"What do you think I ought to do about this?" asked Jane; and Virginia, with strange qualms at heart, thought that her mother had put it that way to avoid asking if the worst was really to be faced.

Evans stroked his bushy beard wisely. "Do about it?" he repeated, as he went back to his chair, leaving the patient to b.u.t.ton her dress with stiff, fumbling fingers. "I mought put you on a course of my blood purifier and wait developments, and, Sister Hemingway, if I was like the regular run of doctors, with their own discoveries on the market, I'd do it in the interest of science, but I'm not going to take the resk on my shoulders. A man who gives domestic remedies like mine is on safe ground when he's treating ordinary diseases, but I reckon a medical board would decide that this was a case for a good, steady knife. Now, I reckon you'd better get on the train and take a run down to Atlanta and put yourself under Dr. Putnam, who is noted far and wide as the best cancer expert in the land."

"Then-then that's what it is?" faltered Mrs. Hemingway.

"Oh yes, that's what you've got, all right enough," said Evans, "and the thing now is to uproot it."

"How-how much would it be likely to cost?" the widow asked, her troubled glance on Virginia's horror-stricken face.

"That depends," mused Evans. "I've sent Putnam a number of cases, and he would, I think, make you a special widow-rate, being as you and me live so nigh each other. At a rough guess, I'd say that everything-board and room and nurse, treatment, medicines, and attention-would set you back a hundred dollars."

"But where am I to get that much money?" Jane said, despondently.

"Well, thar you have me," Evans laughed. "I reckon you know your resources better than anybody else, but you'll have to rake it up some way. You ain't ready to die yet. Callihan has a mortgage on your land, hain't he?"

"Yes, and on my crop not yet gathered," Jane sighed; "he even included every old hoe and axe and piece of harness, and the cow and calf, and every chair and knife and fork and cracked plate in the house."

"Well," and Evans rose and reached for his hat, "as I say, you'll have to get up the money; it will be the best investment you could make."

When he had left, Virginia, horror-stricken, sat staring at her mother, a terrible fear in her face and eyes.

"Then it really _is_ a cancer?" she gasped.

"Yes, I was afraid it was all along," said Jane. "You see, the peddler said so plainly, and he told Ann Boyd about it. Virginia, she didn't know I knew how bad it was, for she hinted at some awful end that was to overtake me, as if it would be news to me. Daughter, I'm going to try my level best to throw this thing off. I always had a fear of death. My mother had before me; she was a Christian woman, and was prepared, if anybody was, and yet she died in agony. She laid in bed and begged for help with her last breath. But my case is worse than hers, for my one foe in this life is watching over me like a hawk. Oh, I can't stand it!

You must help me study up some way to raise that money. If it was in sight, I'd feel better. Doctors can do wonders these days, and I'll go to that big one if I possibly can."

XIII

One afternoon, about a week later, as Ann Boyd sat in her weaving-room twisting bunches of carded wool into yarn on her old spinning-wheel, the whir of which on her busy days could be heard by persons pa.s.sing along the road in front of her gate, a shadow fell on her floor, and, looking up, she saw a tall, handsome young man in the doorway, holding his hat in one hand, a valise in the other. He said nothing, but only stood smiling, as if in hearty enjoyment of the surprise he was giving her.

"Luke King!" she exclaimed. "You, of all people on the face of the earth!"

"Yes, Aunt Ann"-he had always addressed her in that way-"here I am, like a bad coin, always turning up."

The yellow bunches of wool fell to the floor as she rose up and held out her hand.

"You know I'm glad to see you, my boy," she said, "but I wasn't expecting you; I don't know as I ever looked for you to come back here again, where you've had such a hard time of it. When you wrote me you was the chief editor of a paying paper out there, I said to myself that you'd never care to work here in the mountains, where there is so little to be made by a brainy man."

"If I were to tell you the main thing that brought me back you'd certainly scold me," he laughed; "but I never hid a fault from you, Aunt Ann. The truth is, good, old-fashioned home-sickness is at the bottom of it."

"Homesickness, for _this_?" Ann sneered contemptuously, as she waved her hand broadly-"homesick for the hard bed you had at your step-father's, in a pine-pole cabin, with a mud chimney and windows without gla.s.s, when you've been the equal, out there, of the highest and best in the land, and among folks that could and would appreciate your talents and energy and were able to pay cash for it at the highest market-price?"

