"Oh, uncle, don't say that!" Virginia cried-"don't! don't!"

"Well, then, you study it out," he said. "It's too much for me."

That morning Virginia quietly slipped over to Ann Boyd's and confided the new phase of the situation to her sympathetic friend, but Ann could not account for Jane's strange conduct, and Virginia returned home no wiser than she had left. However, at the fence she met Sam. His face was aglow with excitement.

"What you reckon?" he said. "The bird has flown."

"Mother, you mean?"

"Yes, she's skipped clean out. It was this way: Pete Denslow drove past about twenty minutes ago in his empty two-horse wagon, and I hollered out to him and asked him where-away. He pulled up at the gate and said he was going over the mountain to Gilmer after a load of ginseng to fetch back to Darley. Well, sir, no sooner had he said that than your mammy piped up from her dungeon, where she stood listening at a crack, and said, said she, sorter sheepish-like: 'Sam, ask him if he will let me go with him; I promised to go see Sally Maud Pincher over there the first time any wagon was pa.s.sing, and I want to go.' Well, I told Pete, and he looked at the sun and wanted to know how long it would take her to get ready. She heard him, and yelled out from the door that she'd be out in five minutes, and, bless you, she was on the seat beside him in less time in her best clothes and carpet-bag in hand. She was as white in the face as a convict out taking a sunning, and her gingham looked like it was hanging from a hook on her neck, she was that thin. She never said a word to me as she went by. At first I thought she was plumb crazy, but she had the clearest eye in her head I ever saw, and she was chattering away to Pete about the weather as if he was an unmarried man and she was on the carpet."

"Oh, uncle, what do you think it means?" Virginia sighed, deeply worried.

"Why, I think it's a fine sign, myself," said Sam. "I'm not as good a judge of women as I am of mules-though a body ought to know as much of one as the other-but I think she's perhaps been wanting to get a breath of fresh air for some time and didn't like to acknowledge she was tired of cave-life. Over there at Pincher's, you see, she can slide back into her old ways without attracting attention by it."

"And she didn't leave a word of directions to me?" the girl said, sadly.

"Not a word," was the droll reply. "I didn't say good-bye to her myself.

To tell the truth, I had noticed that she'd forgot to put up a snack for her and Pete to eat on the way, and I was afraid she might remember it at the last minute and take what little there was left for you and me."

But Jane evidently had something to attend to before paying her promised visit to Sally Maud Pincher, for on their arrival at the village of Ellijay, the seat of the adjoining county, she asked her obliging conveyer to put her down at the hotel, where she intended to spend the night. It was then about five o'clock in the afternoon, and she went into the little office, which looked like a parlor in a farm-house, and registered her name and was given a room with a sky-blue door and ceiling and whitewashed walls, at the head of the stairs. She sat after that at the window, looking out upon the dreary street and the lonely, red-clay road leading up the mountain, till it grew dark. She went down to the dining-room when the great bra.s.s bell was rung by a negro boy who shook it vigorously as he walked through the hall and around the house, but she had no appet.i.te-the long, jolting journey over the rough road had weakened rather than stimulated her faint physical needs, and so she took only a gla.s.s of milk, into which she had dropped a few morsels of bread, eating the mixture with a spoon like a child.

"If I'm going to do this thing," she mused, as she sat on her bed in her night-dress and twisted her hair in a knot, "the quicker it's over the better. When I left home it seemed easy enough, but now it's awful-simply awful!"

She slept soundly from sheer fatigue, and was up the next morning and dressed before the hotel cook, an old woman, had made a fire in the range. She walked down-stairs into the empty hall and out on the front veranda, but saw no one. The ground was white with frost and the mountain air was crisp and cutting, but it seemed to have put color into her cheeks. Going through the office, where she saw no one, she went into the dining-room just as the cook was coming in from the adjoining kitchen.

"Good-morning," Jane said. "I've got about four miles to walk, and, as I've lately been down sick in bed, I want to sorter take it slow and get an early start. I paid my bill before I went to bed last night, including breakfast, and if you could give me a slice of bread-and-b.u.t.ter and a cup of coffee that will be all I want."

"Well, I can get them ready in a minute," said the woman, "but I'd hate to do a four-mile walk on as little as that."

"I've been sort of dieting myself," Jane said, perhaps recalling her past bounty to the cats and chickens at the window of her room, "and I don't need much."

