She slipped down suddenly into a chair and covered her face, her thin shoulders shaking. Luke went and touched her awkwardly. Times he would have liked to put his arms round Maw-now more than ever; but he didn't dare.

"Don't take on, Maw! Don't!"

"Who's takin' on?" She lifted a fierce, sallow, tear-wet face. "Hain't no use makin' a fuss. All's left's to work-to work, an' die after a while."

"I hate 'em! Uncle Clem an' her, I mean."

"They mean kindness-their way." But her tears started afresh.

"I hate 'em!" Luke's voice grew shriller. "I'd like-I'd like-Oh, d.a.m.n 'em!"

"Don't swear, boy!"

It was Tom who broke in on them. "It's a letter from Rural Free Delivery. He jest dropped it."

He came up, grinning, with the missive. The mother's fingers closed on it nervously.

"From Nat, mebbe-he ain't wrote in months."

But it wasn't from Nat. It was a bill for a last payment on the "new harrow," brought three years before.

II

One of the earliest memories Luke could recall was the big blurred impression of Nat's face bending over his crib of an evening. At first flat, indefinite, remote as the moon, it grew with time to more human, intimate proportions. It became the face of "brother," the black-haired, blue-eyed big boy who rollicked on the floor with or danced him on his knee to-

This is the way the lady rides!

Tritty-trot-trot; tritty-trot-trot!

Or who, returning from school and meeting his faltering feet in the lane, would toss him up on his shoulder and canter him home with mad, merry scamperings.

Not that school and Nat ever had much in common. Even as a little shaver Luke had realized that, Nat was the family wilding, the migratory bird that yearned for other climes. There were the times when he sulked long days by the fire, and the springs and autumns when he played an unending round of hookey. There were the days when he was sent home from school in disgrace; when protesting notes, and sometimes even teacher, arrived.

"It's not that Nat's a bad boy, Mrs. Haynes," he remembered one teacher saying; "but he's so active, so full of restless animal spirits. How are we ever going to tame him?"

Maw didn't know the answer-that was sure. She loved Nat best-Luke had guessed it long ago, by the tone of her voice when she spoke to him, by the touch of her hand on his head, or the size of his apple turnover, so much bigger than the others'. Maw must have built heavily on her hopes of Nat those days-her one perfect child. She was so proud of him! In the face of all ominous prediction she would fling her head high.

"My Nat's a Peel!" she would say. "Can't never tell how he'll turn out."

The farmers thereabouts thought they could tell her. Nat was into one sc.r.a.pe after another-nothing especially wicked; but a compound of the bubbling mischief in a too ardent life-robbed orchards, broken windows, practical jokes, Halloween jinks, vagrant whimsies of an active imagination.

It was just that Nat's quarters were too small for him, chiefly. Even he realized this presently. Luke would never forget the sloppy March morning when Nat went away. He was wakened by a flare of candle in the room he shared with his brothers. Tom, the twelve-year-old, lay sound asleep; but Nat, the big man of fifteen, was up, dressed, bending over something he was writing on a paper at the bureau. There was a fat little bundle beside him, done up in a blue-and-white bandanna.

Day was still far off. The window showed black; there was the sound of a thaw running off the eaves; the whitewashed wall was painted with grotesque leaping shadows by the candle flame. At the first murmur, Nat had come and put his arms about him.

"Don't ye holler, little un; don't ye do it! 'Tain't nothin'-on'y Natty's goin' away a spell; quite a spell, little un. Now kiss Natty....

That's right!... An' you lay still there an' don't holler. An' listen here, too: Natty's goin' to bring ye somethin'-a grand red ball, mebbe-if you're good. You wait an' see!"

But Natty hadn't brought the ball. Two years had pa.s.sed without a sc.r.a.p of news of him; and then-he was back. Slipped into the village on a freighter at dusk one evening. A forlorn scarecrow Nat was; so tattered of garment, so smeared of coal dust, you scarcely knew him. So full of strange sophistications, too, and new trails of thought-so oddly rich of experience. He gave them his story. The tale of an exigent life in a great city; a piecework life made of such flotsam labors as he could pick up, of spells of loafing, of odd incredible a.s.sociates, of months tagging a circus, picking up a task here and there, of long journeyings through the country, "riding the b.u.mpers"-even of alms asked at back doors!

"Oh, not a tramp, Nat!"

The hurt had quivered all through Maw.

But Nat only laughed.

"Jiminy Christmas, it was great!"

He had thrown back his head, laughing. That was Nat all through-sipping of life generously, no matter in what form.

