handed book agent was paying. For the first time in his life when called upon for jury service, Isoni went to meet it with no sourness in his face. Mileage and per diem, but best of all, a great strong man left at home in his place; one to be trusted in and depended upon ; one who would do both his master's work and his own.

Joe had no such pleasant cogitations to occupy his mind as he bent his long back to assume the double burden when Isom went away. For many days he had been unquiet with a strange, indefinable unrest, like the yearn of a wild-fowl when the season comes for it to wing away to southern seas. Curtis Morgan was behind that strong, wild feeling; he was the urge of it, and the fuel of its fire.

Why it was so, Joe did not know, although he struggled in his reason to make it clear. For man}7 days, almost from the first, Joe had felt that Morgan should not be in that house ; that his pretext of lingering there on business was a blind too thin to deceive anybody but Isom. Anybody could deceive Isom if he would work his scheme behind a dollar. It was a shield beyond which Isom could not see, and had no wish to inquire.

Joe did not like those late starts which Morgan made of

74 The Romlbo?/

a morning, long after lie and Isoin were in the field, nor the early homings, long before they came in to do the chores. Joe left the house each morning with reluctance, after Isonfs departure, lingering over little things, finding hitherto undis covered tasks to keep him about in the presence of Ollic, and to throw him between her and the talkative boarder, who seemed alwavs hanging at her heels. Since their talk at dinner on the day that Morgan came, Joe had felt a new and deep interest in Ollie, and held for her an unaccountable feel ing of friendliness.

This feeling had been fed, for a few days, by Ollic, who found odd minutes to talk with him as she had not talked before, and bv small attentions and kindnesses. She had greeted him in the morning with smiles, where her face once wore the sad mask of misery; and she had touched his hand sometimes, with encouraging or commending caress.

Joe had yielded to her immediately the unreserved loyalty of his unsophisticated soul. The lot of his bondage was lightened by this new tie, the prospect of the unserved term under Isom was not so forbidding now. And now this fellow Morgan had stepped between them, in some manner bevond his power to define. It was as one who beholds a shadow fall across his threshold, which he can neither pick up nor cast away.

Ollie had no more little attentions for Joe, but endless solicitude for Morgan's comfort ; no more full smiles for him, but onlv the reflections of those which beamed for the chatter ing lounger who made a pretense of selling books while lie made love to another man's wife.

It was this dim groping after the truth, and his half- conception of it, that rendered Joe miserable. lie did not fully understand what Morgan was about, but it was plain to him that the man had no honest purpose there. lie could not repeat his fears to Isom, for Isom's wrath and correction

A Stranger at the Gate 75

would fall on Ollie. Now he was left in charge of his master's house, his lands, his livestock, and his honor.

The vicarious responsibility rested on him with serious weight. Knowing what he knew, and seeing what he saw, should he allow things to proceed as they had been going? Would he be true to the trust that Isom had placed in him with his parting word in standing aside and knowingly per mitting this man to slip in and poison the heart of Isom's wife?

She was lonely and oppressed, and hungry for kind words, but it was not this stranger's office to make green the barren ness of her life. He was there, the bondboy, responsible to his master for his acts. She might come to him for sympathy, and go away with honor. But with this other, this man whose pale eyes shifted and darted like a botfly around a horse's ear, could she drink his counsel and remain undeh'led ?

Joe thought it up and down as he worked in the field near the house that morning, and his face grew hot and his eyes grew fevered, and his resentment against Morgan rose in his throat.

lie watched to see the man drive away on his canvassing round, but the sun passed nine o'clock and he did not go. He had no right there, alone in the house with that woman, putting, who could say, what evil into her heart.

Ten o'clock and the agent's buggy had not left the barn. Joe could contain himself no longer. He was at work in a little stony piece of late clover, so rough he did not like to risk the mower in it. For three hours he had been laying the tumbled swaths in winding tracks across the field, and he had a verv good excuse for going to the well, indeed. Coupled with that was the need of a whet-rock, and behind it all the justification of his position. He was there in his master's place ; he must watch and guard the honor of his house.

70 The

Joe could not set out on that little trip without a good deal of moral cudgeling when it came to the point, although he threw dov.n his scythe with a muttered curse on his lips for the man \\l;o was playing such an underhanded game.

It was on Ollie's account he hesitated. OIlie would think that he suspected her, when tin-re was nothing farther from his m:nd. It was Morgan who would set the snare for her to trip into, and it was Morgan that he was going to send about his business. But OIlie might take offense and turn against him, and make it as unpleasant as she had shown that she could make it agreeable.

Hut duty wa.s stronger than friendship. It was stern and implacable, and there was no pleasant road to take around it and come out with honor at the other end.

Joe made as much noise as he could with his big feet — and that was no inconsiderable' amount — as he approached the house. But near the building the grass was long, and soft underfoot, and it bore Joe around to the kitchen window silently. His lips were too dry to whistle ; his heart was going too fast to carry a tune.

lie paused a little way beyond the window, which stood open with the sun falling through it, listening for the sound of their voices. It was strangely silent for a time when the book-agent was around.

Joe went on, his shadow breaking the sunbeam which whitened the kitchen floor. There was a little quick start. as he came suddenly to the kitchen door; a hurried stir of feet. As he stepped upon the porch he saw Morgan in the door, OIlie not a yard behind him, their hands just breaking their clasp. Joe knew in his heart that Morgan had bei u holding her in his arms.

Ollie's face was Hushed, her hair was disturbed. Her bosom rose and fell like troubled water, her eyes were brighter than Joe ever had seen them. Even Morgan was different,

A Stranger at the Gate 77

sophisticated and brazen that he was. A flash of red showed on his cheekbones and under his eyes ; his thin nostrils were panting like gills.

Joe stood there, one foot on the porch, the other on the ground, as blunt as honesty, as severe as honor. There was nothing in his face that either of them could read to indicate what was surging in his breast. He had caught them, and they wondered if he had sense enough to know.

Joe pushed his hat back from his sweating forehead and looked inquiringly at Morgan.

" Your horse sick, or something ? " he asked.

" No," said Morgan, turning his back on Joe with a little jerk of contempt in his shoulders.

" Well, I think he must be down, or something," said Joe, " for I heard a racket in the barn."

" Why didn't you go and see what was the matter ?" demanded Morgan crossly, snatching his hat from the table.

Ollie was drowned in a confusion of blushes. She stood hanging her head, but Joe saw the quick turn of her eyes to follow Morgan as he went away in long strides toward the barn.