"Well, all right," said the cook, spreading a napkin at one end of a long table; "you set down here and I'll supply you in a few minutes. The landlord leaves me in charge here till he gets up. He's a late sleeper; he was out last night at the trial of the moonshiners. You say you paid for breakfast in your bill. I think it's a shame. If he wasn't so easy to make mad, I'd go shake him up and get some of your money back. I don't happen to tote the key to the cash-drawer. I reckon you paid seventy-five cents for supper, bed, and breakfast-'s., b., and b.,' we call it for short-and you are ent.i.tled to a full round-meat, eggs, fish (in season), batter-cakes or waffles, whichever it is. Our waffle-irons are split right half in two, and we just give batter-cakes now; but folks know the brand clean to Darley. You ought to see the judge tackle 'em during court week; him and the district-attorney had a race the other night to see which could eat the most. I had three pans running, and such a smoke of burning lard in the kitchen you couldn't have seen a white cat in an inch of your nose. The whole jury and a lots of witnesses under guard of the sheriff was allowed to look on. The judge beat. The lawyer got so full he couldn't talk, and that was the signal to call a halt. I was glad, for old Mrs. Macklin was waiting in the kitchen to try to hear if there was any chance to save her son, who was being tried for killing that feller in the brick-yard last summer. Ever'

time I'd come in for fresh cakes she'd look up sorter pitiful-like to see if I'd heard anything. They'd already agreed to send 'im up for life, but I didn't know it. Yes, you ought to have a quarter of that money back, _anyway_. Unless a knife and fork is used, I make a habit, when it's left to me, not to charge a cent, and you don't look like you are overly flush."

"No, but I'm satisfied as it is," Jane said, as she finished her bread and milk. "I didn't expect to get it for any less."

x.x.xVIII

A few minutes later, with her flabby carpet-bag on her sharp hip, Jane fared forth on the mountain road, which led farther eastward. She walked slowly and with increased effort, for the high alt.i.tude seemed to affect her respiration, and, light as it was, the carpet-bag became c.u.mbersome and she had to pause frequently to rest.

"Yes, if I'm going to do it, I'll have to plunge in and do it, and be done with the matter," she kept saying. "I reckon it isn't the first time such a thing has been heard of." She pa.s.sed several humble mountain houses, built of logs, on the way, but stopped at none of them. The sun was near the zenith when she came to a double log-cabin standing back on a plot of newly cleared land a hundred yards from the rocky road. A tall, plain-looking girl, with a hard, unsympathetic face, stood in the doorway, and she stepped down to the ground and quieted a snarling dog which was chained to a stake driven into the earth.

"I reckon you are Nettie Boyd, ain't you?" Jane said.

"I used to be," the young woman answered. "I married a Lawson-Sam Lawson-awhile back."

"Oh yes, I forgot that. I'd heard it, too, of course, but it slipped my memory. I'm a Hemingway, from over in Murray County-Jane Hemingway. I used to be acquainted with your pa. Is he handy?"

"Yes, he was here just a minute ago," Ann Boyd's daughter answered.

"He's around at his hay-stack pulling down some roughness for the cow.

Go in and take a seat and I'll call him. Lay your bonnet on the bed and make yourself at home."

Jane went into the cabin, the walls of which were unlined, being only the bare logs with the bark on them. The cracks where the logs failed to fit closely together were filled with the red clay from the hills around. There was not a picture in sight, not an ornament on the crude board shelf over the rugged mud-and-stone fireplace. From wooden pegs driven in auger-holes in the walls hung the young bride's meagre finery, in company with what was evidently her husband's best suit of clothes and hat. Beneath them, on the floor, stood a pair of new woman's shoes, dwarfed by contrast to a heavier and larger masculine pair. Jane sat down, rolling her bonnet in her stiff fingers. The chair she sat on was evidently of home make, for the rockers were unevenly sawed, and, on the unplaned boards of the floor, it had a joggling, noisy motion when in use. There were two beds in the room, made of rough, pine planks. The coverings of the beds were not in order and the pillows were soiled.

"If she'd 'a' stayed on with Ann she would 'a' made a better house-keeper than that," Jane mused. "She's a sight, too, with her hair uncombed and dress so untidy so soon after the honeymoon. I can see now that her and Ann never would get on together. Anybody could take one look at that girl and see she's selfish. I wonder what that fellow ever saw in her?"

There was a sound of voices outside. With a start, Jane drew herself erect. The carpet-bag on her knees threatened to fall, and she lowered it to the floor. Her ordeal was before her.

"Why, howdy do?"