"You don't understand, Aunt Ann." He flushed sensitively under her stare of disapproval as he sat down in a chair near her wheel. "Maybe you never did understand me thoroughly. I always had a big stock of sentiment that I couldn't entirely kill. Aunt Ann, all my life away has only made me love these old mountains, hills, and valleys more than ever, and, finally, when a good opportunity presented itself, as-"

"Oh, you are just like the rest, after all. I'd hoped to the contrary,"

Ann sighed. "But don't think I'm not glad to see you, Luke." Her voice shook slightly. "G.o.d knows I've prayed for a sight of the one face among all these here in the mountains that seemed to respect me, but there was another side to the matter. I wanted to feel, Luke, that I had done you some actual good in the world-that the education I helped you to get was going to lift you high above the average man. When you wrote about all your good-luck out there, the big salary, the interest the stockholders had given you in the paper that bid fair to make a pile of money, and stood so high in political influence, I was delighted; but, Luke, if a sentimental longing for these heartless red hills and their narrow, hide-bound inhabitants has caused you actually to throw up-"

"Oh, it's really not so bad as that," King hastened to say. "The truth is-though I really _was_ trying to keep from bragging about my good-fortune before I'd had a chance to ask after your health-the truth is, Aunt Ann, it's business that really brings me back, though I confess it was partly for sentimental reasons that I decided on the change. It's this way: A company has been formed in Atlanta to run a daily paper on somewhat similar lines to the one we had in the West, and the promoters of it, it seems, have been watching my work, and that sort of thing, and so, only a few days ago, they wrote offering me a good salary to a.s.sume chief charge and management of the new paper. At first I declined, in a deliberate letter, but they wouldn't have it that way-they telegraphed me that they would not listen to a refusal, and offered me the same financial interest as the one I held."

"Ah, they did, eh?" Ann's eye for business was gleaming. "They offered you as good as you had?"

"Better, as it has turned out, Aunt Ann," said King, modestly, "for when my a.s.sociates out there read the proposition, they said it was my duty to myself to accept, and with that they took my stock off my hands. They paid me ten thousand dollars in cash, Aunt Ann. I've got that much ready money and a position that is likely to be even better than the one I had. So, you see, all my home-sickness-"

"Ten thousand dollars!" Ann cried, her strong face full of gratification. "Ten thousand dollars for my st.u.r.dy mountain-boy! Ah, that will open the eyes of some of these indolent know-it-all louts who said the money spent on your education was thrown in the fire. You are all right, Luke. I'm a judge of human stock as well as cattle and horses. If you'd been a light fellow you'd have dropped me when you began to rise out there; but you didn't. Your letters have been about the only solace I've had here in all my loneliness and strife, and here you are to see me as soon as you come-that is, I reckon, you haven't been here many days."

"I got to Darley at two o'clock to-day," King smiled, affectionately. "I took the hack to Springtown and left my trunk there, to walk here. I haven't seen mother yet, Aunt Ann. I had to see you first."

"You are a good boy, Luke," Ann said, with feeling, as was indicated by her husky voice and the softening of her features. "So you _are_ going to see your mother?"

"Yes, I'm going to see her, Aunt Ann. For several years I have felt resentment about her marrying as she did, but, do you know, I think success and good-fortune make one forgiving. Somehow, with all my joy over my good-luck, I feel like I'd like to shake even lazy old Mark Bruce by the hand and tell him I am willing to let by-gones be by-gones.

Then, if I could, I'd like to help him and my mother and step-brother and step-sisters in some material way."

"Huh! I don't know about that," Ann frowned. "Help given to them sort is certainly throwed away; besides, what's yours is yours, and if you started in to distribute help you'll be ridden to death. No, go to see them if you _have_ to, but don't let them wheedle your justly earned money out of you. They don't deserve it, Luke."

"Oh, well, we'll see about it," King laughed, lightly. "You know old Bruce may kick me out of the house, and if mother stood to him in it again"-King's eyes were flashing, his lip was drawn tight-"I guess I'd never go back any more, Aunt Ann."

"Old Mark would never send you away if he thought you had money," Ann said, cynically. "If I was you I'd not let them know about that. You see, you could keep them in the dark easily enough, for I've told them absolutely nothing except that you were getting along fairly well."