Joe went to the tool-chest which stood in a corner of the kitchen and busied himself clattering over its contents. Pres ently he looked at Ollie, his hand on the open lid of the box.

" Did you see that long whetstone lying around anywhere, Ollie ?" he asked.

She lifted her head with a little start. Joe never had called her familiarly by her name before. It always had been " Missis Chase," distant and respectful.

" No, I haven't seen it, Joe," she answered, the color leaving her cheeks.

" All right, Ollie," said he, holding her eyes with steady gaze, until she shifted hers under the pain of it, and the questioning reproach.

78 The liondboij

Joe slammed down the lid of the tool-chest, as if with the intention of making as much noise as possible.

There was something in the way he had spoken her name that was stranger than the circumstance itself. Perhaps she felt the authority and the protection which Joe meant that his voice should assume ; perhaps she understood that it was the word of a man. She was afraid of him at that moment, as she never had been afraid of Isom in all their married life.

''I suppose Isom put it away somewhere around the barn," said Joe.

"Maybe he did, Joe."

"I'll go down there and see if I can find it," he said.

Ollie knew, as well as Joe himself, that he was making the whetstone the vehicle to carry his excuse for watching Mor gan away from the farm, but she was not certain whether this sudden shrewdness was the deep understanding of a man, or the domineering spirit of a crude lad, jealous of his passing authority.

The uncertainty troubled her. She watched him from the door and saw him approach Morgan, where he was backing his horse into the shafts. ''All right, is he ?" asked Joe, stopping a moment.

Morgan was distant.

" I guess he'll live another day, don't worry about him," said lie, in surly voice.

"What time do you aim to be back today?" pursued Joe. entiivlv unmoved bv Morgan's show of temper.

"Say, I'll set up a bulletin board with my time-table on it if you've got to have it, Mr. Overseer! ' said Morgan, looking up from the buckling of a shaft-strap, his face coloring in anger.

"Well, you don't need to get huffy over it."

" Mind vour business then,*' Morgan growled.

A Stranger at the Gate 79

He didn't wait to discuss the matter farther, but got into the buggy without favoring Joe with as much as another glance, gave his horse a vindictive lash with the whip and drove off, leaving the gate open behind him.

Joe shut it, and turned back to his mowing.

Many a time he paused that morning in his labor, leaning on the snath of his scythe, in a manner of abstraction and seeming indolence altogether strange to him. There was a scene, framed by the brown casing of the kitchen door, with two figures in it, two clinging hands, which persisted in its disturbing recurrence in his troubled mind.

Ollie was on dangerous ground. How far she had advanced, he did not know, but not yet, he believed, to the place where the foulness of Morgan had defiled her beyond cleansing. It was his duty as the guardian of his master's house to watch her, even to warn her, and to stop her before she went too far.

Once he put down his scythe and started to go to the house, his mind full of what he felt it his duty to say.

Then there rose up that feeling of disparity between ma tron and youth which had held him at a distance from Ollie before. He turned back to his work with a blush upon his sun-scorched face, and felt ashamed. But it was not a thing to be deferred until after the damage had been done. He must speak to her that day, perhaps when he should go in for dinner. So he said.

Ollie seemed self-contained and uncommunicative at dinner. Joe thought she was a little out of humor, or that she was falling back into her old gloomy way, from which she had emerged, all smiles and dimples, like a new and youthful creature, on the coming of Morgan. He thought, too, that this might be her way of showing her resentment of the familiarity that he had taken in calling her by her name.

The feeling of deputy-mastership was no longer important upon his shoulders. He shrank down in his chair with a

80 The Itondboy

sense of drawing in, like a snail, while he burned with humili ation and shame. The pinnacle of manhood was too slippery for his clumsy feet ; he had plumped down from its altitudes as swiftly as he had mounted that morning under the spur of duty. He was a boy, and felt that he was a boy, and far, far from being anything nobler, or stronger, or better quali fied to give saving counsel to a woman older, if not wiser, than himself.

Perhaps it was Ollie's purpose to inspire such feeling, and to hold .Joe in his place. She was neither so dull, nor so unpractised in the arts of coquetry, to make such a suppo sition improbable.

It was only when Joe sighted Morgan driving back to the farm late in the afternoon that his feeling of authority asserted itself again, and lifted him up to the task before him. He must let her understand that he knew of what was going on between them. A few words would suffice, and they must be spoken before Morgan entered the house again to pour his poison into her ears.

Ollie was churning that afternoon, standing at her task close by the open door. Joe came past the window, as he had crossed it that morning, his purpose hot upon him, his long legs measuring the ground in immense, swift steps. He carried his hat in his hand, for the day was one of those with the pepper of autumn in it which puts the red in the apple's cheeks.

Ollie heard him approaching ; her bare arm stayed the stroke of the churn-dasher as she looked up. Her face was bright, a smile was in her eyes, revealing the clear depths of them, and the life and the desires that issued out of them, like the waters of a spring in the sun. She was moist and radiant in the sweat of her labor, and clean and fresh and sweet to sec.

Her dress was parted back from her bosom to bare it to

A Stranger at the Gate 81

the refreshment of the breeze, and her skin was as white as the cream on the dasher, and the crimson of her cheeks blended down upon her neck, as if the moisture of her brow had diffused its richness, and spread its beauty there.

She looked at Joe, halted suddenly like a post set upright in the ground, stunned by the revelation of the plastic beauty of neck and bare bosom, and, as their eyes met, she smiled, lifted one white arm and pushed back a straying lock of hair.

Joe's tongue lay cold, and numb as wood against his palate ; no word would come to it ; it would not move. The wonder of a new beauty in God's created things was deep upon him ; a warm fountain rose in him and played and tossed, with a new and pleasurable thrill. He saw and ad mired, but he was not ashamed.

All that he had come to say to her was forgotten, all that he had framed to speak as he bore hastily on toward the house had evaporated from his heated brain. A new world turned its bright colors before his eyes, a new breadth of life had been revealed, it seemed to him. In the pleasure of his discovery he stood with no power in him but to trem ble and stare.

The flush deepened in Ollie's cheeks. She understood what was moving in his breast, for it is given to her kind to know man before he knows himself. She feigned surprise to behold him thus stricken, staring and silent, his face scarlet with the surge of his hot blood.

With one slow-lifted hand she gathered the edffes of her

I~ ~

dress together, withdrawing the revealed secret of her breast.

" Why, Joe ! What arc you looking at, ? " she asked.

"You," he answered, his voice dry and hoarse, like that of one who asks for water at the end of a race. He turned away from her then, saying no more, and passed quickly out of her sight beyond the shrubbery which shouldered the kitchen wall.

