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 ready-reckoner 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 charge on the spot, and drove off to his day's canva.s.sing 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 bound, and in his valise along with the compendiums of his valuable a.s.sortment.

He 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 grat.i.tude for small offices of a.s.sistance, 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 talking with her.

Isom 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 Isom, 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 pa.s.sed from the book agent's hands into Isom's, and Isom grinned over it as the easiest money 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 provincially 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 substance 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 that 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, and the fact that Joe knew very well the old man's talk was artful pretense.

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

"I'll attend to him," promised Joe.

Isom's hand had lingered a minute on Joe's shoulder while he talked, and the old man's satisfaction over the depth of muscle that he felt beneath it was great. He stood looking Joe over with quick-shifting, calculating eyes, measuring him in every part, from flank to hock, like a farrier.

He was gratified to see how Joe had filled out in the past six months.

If he had paid for a colt and been delivered a draft-horse, his surprise would not have been more pleasant.

As it was, he had bargained for the services of a big-jointed, 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. He had him, bound body and limb, tied in a corner from which he could not escape, to send and call, to fetch and carry, for the better part of two good, profitable years.

As Isom rode away he rubbed his dry, hard hands above his saddle-horn, feeling more comfortable than he had felt for many a day. He gloated over the excellent bargain that he had made with the Widow Newbolt; he grinned at the roots of his old rusty beard. If ever a man poked himself in the ribs in the excess of self-felicitation, Isom Chase did it as he rode along on his old buckskin horse that autumn morning, with the sun just lifting over the hill.

It was an excellent thing, indeed, for a patriot to serve his country once in a while on a jury, thought Isom, especially 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, Isom 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 a.s.sume 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 many 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 a morning, long after he and Isom were in the field, nor the early homings, long before they came in to do the ch.o.r.es. Joe left the house each morning with reluctance, after Isom's departure, lingering over little things, finding hitherto undiscovered tasks to keep him about in the presence of Ollie, and to throw him between her and the talkative boarder, who seemed always 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 feeling of friendliness.

This feeling had been fed, for a few days, by Ollie, who found odd minutes to talk with him as she had not talked before, and by 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 beyond 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 only the reflections of those which beamed for the chattering lounger who made a pretense of selling books while he 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. He did not fully understand what Morgan was about, but it was plain to him that the man had no honest purpose there.

He could not repeat his fears to Isom, for Isom's wrath and correction 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 permitting 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 barrenness 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 undefiled?

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.

He watched to see the man drive away on his canva.s.sing round, but the sun pa.s.sed 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 very 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.

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 down his scythe with a muttered curse on his lips for the man who was playing such an underhanded game.

It was on Ollie's account he hesitated. Ollie would think that he suspected her, when there was nothing farther from his mind. 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 Ollie might take offense and turn against him, and make it as unpleasant as she had shown that she could make it agreeable.

But duty was 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 gra.s.s 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.

He 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, Ollie not a yard behind him, their hands just breaking their clasp. Joe knew in his heart that Morgan had been holding her in his arms.

Ollie's face was flushed, 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, 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, s.n.a.t.c.hing 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.