King smiled. "They never would think I had much to judge by this suit of clothes," he said. "It is an old knockabout rig I had to splash around in the mud in while out hunting, and I put it on this morning-well, just because I did not want to come back among all my poor relatives and friends dressed up as I have been doing in the city, Aunt Ann," he laughed, as if making sport of himself. "I've got a silk high-hat as slick as goose-grease, and a long jimswinger coat, and pants that are always ironed as sharp as a knife-blade in front. I took your advice and decided that a good appearance went a long way, but I don't really think I overdid it."

"I'm glad you didn't put on style in coming back, anyway," Ann said, proudly. "It wouldn't have looked well in you; but you did right to dress like the best where you were, and it had something-a lots, I imagine-to do with your big success. If you want to go in and win in any undertaking, don't think failure for one minute, and the trouble is that shabby clothes are a continual reminder of poverty. Make folks believe at the outset that you are of the best, and then _be_ the best."

King was looking down thoughtfully. "There is one trouble," he said, "in making a good appearance, and that comes from the ideas of some as to what sort of man or woman is the best. Before I left Seattle, Aunt Ann, my a.s.sociates gave me a big dinner at the club-a sort of good-bye affair to drink to my future, you know-and some of the most distinguished men in the state were there, men prominent in the business and political world. And that night, Aunt Ann"-King had flushed slightly and his voice faltered-"that night a well-meaning man, a sort of society leader, in his toast to me plainly referred to me as a scion of the old Southern aristocracy, and he did it in just such a way as to make it appear to those who knew otherwise that I would be sailing under false colors if I did not correct the impression. He had made a beautiful talk about our old colonial homes, our slaves in livery, our beautiful women, who invariably graced the courts of Europe, and concluded by saying that it was no wonder I had succeeded where many other men with fewer hereditary influences to back them had failed."

"Ah, you _were_ in a fix!" Ann said. "That is, it was awkward for you, who I know to be almost too sincere for your own good."

"Well, I couldn't let it pa.s.s, Aunt Ann-I simply couldn't let all those men leave that table under a wrong impression. I hardly know what I said when I replied, but it seemed to be the right thing, for they all applauded me. I told him I did not belong to what was generally understood to be the old aristocracy of the South, but to what I considered the new. I told them about our log-cabin aristocracy, Aunt Ann, here in these blue mountains, for which my soul was famished. I told them of the st.u.r.dy, hard-working, half-starved mountaineers and their scratching, with dull tools, a bare existence out of this rocky soil. I told them of my bleak and barren boyhood, my heart-burnings at home, when my mother married again, the nights I'd spent at study in the light of pine-knots that filled the house with smoke. Then I told them about the grandest woman G.o.d ever brought to life. I told them about you, Aunt Ann. I gave no names, went into no painful particulars, but I talked about what you had done for me, and how you've been persecuted and misunderstood, till I could hardly hold back the tears from my eyes."

"Oh, hush, Luke," Ann said, huskily-"hush up!"

"Well, I may now, but I couldn't that night," said King. "I got started, and it came out of me like a flood. I said things about you that night that I've thought for years, but which you never would let me say to you."

"Hush, Luke, hush-you are a good boy, but you mustn't-" Ann's voice broke, and she placed her hand to her eyes.

"There was a celebrated novelist there," King went on, "and after dinner he came over to me and held out his hand. He was old and white-haired, and his face was full of tender, poetic emotion. 'If you ever meet your benefactress again,' he said, 'tell her I'd give half my life to know her. If I'd known her I could write a book that would be immortal.'"

There was a pause. Ann seemed to be trying to crush out some obstruction to deliberate utterance in her big, throbbing throat.

"If he knew my life just as it has been," she said, finally-"if he knew it all-all that I've been through, all I've thought through it all, from the time I was an innocent, laughing girl 'till now, as an old woman, I'm fighting a battle of hate with every living soul within miles of me-if he knew all _that_, he could write a book, and it would be a big one. But it wouldn't help humanity, Luke. My hate's mine, and the devil's. It's not for folks born lucky and happy. Some folks seem put on earth for love. I'm put here for hate and for joy over the misfortune of my enemies."

"You know many things, Aunt Ann," King said, softly, "and you are older than I am, but you can't see the end of it all as clearly as I do."

"You think not, my boy?"