82 The Hoiidboy

Slowly Ollic lifted the dasher which had settled to the bottom of the churn, and a smile broke upon her lips. As she went on with the completion of her task, she smiled still, with lips, with eyes, with warm exultation of her strong young body, as over a triumphant ending of some issue long at balance and undefined.

Joe went away from the kitchen door in a strange da/e of faculties. For that new feeling which leaped in him and warmed him to the core, and gave him confidence in his strength never before enjoyed, and an understanding of things hitherto unrevealed, he was glad. But at heart lie felt that he was a traitor to the trust imposed in him, and that he had violated the sanctity of his master's home.

Xow he knew what it was that had made his cheeks flame in anger and his blood leap in resentment when he saw OIlie in the door that morning, all flushed and trembling from Morgan's arms ; now he understood why he had lingered to interpose between them in past (lavs. It was the wild, deep fear of jealousy. lie was in love with his master's wife ! \Vhat had been given him to guard, he had looked upon with unholy hunger ; that which had been left with him to treasure, he had defiled with lustful eyes.

Joe struck across the fields, his work forgotten, now hot with the mounting fires of his newlv discovered passion, now cold with the swelling accusation of a trust betrayed. Jeal ousy, and not a regard for his master's honor, had prompted him to put her on her guard against Morgan. lie had himself coveted his neighbor's wife. He had looked upon a woman to lust after her, he had committed adultery in his heart. Between him and Morgan there was no redeem ing difference. One was as bad as the other, said Joe. Only this difference ; he would stop there, in time, ashamed now of the offending of his eves and the trespass of his heart. Ollie did not know. lie had not wormed his way into her

A Stranger at the Gate 83

heart by pitying her unhappiness, like the false guest who had emptied his lies into her ears.

Joe was able to see now how little deserving Isom was of any such blessing as Ollie, how ill-assorted they were by nature, inclination and age. But God had joined them, for what pains and penances He alone knew, and it was not the work of any man to put them apart.

At the edge of a hazel coppice, far away from the farm house that sheltered the object of his tender thoughts and furtive desires, Joe sat among the first fallen leaves of autumn, fighting to clear himself from the perplexities of that disquieting situation. In the agony of his aching con science, he bowed his head and groaned.

A man's burden of honor had fallen upon him with the disclosure of a man's desires. His boyhood seemed suddenly to have gone from him like the light of a lamp blown out by a puff of wind. He felt old, and responsible to answer now for himself, since the enormity of his offense was plain to his smarting conscience.

And he was man enough to look after Morgan, too. He would proceed to deal with Morgan on a new basis, himself out of the calculation entirely. Ollie must be protected against his deceitful wiles, and against herself as well.

Joe trembled in his newer and clearer understanding of the danger that threatened her as he hastened back to the barn-yard to take up his neglected chores. The thought that Morgan and Ollie were alone in the house almost threw him into a fever of panic and haste.

He must not be guilty of such an oversight again ; he must stand like a stern wall between them, and be able to account for his trust to Isom with unclouded heart.

CHAPTER V

THE SECRET OF THE CLOVER

UNTIL the time he had entered Isom Chase's house, temptation never had come near Joe Xewbolt. lie never had kissed a maiden ; he never had felt the quickening elixir of a soft breast pressed against his own. And so it fell that the sudden conception of what he had unwittingly come to, bore on him with a weight which his sensitive and upright mind magnified into an enormous and crushing shame. While his intention could bear arraignment and come awav with acquittal, the fact that he had been perverted enough in the grain, as he looked at it, to drift unknowingly into love with another man's wife, galled him until his spirit groaned.

Isom did not return that evening; the conclusion of his household was that he had been chosen on a jury. Thev discussed it at supper, Ollie nervously gay, Morgan full of raucous laughter, Joe sober and grudging of his words.

Joe never had borne much of a hand at the table-talk since Morgan came, and before his advent there was none to speak of, so his taciturnity that evening passed without a second thought in the minds of Ollie and her guest. They had words enough for a house full of people, thought Joe. as he saw that for everv word from the lips they sent two speeding from their eves. That had become a language to which he had found the llosetta Stone; it was as plain to him now as Roman text.

Perhaps Morgan regarded her with an affection as sincere as his own. He did not know; but he felt that it could not be as blameless, for if Joe had desired her in the uninterpreted

84

85

passion of his full young heart, he had brought himself up to sudden judgment before the tribunal of his conscience. It would go no farther. He had put his moral foot down and smothered his unholy desire, as he would have stamped out a flame.

It seemed to Joe that there was something in Morgan's eyes which betrayed his heart. Little gleams of his under lying purpose which his levity masked, struck Joe from time to time, setting his wits on guard. Morgan must be watched, like a cat within leaping distance of an unfledged bird. Joe set himself the task of watching, determined then and there that Morgan should not have one dangerous hour alone with Ollie again until Isom came back and lifted the responsi bility of his wife's safety from his shoulders.

For a while after supper that night Joe sat on the bench beside the kitchen door, the grape-vine rustling over his head, watching Ollie as she went to and fro about her work of clearing away. Morgan was in the door, his back against the jamb, leisurely smoking his pipe. Once in a while a snoring beetle passed in above his head to join his fellows around the lamp. As each recruit to the blundering com pany arrived, Morgan slapped at him as he passed, making Ollie laugh. On the low, splotched ceiling of the kitchen the flies shifted and buzzed, changing drowsily from place to place.

" Isom ought to put screens on the windows and doors," said Morgan, looking up at the flies.

" Mosquito bar, you mean ? " asked Ollie, throwing him a smile over her shoulder as she passed.

"No, I mean wire-screens, everybody's gettiir 'ein in now ; I've been thinkin' of takin' 'em on as a side-line."

"It'll be a cold day in July when Isom spends any money just to keep flics out of his house!" said she.

Morgan laughed.

86 TJic Rondboy

"Maybe if a person could show him that they eat up a lot of stufT he'd come around to it," Morgan said.

"Maybe,'' said Ollie, and both of them had their laugh again.

Joe moved on tlic bench, making it creak, an uneasy feeling coming over him. Close as Isom was, and hard-handed and mean, Joe felt that there was a certain indelicacy in his wife's discussion of his traits with a stranger.

Ollie had cleared away the dishes, washed them and placed them in the cupboard, on top of which the one clock of that household stood, scar-faced, hut hoarse-voiced when it struck, and strong as the challenge of an old cock. Already it had struck nine, for they had hcen late in coming to supper, owing to Joe's long set-to with his conscience at the edge of the ha/el-copse in the woods.