He had stayed just three weeks. He had spent them chiefly defeating Maw's plans to keep him. Wanderl.u.s.t kept him longer the next time. That was eight years ago. Since then he had been back home three times. Never so poor and shabby as at first-indeed, Nat's wanderings had prospered more or less-but still remote, somewhat mysterious, touched by new habits of life, new ways of speech.

The countryside, remembering the manner of his first return, shook its head darkly. A tramp-a burglar, even. G.o.d knew what! When, on his third visit home, he brought an air of extreme opulence, plenty of money, and a sartorial perfection undreamed of locally, the heads wagged even harder. A gambler probably; a ne'er-do-well certainly; and one to break his mother's heart in the end.

But none of this was true, as Luke knew. It was just that Nat hated farming; that he liked to rove and take a floater's fortune. He had a taste for the mechanical and followed incomprehensible quests. San Francisco had known him; the big races at Cincinnati; the hangars at Mineola. He was restless-Nat; but he was respectable. No one could look into his merry blue eyes and not know it. If his labors were uncertain and sporadic, and his address that of a nomad, it all sufficed, at least for himself.

If at times Luke felt a stirring doubt that Nat was not acquitting himself of his family duty, he quenched it fiercely. Nat was different.

He was born free; you could tell it in his talk, in his way of thinking.

He was like an eagle and hated to be bound by earthly ties. He cared for them all in his own way. Times when he was back he helped Maw all he could. If he brought money he gave of it freely; if he had none, just the look of his eye or the ready jest on his lip helped.

Upstairs in a drawer of the old pine bureau lay some of Nat's discarded clothing-incredible garments to Luke. The lame boy, going to them sometimes, fingered them, pondering, reconstructing for himself the fabric of Nat's adventures, his life. The ice-cream pants of a by-gone day; the pointed, shriveled yellow Oxfords! the silk-front shirt; the odd cuff link or stud-they were like a genie-in-a-bottle, these poor clothes! You rubbed them and a whole Arabian Night's dream unfurled from them.

And Nat lived it all! But people-dull stodgy people like Uncle Clem and Aunt Mollie, and old Beckonridge down at the store, and a dozen others-these criticized him for not "workin' reg'lar" and giving a full account of himself.

Luke, thinking of all this, would flush with impotent anger.

"Oh, let 'em talk, though! He'll show 'em some day! They dunno Nat.

He'll do somethin' big fur us all some day."

III

Midsummer came to trim the old farm with her wreaths. It was the time Luke loved best of all-the long, sweet, loam-scented evenings with Maw and Tom on the old porch; and sometimes-when there was no fog-Paw's cot, wheeled out in the stillness. But Maw was not herself this summer.

Something had fretted and eaten into her heart like an acid ever since Aunt Mollie's visit and the news of Matty Bisbee's funeral.

When, one by one, the early summer festivities of the neighborhood had slipped by, with no inclusion of the Hayneses, she had fallen to brooding deeply,-to feeling more bitterly than ever the ignominy and wretchedness of their position.

Luke tried to comfort her; to point out that this summer was like any other; that they "never had mattered much to folks." But Maw continued to brood; to allude vaguely and insistently to "the straw that broke the camel's back." It was bitter hard to have Maw like that-home was bad enough, anyway. Sometimes on clear, soft nights, when the moon came out all splendid and the "peepers" sang so plaintively in the Hollow, the boy's heart would fill and grow enormous in his chest with the intolerable sadness he felt.

Then Maw's mood lifted-pierced by a ray of heavenly sunlight-for Nat came home!

Luke saw him first-heard him, rather; for Nat came up the lane-oh, miraculous!-driving a motor car. It was not a car like Uncle Clem's-not even a step-brother to it. It was low and almost noiseless, and shaped like one of those queer torpedoes they were fighting with across the water. It was colored a soft dust-gray and trimmed with nickel; and, huge and powerful though it was, it swung to a mere touch of Nat's hand.

Nat stood before them, clad in black leather Norfolk and visored cap and leggings.

"Look like a fancy brand of chauffeur, don't I?" he laughed, with the easy resumption of a long-broken relation that was so characteristically Nat.

But Nat was not a chauffeur. Something much bigger and grander. The news he brought them on top of it all took their breaths away. Nat was a special demonstrator, out on a brand-new high-cla.s.s job for a house handling a special line of high-priced goods. And he was to go to Europe in another week-did they get it straight? Europe! Jiminy! He and another fellow were taking cars over to France and England.