Joe Boyd, in tattered shirt, trousers patched upon patches, and gaping shoes through which his bare toes showed, stood in the doorway. That the old beau and the once most popular young man of the country-side could stand looking like that before her, even after the lapse of all those trying years, and not feel abashed, was one of the inexplicable things that rushed through Jane Hemingway's benumbed brain. That she, herself, could be looking at the very husk of the ideal of manhood she had held all those years and not cry out in actual pain over the pitiful evidences of his collapse from his high estate was another thing she marvelled over. Joe Boyd! Could it actually be he? Could those gaunt, talon-nailed members, with their parchment-like skin, be the hands she used to think so shapely? Could those splaying feet be the feet that had tripped more lightly in the Virginia Reel than those of any other man for miles around? Could those furtive, harsh-glancing eyes be the deep, dreamy ones in which she had once seen the mirage of her every girlish hope? Could that rasping tone come from the voice whose never diminishing echo had rung in her ears through all those years of hiding her secret from the man she had married out of "spite," through all her long tooth-in-flesh fight with the rival who had temporarily won and held him?

She rose and gave him her hand, and the two stood facing each other, she speechless, he thoroughly at his indolent ease.

"Well, I reckon, Jane, old girl," he laughed, as he wiped a trickling stream of tobacco-juice from the corner of his sagging mouth, "that you are the very last human being I ever expected to lay eyes on again. I swear I wouldn't 'a' known you from Adam's cat if Nettie hadn't told me who it was. My, how thin you look, and all bent over!"

"Yes, I'm changed, and you are too, Joe," she said, as, with a stiff hand beneath her, she sought the chair again.

"Yes"-he went to the doorway and spat voluminously out into the yard, and came back swinging a chair as lightly in his hand as if it had been a baseball bat with which he was playing-"yes, I reckon I am altered considerable; a body's more apt to see changes in others than in himself. I was just thinking the other day about them old times. La me!

how much fun we all did have, but it didn't last-it didn't last."

He sat down, leaning forward and clasping his dry-palmed hands with a sound like the rubbing together of two pieces of paper. There was an awkward silence. Nettie Lawson came to the door and glanced in inquiringly, and then went away. They heard her calling her chickens some distance from the cabin.

"No, I wouldn't have recognized you if I'd met you alone in the big road," he said, "nor you wouldn't me, I reckon."

"Joe"-she was looking about the room-"somehow I had an idea that you were in-in a little better circ.u.mstances than-than you seem to be in now."

"Well, that wouldn't be hard to imagine, anyway," he said, with an intonation like a sigh, if it wasn't one. "If a body couldn't imagine a better fix for a man to be in than I am in, they'd better quit. Lord, Lord, I reckon I ought to be dead ashamed to meet you in this condition when you knew me away back in them palmy days, but, Jane, I really believe I've sunk below that sort of a feeling. You know I used to cut a wide swath when I had plenty of money and friends, but what's the use of crying over spilt milk? This is all there is left of me. I managed to marry Nettie off to a feller good enough in his way. I thought he was a fine catch, but I don't know. I was under the impression that his folks had some money to give him to sorter start the two out, but it seems they didn't have, and was looking for a stake themselves. Since they married he just stays round here, contented and about as shiftless as anybody could be. I thought, for instance, that he never got in debt, but a store-keeper in town told me the other day that he owed him for the very duds he was married in."

"That's bad, that's powerful bad," Jane said, sympathetically. Then a fixed look took possession of her eyes, and her fingers tightened on her bonnet in her lap, as she plunged towards the thing with which she was burdened. "Joe," she continued, "I've come all the way over the mountain in my delicate health to see you about a particular matter. G.o.d knows it's the hardest thing I ever contemplated, but there is no other way out of it."

"Well, I think I know what you are going to say," he answered, avoiding her eyes.

"You do, Joe?" she exclaimed. "Oh no, surely, you can't know that."

"Well, I think I can make a good guess," he said, awkwardly twirling his fingers round and round. "You see, I always make a habit, when I happen to meet anybody from over your way, of asking about old acquaintances, and I heard some time back that you was in deep trouble. They said you had some high-priced doctoring to do in Atlanta, and that you was going from old friend to old friend for what little help they could give. I'm going to see what I can do towards it myself, since you've taken such a long trip, though, Jane, to tell you the truth, I haven't actually seen a ten-cent piece in a month. I've gone without tobacco when I thought the desire for it would run me distracted. So-"

"I didn't come for help-Lord, Lord, I only wish it was that, Joe. I've already had the operation, and I'm recovering. I've come over here, Joe, to make an awful confession."

"A-a-what?" he said.

There was a pause. Jane Hemingway unrolled her bonnet and put it on, pulling the hood down over her line of vision.

"Joe, I've come to tell you that I've been a bad woman; I've been a bad, sinning woman since away back there when you married Ann. Things you used to say to me, I reckon, turned my silly head. You remember when you took me to camp-meeting that night, and we sat through meeting out in the buggy under the trees. I reckon, if it was all to do over you wouldn't have said so much. I reckon you wouldn't if you'd known you were planting a seed that was going to fructify and bear the fruit of hate and enmity that would never rot; but, for all I know, you may have been saying the same things to other girls who knew better how to take them than I did."