Joe got up, stretching his arms, yawning.

"Goin' to he'd, heh ?" asked Morgan.

"No, I don't seem to feel sleepy tonight/' Joe replied.

He went into the kitchen and sat at the table, his elbows on the hoard, his head in his hands, as if turning over some difficult problem in his mind. Presently he fell to raking his shaggy hair with his long fingers; in a moment it was as disorderly as the swaths of clover hay lying out in the moon light in the little stone-set field.

Morgan had filled his pipe, and was after a match at the box behind the stove, with the familiarity of a household inmate. lie winked at Ollie, who was then pulling down her sleeves, her long day's work hcing done.

"Well, do you think you'll be elected ?" he asked, lounging across to Joe, his hands in his pockets.

Morgan wore a shirt as gay-striped as a Persian tent, and he had removed his coat so the world, or such of it as was present in the kitchen, might behold it and admire. Joe withdrew his hands from his forelock and looked at Morgan

The Secret of the Clover

curiously. The lad's eyes were sleep-heavy and red, and he was almost as dull-looking, perhaps, as Morgan imagined him to be.

" What did you say ? " he asked.

" I asked you if you thought you'd be elected this fall," repeated Morgan, in mock seriousness.

" I don't know what you mean," said Joe, turning from him indifferently.

" Why, ain't you runnin' for President on the squash-vine ticket ?" asked Morgan. " I heard you was the can'idate."

Joe got up from the table and moved his chair away with his foot. As he was thus occupied he saw Ollie's shadow on the wall repeat a gesture of caution which she made to Morgan, a lifting of the hand, a shaking of the head. Even the shadow betrayed the intimate understanding between them. Joe went over and stood in the door.

" No use for you to try to be a fool, Morgan ; that's been attended to for you already," said he.

There wasn't much heart in Morgan's laugh, but it would pass for one on account of the volume of sound.

" Oh, let a feller have his joke, won't you, Joe ? " said he.

" Go ahead," granted Joe, leaning his shoulder against the jamb, facing out toward the dark.

Morgan went over and put his hand on the great lad's shoulder, with a show of friendly condescension.

"What would the world be without its jokes ?" he asked. And then, before anybody could answer : " It'd be like home without a mother."

Joe faced him, a slow grin spreading back to his ears.

" Or a ready-reckoner," said he.

Morgan's laugh that time was unfeigned.

" Joe, you've missed your callin'," said he. " You've got no business foolin' away your time on a farm. With that solemn, long-hungry look of yours you ought to be sellin'

88 The

consumption cure and ringbone ointment from the end of a

wagon on the square in Kansas City.*'

4%()r hooks, inavhe,1" suggested .Toe.

"\o-o-o," said Morgan thoughtfully, "I wouldn't just say you're up to the level of hooks. But YOU might rise even to hooks if you'd cultivate your mind and brain. Well, I think I'll flv up to roost. I've got to take an carlv start in the morning and clean up on this neck of the woods tomorrow. Good night, folks.''

"I don't suppose Isom '11 be home tonight," Ollic ventured, as Morgan's feet sounded on the stairs.

" Xo, I guess not,'' Joe agreed, staring thoughtfully at the black oblong of the door.

" If he dot's come, I don't suppose it'll hurt him to cat something cold," she said.

'* I'll wait up a while longer. If he comes I can warm up the col'IVe for him," Joe offered.

" Then I'll go to bed. too." she yawned wearily.

" Yes, you'd better go," said he.

Ollie's room, which was Isom's also when he was there, was in the front of the house, upstairs. Joe heard her feet along the hall, and her door close after her. Morgan was still tramping about in the room next to Joe's, where he slept. It was the best room in the house, better than the one shared by Isom and his wife, and in the end of the house opposite to it. Joe sat quietlv at the table until Morgan's complaining bed-springs told him that the guest had retired. Then he mounted the narrow kitchen stairs to his own chamber.

Joe sat on the edge of his bed and pulled oil' his boots, dropping them noisilv on the floor. Then, with shirt and trousers on, he drew the quilt from his bed, took his pillow under his arm, and opened the door into the hall which divided the house from end to end.

The moon was shining in through the double window in the

Tlie Secret of the Clover 89

end toward Ollie's room ; it lay on the white floor, almost as bright as the sun. Within five feet of that splash of moonlight Joe spread his quilt. There he set his pillow and stretched his long body diagonally across the narrow hall, blocking it like a gate.

Joe roused Morgan next morning at dawn, and busied himself with making a fire in the kitchen stove and bringing water from the well until the guest came down to feed his horse. Morgan was in a crusty humor. He had very little to say, and Joe did not feel that the world was any poorer for his silence.

" This will be my last meal with you," announced Morgan at breakfast. " I'll not be back tonight,"

Ollie was paler than usual, Joe noticed, and a cloud of dejection seemed to have settled over her during the night. She did not appear to be great!}' interested in Morgan's statement, although she looked up from her breakfast with a little show of friendly politeness. Joe thought that she did not seem to care for the agent ; the tightness in his breast was suddenly and gratefully eased.

" You haven't finished out your week, there'll be something coming to you on what 3Tou've paid in advance," said she.

" Let that go," said Morgan, obliterating all claim with a sweep of his hand.

" I think you'd better take back what's coming to you,"' suggested Joe.

Morgan turned to him with stiff severity.

"Are 3rou the watch-dog of the old man's treasurv?" he sneered.

"Maybe I am, for a day or two," returned Joe, "and if you step on me I'll bite."

He leveled his steady gray eyes at Morgan's shifting orbs, and held them there as if to drive in some hidden import of his words. Morgan seemed to understand. He colored,

90 The Bondboy

laughed shortly, and busied himself buttering a griddle-cake.

Ollic, pale and silent, had not looked up during this by- passage between the two men. Her manner was of one who expected something, which she dreaded and feared to face.

Morgan took the road early. Joe saw him go with a feeling of relief. lie felt like a swollen barrel which had burst its close-binding hoops, he thought, as he went back to the place where he dropped his scythe yesterday.

As he worked through the long morning hours Joe struggled to adjust himself to the new conditions, resulting from the discovery of his own enlargement and understanding. It would be a harder matter now to go on living there with Ollie. Kach day would be a trial by fire, the weeks and months a lengthening highway strewn with the embers of his own smoldering passion. Something might happen, almost any day, youth and youth together, galled bv the same hand of oppression, that would overturn his peace forever. Yet, he could not leave. The bond of his mother's making, stamped with the seal of the law, held him captive there.

At length, after spending a harrowing morning over it, he reached the determination to stand up to it like a man, and serve Isom as long as he could do so without treason. When the day came that his spirit weakened and his continence failed, he would throw down the burden and desert. That he would do, even though his mother's hopes must fall and his own dreams of redeeming the place of his birth, to which he was attached by a sentiment almost poetic, must dissolve like vapor in the sun.

It was mid-afternoon when Joe finished his mowing and stood casting his eves up to the skv for signs of rain. Then- being none, lie concluded that it would be safe to allow yesterday's cutting to lie another night in the field while he put in the remainder of the day with his scythe in the lower orchard plot, where the clover grew rank among the trees.

91

Satisfied that he had made a showing thus far with which Isom could find no fault, Joe tucked the snath of his scythe under his arm and set out for that part of the orchard which lay beyond the hill, out of sight of the barn and house, and from that reason called the "lower orchard" by Isom, who had planted it with his own hand more than thirty years ago.

There noble wine-sap stretched out mighty arms to fondle willow-twig across the shady aisles, and maidenblush rubbed cheeks with Spitzenberg, all reddening in the sun. Under many of the trees the ground was as bare as if fire had devastated it, for the sun never fell through those close- woven branches from May to October, and there no clover grew. But in the open spaces between the rows it sprang rank and tall, troublesome to cut with a mower because of the low-swinging, fruit-weighted limbs.

Joe waded into this paradise of fruit and clover bloom, dark leaf and straining bough, stooping now and then to pick up a fallen apple and try its mellowness with his thumb. They were all hard, and fit only for cider }ret, but their rich colors beguiled the e}re into betrayal of the palate. Joe fixed his choice upon a golden willow-twig. As he stood rubbing the apple on his sleeve, his eye running over the task ahead of him in a rough estimate of the time it would require to clean up the clover, he started at sight of a white object dangling from a bough a few rods ahead of him. His attention curiously held, he went forward to investigate, when a little start of wind swung the object out from the limb and he saw that it was a woman's sun-bonnet, hanging basket-wise by its broad strings. There was no question whose it was ; he had seen the same bonnet hanging in the kitchen not three hours before, fresh from the ironing board.

Joe dropped his apple unbittcn, and strode forward, puzzled a bit over the circumstance. He wondered what

7

92 The Komlboy

had brought Ollie down there.', and where she was then. She never came to that part of the orchard to gather wind-falls for the pigs- — she was not gathering them at. all during Isom's absence, lie had relieved her of that — and there was nothing else to call her away from the house at that time of the dav.

The lush clover struck him mid-thigh, progress through it was difficult. Joe lifted his feet like an Indian, toes turned in a bit, and this method of walking made it appear as if lie stalked something, for he moved without noise.

lie had dropped his scythe with the apple, his eves held Olhe's swinging bonnet as he approached it as if it were some rare bird which he hoped to steal upon and take. Thus coming on, with high-lifted feet, his breath short from excitement, Joe was within ten yards of the bonnet win 11 a voice sounded behind the intervening screen of clover and boughs.

Joe dropped in his tracks, as if ham-strung, crouched in the clover, pressed his hands to his mouth to stifle the gro;m that rose to his lips. It was Morgan's voice. lie had conic sneaking back while the watch-dog was oil' guard, secure 111 the belief that he had gone away. As Joe crouched there hidden in the clover, trembling and cold with anger, Mor gan's voice rose in a laugh.

''Well, I wouldn't have given him credit for that much sense if I hadn't seen him with mv own eyes,*' said he.

"lie's smarter than he looks," said Ollie, their voict s distinct in Joe's shamed ears, for it was as quiet in the orchard as on the first day.

They both laughed over what she said.

"lie thinks I'm gone, he'll go to bed early tonight," said Morgan. "Don't bother about bringing anything with you."

"Not even mv diamonds?" she laughed.

Morgan's gruffer mirth joined her, and Joe found himself

Tlie Secret of the Clover 93

straining to hear, although he despised himself for spying and eavesdropping, even on guilt.

"We can get on without the diamonds," said Morgan, " and I don't suppose you've got any ball dresses or sealskin cloaks ? "

" Three calico wrappers that he's bought me, and a dress or two that I had when I came," said Ollie, bitterly.

" You'll have all you want in a day or two, honey," said Morgan, in comforting voice.

They were silent a while ; then Joe heard her ask the time. Morgan told her it was half-past four.

"Oh, I had no idea it was that late — time goes so fast when I'm with you ! I must go back to the house now, Joe might come in and find me gone."

" Yes, I'd like to wring his damned neck ! " said Morgan.

" He's a good boy, Curtis," she defended, but with lightness, "but he's a little- — "

She held her words back coquettishly.

" Heh ? " queried Morgan.

" Jealous, you old goose ! Can't you see it ? "

Morgan had a great laugh over that. From the sound of his voice Joe knew that he was standing, and his whole body ached with the fear that they would discover him lying there in the clover. Not that he was afraid of Morgan, but that he dreaded the humiliation which Ollie must suffer in knowing that her guilt}7 tryst had been discovered.

" I'll meet you at the gate, I'll have the buggy on down the road a little ways," Morgan told her. " There's only a little while between you and liberty now, sweetheart."

Joe dared not look up nor move, but he needed no eyes' to know that Morgan kissed her then. After that he heard her running away toward the house. Morgan stood there a little while, whistling softly. Soon Joe heard him going in the direction of the road.

94- The Bondboy

Morgan was quite a distance ahead when Joe sprang out of his concealment and followed him, for he wanted to give Ollie time to pass beyond ear-shot of the orchard. As Joe made no attempt to smother the sound of his feet, Morgan heard him while he was still several yards behind him. lie turned, stopped, and waited for Joe to come up.

Joe's agitation was plain in his face, his shocked eves stared out of its pallor as if they had looked upon violence and death.

''What's the matter, kid ?" inquired Morgan carelessly.

" I've got something to say to you," answered Joe thickly. lie was panting, more from rage than exertion; his hands trembled.

Morgan looked him over from boots to bandlcss hat with the same evidence of curiosity as a person displays when turning some washed-up object with the foot on the sands. It was as if he had but an abstract interest in the youth, a feeling which the incident had obtruded upon him without penetrating the reserve of his private cogitations.

" Kid, you look like you'd seen a snake," said he.

"You let that woman alone — you've got to let her alone, I tell you ! " said Joe with explosive suddenness, his passion out of hand.

Morgan's face grew red.

"Mind your own business, you sneakin' skunk!" said he.

"I am minding it," said Joe; "but maybe not as well as I ought to 'a' done. Isom left me here in his place to watch and look after things, but you've sneaked in under my arm like a dirty, thieving dog, and you've — you've —

Morgan thrust his fist before Joe's face.

"That'll do now — that'll do out of you!" he threatened.

Joe caught Morgan's wrist with a quick, snapping move ment, and slowly bent the threatening arm down, Morgan struggling, foot to foot with him in the test of strength. Joe

95

held the captured arm down for a moment, and they stood breast to breast, glaring into each other's eyes. Then with a wrench that spun Morgan half round and made him stagger, Joe flung his arm free.

"Now, you keep away from here — keep away!" he warned, his voice growing thin and boyish in the height of his emotion, as if it would break in the treble shallows.

" Don't fool with me or I'll hurt you," said Morgan. " Keep your nose "

" Let her alone ! " commanded Joe sternly, his voice sinking again even below its accustomed level, gruff and deep in his chest. " I heard you — I didn't mean to, but I couldn't help it — and I know what you're up to tonight. Don't come around here tonight after her, for I'm not going to let her go."

" Ya-a, you pup, you pup ! " said Morgan nastily.

"It's a hard life for her here — I know that better than you do," said Joe, passing over the insult, " but you can't give her any better — not as good. What you've done can't be undone now, but I can keep you from dragging her down any further. Don't you come back here tonight ! "

" If you keep your fingers out of the fire," said Morgan, looking at the ground, rolling a fallen apple with his toe, " you'll not get scorched. You stick to your knittin' and don't meddle with mine. That'll be about the healthiest thing you can do ! "

" If Isom knew what you've done he'd kill you — if he's even half a man," said Joe. " She was a good woman till you came, you hound ! "

" She's a good woman yet," said Morgan, with some feeling, " too good for that old hell-dog she's married to ! "

'' Then let her stay good — at least as good as she is," advised Joe.

" Oh, hell ! " said Morgan disgustedly.

96 The Bondboi/

"Yon can't have her," persisted Joe.

"We'll see about that, too," said Morgan, his manner and voice threatening. "What're you goin' to do — pole oil and tell the old man ? "

" I'll do what Isoin left me here to do, the rest of the time he's away," said Joe. " Ollie shan't leave the house tonight."

" Yes, vou flat-bellied shad, you want her yourself — you're stuck on her yourself, you fool! Yes, and you've got .just about as much show of gittin' her as I have of jumpin' over that tree!" derided Morgan.

''No matter what I think of her, good or bad, she'd he safe with me," Joe told him, searching his face accusingly.

"Yes, of course she would!" scoffed Morgan. "You're one of these saints that'll live all your life by a punkin and never poke it with your finger. Oh, yes, I know your kind!"

" I'm not going to quarrel with you, Morgan, unless you make me," said Joe; "but you've got the wrong end of the stick. I don't want her, not the way you do, anyhow."

Morgan looked at him closely, then put out his hand with a gesture of conciliation.

" I'll take that back, Joe," said he. " You're not that kind of a kid. You mean well, but you don't understand. Look-a here, let me tell vou, Joe: I love that little woman, kid, just as honest and true as any man could love her, and she thinks the world and all of me. I only want to take her away from here because I love her and want to make her happy. Don't you see it, kid? "

"How would you do that? You couldn't marry her."

" No! for a while, of course," admitted Morgan. "But the old possum he'd get a divorce in a little while."

" Well, I'm not going to let her go," Joe declared, turning away as if that settled the matter for good and all. "You've done — I could kill you for what you've done!" said he, with sudden vehemence.

The Secret of the Clover 97

Morgan looked at him curiously, his careless face softening.

" Now, see here, don't you look at it that way, Joe," he argued. " I'm not so bad ; neither is Ollie. You'll understand these matters better when you're older and know more about the way men feel. She wanted love, and I gave her love. She's been worked to rags and bones by that old devil ; and what I've done, and what I want to do, is in kindness, Joe. I'll take her away from here and provide for her like she was a queen, I'll give her the love and comradeship of a young man and make her happy, Joe. Don't }'ou see?"

" But you can't make her respectable," said Joe. " I'm not going to let her leave with you, or go to you. If she wants to go after Isom comes back, then let her. But not before. Now, 3rou'd better go on away, Morgan, before I lose my temper. I was mad when I started after you, but I've cooled down. Don't roil me up again. Go on your way, and leave that woman alone."

" Joe, you're a man in everything but sense," said Morgan, not unkindly, " and I reckon if you and I was to clinch we'd raise a purty big dust and muss things around a right smart. And I don't know who'd come out on top at the finish, neither. So I don't want to have any trouble with you. All I ask of you is step to one side and leave us two alone in what we've started to do and got all planned to carry out. Go to bed tonight and go to sleep. You're not supposed to know that anything's due to happen, and if }TOU sleep sound you'll find a twenty-dollar bill under your hat in the morning."

The suggestion brought a blush to Joe's face. He set his lips as if fighting down hot words before he spoke.

" If I have to tie her I'll do it," said Joe earnestly. " She shan't leave. And if I have to take down that old gun from the kitchen wall to keep you away from here till Isom comes home, I'll take it down. You can come to the gate tonight if you want to, but if you do —

08 The Handbag

Joe looked him straight in the eyes. Morgan's face lost its color. lie turned as if to see that his horse was still standing, and stood that way a little while.

'"I guess I'll drive on otl', Joe," said Morgan with a sigh, as if he had reached the conclusion after a long consideration.

"All right," said Joe.

"No hard feelin's left behind me?" facing Joe again with his old, self-assured smile. He offered his hand, but Joe did not take it.

"As long as YOU never come back," said Joe.

Morgan walked to the fence, his head bent, thoughtfully. Jot' followed, as if to satisfy himself that the wily agent was not going to work some subterfuge, having small faith in his promise to leave, much less in the probability that he would stay awav.

Joe stood at the fence, looking after Morgan, long after the dust of his wheels had settled again to the road. At last he went back to the place where he had dropped his scythe, and cut a swath straight through to the tree where Ollie's bonnet had hung. And there he mowed the trampled clover, and obliterated Jier footprints with his own.

The weight of his discovery was like some dead thing on his breast. lie felt that Ollie had fallen from the high heaven of his regard, never to mount to her place again. But Isom did not know of this bitter thing, this shameful shadow af his door. As far as it rested with him to hold the secret in his heart, poison though it was to him, Isom should never know.

CHAPTER VI

BLOOD

JOE had debated the matter fully in his mind before going in to supper. Since he had sent her tempter away, there was no necessity of taking Ollie to task, thus laying bare his knowledge of her guilty secret. He believed that her conscience would prove its own flagellant in the days to come, when she had time to reflect and repent, away from the debauching influence of the man who had led her astray. His blame was all for Morgan, who had taken advantage of her loneliness and discontent.

Joe now recalled, and understood, her reaching out to him for sympathy ; he saw clearly that she had demanded some thing beyond the capacity of his unseasoned heart to give. Isom was to blame for that condition of her mind, first and most severely of all. If Isom had been kind to her, and given her only a small measure of human sympathy, she would have clung to him, and rested in the shelter of his protection, content against all the world. Isom had spread the thorns for his own feet, in his insensibility to all human need of gentleness.

Joe even doubted, knowing him as he did, whether the gray old miser was capable of either jealousy or shame. He did not know, indeed, what Isom might say to it if his wife's infidelity became known to him, but he believed that he would rage to insanity. Perhaps not because the sting of it would penetrate to his heart, but in his censure of his wife's extrava gance in giving away an affection which belonged, under the form of marriage and law, to him.

Joe was ashamed to meet Ollie at the table, not for

99

100 The Itondbo?/

liiinsclf, l)ul for her. lie was afraid that his eves, or his manner, might betray what he knew. lie might have spared himsrlf this feeling of humiliation on her account, for Ollie, all unconscious of his discovery, was bright and full of smiles. Joe could not rise- to her level of light-hcartcdncss, and, there being no common ground between them, he lapsed into his old-time silence over his plate.

After supper Joe flattened himself against the kitchen wall where he had sat the night, before on the bench outside the door, drawing back into the shadow. There he sat and thought it over again, unsatisfied to remain silent, yet afraid to speak. lie did not want to be unjust, for perhaps she did not intend to meet Morgan at all. In addition to this doubt of her intentions, he had the hope that Isom would come verv soon. lie decided at length that he would go to bed and lie awake until he heard Ollie pass up to her room, when he would slip down again and wait. If she came down, he would know that she intended to carry out her part of the compact with Morgan. Then he could tell her that Morgan would not come.

Ollie was not long over her work that night. When Joe heard her door close, he took his boots in his hand and went downstairs. lie had left his hat on the kitchen table, accord ing to his nightlv custom; the moonlight coming in through the window reminded him of it as he passed. lie put it on. thinking that he would take a look around the road in the vicinity of the gate, for he suspected that Morgan's submis sive going masked some iniquitous intent. Joe pulled on hi> boots, sitting in the kitchen door, listening a moment before he closed it after him, and walked softly toward the road.

A careful survey as far as he could see in the bright moon light, satisfied him that Morgan had not left his horse and buggy around there anywhere. lie might come later. Joe decided to wait around there and sec.

Blood 101

It was a cool autumn night ; a prowling wind moved silently. Over hedgerow and barn roof the moonlight lay in white radiance ; the dusty highway beyond the gate was changed by it into a royal road. Joe felt that there were memories abroad as he rested his arms on the gate-post. Moonlight and a soft wind always moved him with a feeling of indefinite and shapeless tenderness, as elusive as the echo of a song. There was a soothing quality in the night for him, which laved his bruised sensibilities like balm. lie expanded under its influence; the tumult of his breast began to subside.

The revelations of that day had fallen rudely upon the youth's delicately tuned and finely adjusted nature. He had recoiled in horror from the sacrilege which that house had suffered. In a measure he felt that he was guilty along with Ollie in her unspeakable sin, in that he had been so stupid as to permit it.

But, he reflected as he waited there with his hand upon the weathered gate, great and terrible as the upheaval of his day- world had been, the night had descended unconscious of it. The moonlight had brightened untroubled by it ; the wind had come from its wooded places unhurried for it, and unvexed. After all, it had been only an unheard discord in the eternal, vast harmony. The things of men were matters of infinitesi mal consequence in nature. The passing of a nation of men would not disturb its tranquillity as much as the falling of a leaf.

It was then long past the hour when he was habitually asleep, and his vigil weighed on him heavily. No one had passed along the road ; Morgan had not come in sight. Joe was weary from his day's internal conflict and external toil. He began to consider the advisability of returning to bed.

Perhaps, thought he, his watch was both futile and unjust. Ollie did not intend to keep her part in the agreement. She must be burning with remorse for her transgression.

102 The Bondboy

He turned and walked slowly toward the house, stopping a little way along to look back and make sure that Morgan had not appeared. Thus he stood a little while, and then resumed his way.

The house was before him, shadows in the sharp angles of its roof, its windows catching the moonlight like wakeful eves. There was a calm over it, and a somnolent peace. It seemed impossible that iniquitous desires could live and grow on a night like that. Ollie must be asleep, said he, and repentant in her dreams.

Joe felt that he might go to his rest with honest v. It would be welcome, as the desire of tired youth for its bed is strong. At the well he stopped again to look back for Morgan.

As he turned a light flashed in the kitchen, gleamed a moment, went out suddenly. It was as if a match had been struck to look for something quickly found, and then blown out with a puff of breath.

At once the fabric of his hopes collapsed, and his honest attempts to lift Ollie back to her smirched pedestal and invest her with at least a part of her former purity of heart, came to a painful end. She was preparing to leave. The hour when he must speak had come.

He approached the door noiselessly. It was closed, as he had left it, and within everything was still. As he stood hesitating before it, his hand lifted to lay upon the latch, his heart laboring in painful lunges against his ribs, it opened without a sound, and Ollie stood before him against the background of dark.

The moonlight came down on him through the half-bare arbor, and fell in mottled patches around him where he stood, his hand still lifted, as if to help her on her way. Ollie caught her breath in a frightened start, and shrank back.

"You don't need to be afraid, Ollie — it's Joe," said he.

Blood 103

" Oh, you scared me so ! " she panted.

Each then waited as if for the other to speak, and the silence seemed long.

"Were you going out somewhere?" asked Joe.

" No ; I forgot to put away a few things, and I came down," said she. " I woke up out of my sleep thinking of them," she added.

" Well ! " said he, wronderingly. " Can I help you anv> Ollie?"

" No ; it's only some milk and things," she told him. " You know how Isom takes on if he finds anything undone. I was afraid he might come in tonight and see them."

" Well ! " said Joe again, in a queer, strained way.

He was standing in the door, blocking it with his body, clenching the jamb with his hands on either side, as if to bar any attempt that she might make to pass.

"Will you strike a light, Ollie? I want to have a talk with you," said he gravely.

"Oh, Joe!" she protested, as if pleasantly scandalized by the request, intentionally misreading it.

"Have you got another match in your hand? Light the lamp."

"Oh, what's the use?" said she. "I only ran down for a minute. We don't need the light, do we, Joe? Can't you talk without it?"

" No ; I want you to light the lamp," he insisted.

" I'll not do it ! " she flared suddenly, turning as if to go to her room. " You've not got any right to boss me around in my own house ! "

" I don't suppose I have, Ollie, and I didn't mean to," said he, stepping into the room.

Ollie retreated a few steps toward the inner door, and stopped. Joe could hear her excited breathing as he flung his hat on the table.

104 The

" Ollic, what I've got to say to you lias to be said sooner or later tonight, and you'd just as well hear it now," said Joe, trying to assure her of his friendly intent by speaking softly, although his voice was tremulous. "Morgan's gone; he'll not be back- — at least not tonight/'

"Morgan?" said she. ''What do you mean — what do I care where he's gone?"

Joe made no reply. lie fumbled for the box behind the stove and scraped a slow sulphur match against the pipe. Its light discovered Ollie shrinking against the wall where she had stopped, near the door.

She was wearing a straw hat, which must have been a part of her bridal gear. A long white veil, which, she wore scarf- wise over the front display of its ilowers and fruits, came down and crossed behind her neck. Its ends dangled upon her breast. The dress was one that Joe never had seen her wear before, a girlish white thing with narrow ruffles. lie wondered as he looked at her with a great ache in his heart, how so much seeming puritv could be so base and foul. In that bitter moment he cursed old Isom in his heart for goad ing her to this desperate bound. She had been starving for a man's love, and for the lack of it she had thrown herself away on a dog.

Joe fitted the chimney on the burner of the lamp, and stood in judicial seriousness before her, the stub of the burning match wasting in a little bla/.e between his fingers.

'; Morgan's gone," he repeated. " and he'll never come back. I know all about you two, and what you'd planned to do."

Joe dropped the stub of the match and set his loot on it.

Ollie stared at him, her face as white as her bridal dress, her eves big, like a barn-yard animal's eyes in a lanternV light. She was gathering and wadding the ends of her veil in her hands; her lips were open, showing the points of her small, white teeth.

Blood 105

" Isom — he'll kill me ! " she whispered.

" Isom don't know about it," said Joe.

"You'll tell him!"

"No."

Relief flickered in her face. She leaned forward a little, eagerly, as if to speak, but said nothing. Joe shrank back from her, his hand pressing heavily upon the table.

" I never meant to tell him," said he slowly.

She sprang toward him, her hands clasped appealingly.

" Then you'll let me go, you'll let me go? " she cried eagerly. " I can't stay here," she hurried on, " you know I can't stay here, Joe, and suffer like he's made me suffer the past year ! You say Morgan won't come —

" The coward, to try to steal a man's wife, and deceive you that way, too ! " said Joe, his anger rising.

" Oh, you don't know him as well as I do ! " she defended, shaking her head solemnly. " He's so grand, and good, and I love him, Joe — oh, Joe, I love him ! "

" It's wrong for you to say that ! " Joe harshly reproved her. " I don't want to hear you say that ; you're Isom's wife."

" Yes, God help me," said she.

" You could be worse off than you are, Ollie ; as it is you've got a name! "

"What's a name when you despise it?" said she bitterly.

" Have you thought what people would say about you if you went away with Morgan, Ollie?" inquired Joe gently.

" I don't care. We intend to go to some place where we're not known, and —

" Hide," said Joe. " Hide like thieves. And that's what you'd be, both of you, don't you see? You'd never be com fortable and happy, Ollie, skulking around that way."

" Yes, I would be happy," she maintained sharply. " Mr. Morgan is a gentleman, and he's good. He'd be proud of me, he'd take care of me like a lady."

100 The Hondboy

" For a little while maybe, till he found somebody else that he thought more of," said Joe. "When it comes so easy to take one man's wife, he wouldn't stop at going off with another."

"It's a lie — you know it's a lie! Curtis Morgan's a gentleman, I tell you, and I'll not hear you run him down!'1

"Gentlemen and ladies don't have to hide," said Joe.

"You're lying to me!" she charged him suddenly, her face coloring angrily, "lie wouldn't go away from here on the say-so of a kid like you. lie's down there waiting for me, and I'm going to him."

" I wouldn't deceive you, Ollie," said he, leaving his post near the door, opening a wav for her to pass. " If you think he's there, go and see. But I tell you he's gone. He asked me to shut mv eves to this thing and let vou and him carry it out; but I couldn't do that, so he went away."

She knew he was not deceiving her, and she turned on him with reproaches.

" You want to chain me here and see me work myself to death for that old miserly Isom!" she stormed. "You're just as bad as he is; you ain't got a soft spot in your heart."

"Yes, I'd rather see you stay here with Isom and do a nigger woman's work, like you have been doing ever since you married him. than let you go away with Morgan for on<> mistaken day. What you'd have to face with him would kill you quicker than work, and you'd suffer a thousand times more sorrow."

"What do you know about it?" she sneered. "You never loved anybody; That's the way with you religious fools — you don't get any fun out of life yourselves, and you want to spoil everybody else's. Well, you'll not spoil mine, I tell you. I'll go to Morgan this very night, and you can't stop me ! "

"Well, we'll see about that, Ollie," he told her, showing a

Blood 107

little temper. " I told him that I'd keep you here if I had to tie you, and I'll do that, too, if I have to. Isom —

" Isom, Isom ! " she mocked. " Well, tell Isom }TOU spied on me and tell the old fool what you saw — tell him, tell him! Tell him all you know, and tell him more ! Tell the old devil I hate him, and always did hate him ; tell him I've got out of bed in the middle of the night more than once to get the ax and kill him in his sleep ! Tell him I wish he was dead and in hell, where he belongs, and I'm sorry I didn't send him there ! What do I care about Isom, or 3'ou, or anybody else, you spy, you sneaking spy !"

" I'll go with you to the road if you want to see if he's there," Joe offered.

Ollie's fall from the sanctified place of irreproachable womanhood had divested her of all awe in his eyes. He spoke to her now as he would have reasoned with a child.

"' No, I suppose you threatened to go after Isom, or some thing like that, and he went away," said she. " You couldn't scare him, he wouldn't run from you. Tomorrow he'll send me word, and I'll go to him in spite