"You mean to say there was another woman somewheres?" asked Sol, taking the scent avidly.

The women against the wall joined Mrs. Greening in a virtuous, scandalized groan. They looked pityingly at Ollie, sitting straight and white in her chair. She did not appear to see them; she was looking at Judge Little with fixed, frightened stare.

"That is not for me to say," answered the judge; and his manner of saying it seemed to convey the hint that he _could_ throw light on Isom's past if he should unseal his lips.

Ollie took it to be that way. She recalled the words of the will, "My friend, John B. Little." Isom had never spoken in her hearing that way of any man. Perhaps there was some bond between the two men, reaching back to the escapades of youth, and maybe Judge Little had the rusty old key to some past romance in Isom's life.

"Laws of mercy!" said Mrs. Greening, freeing a sigh of indignation which surely must have burst her if it had been repressed.

"This doc.u.ment is dated almost thirty years ago," said the judge. "It is possible that Isom left a later will. We must make a search of the premises to determine that."

"In sixty-seven he wrote it," said Sol, "and that was the year he was married. The certificate's hangin' in there on the wall. Before that, Isom he went off to St. Louis to business college a year or two and got all of his learnin' and smart ways. I might 'a' went, too, just as well as not. Always wisht I had."

"Very true, very true," nodded Judge Little, as if to say: "You're on the trail of his iniquities now, Sol."

Sol's mouth gaped like an old-fashioned corn-planter as he looked from the judge to Mrs. Greening, from Mrs. Greening to Ollie. Sol believed the true light of the situation had reached his brain.

"Walker--Isom Walker Chase! No Walkers around in this part of the country to name a boy after--never was."

"His mother was a Walker, from Ellinoi, dunce!" corrected his wife.

"Oh!" said Sol, his scandalous case collapsing about him as quickly as it had puffed up. "I forgot about her."

"Don't you worry about that will, honey," advised Mrs. Greening, going to Ollie and putting her large freckled arm around the young woman's shoulders; "for it won't amount to shucks! Isom never had a son, and even if he did by some woman he wasn't married to, how's he goin' to prove he's the feller?"

n.o.body attempted to answer her, and Mrs. Greening accepted that as proof that her argument was indubitable.

"It--can't--be--true!" said Ollie.

"Well, it gits the best of me!" sighed Greening, shaking his uncombed head. "Isom he was too much of a business man to go and try to play off a joke like that on anybody."

"After the funeral I would advise a thorough search among Isom's papers in the chance of finding another and later will than this," said Judge Little. "And in the meantime, as a legal precaution, merely as a legal precaution and formality, Mrs. Chase----"

The judge stopped, looking at Ollie from beneath the rims of his specs, as if waiting for her permission to proceed. Ollie, understanding nothing at all of what was in his mind, but feeling that it was required of her, nodded. That seemed the signal for which he waited. He proceeded:

"As a legal formality, Mrs. Chase, I will proceed to file this doc.u.ment for probate this afternoon."

Judge Little put it in his pocket, reaching down into that deep depository until his long arm was engulfed to the elbow. That pocket must have run down to the hem of his garment, like the oil on Aaron's beard.

Ollie got up. Mrs. Greening hastened to her to offer the support of her motherly arm.

"I think I'll go upstairs," said the young widow.

"Yes, you do," counseled Mrs. Greening. "They'll be along with the wagons purty soon, and we'll have to git ready to go. I think they must have the grave done by now."

The women watched Ollie as she went uncertainly to the stairs and faltered as she climbed upward, shaking their heads forebodingly. Sol and Judge Little went outside together and stood talking by the door.

"Ain't it terrible!" said one woman.

"Scan'lous!" agreed the other.

Mrs. Greening shook her fist toward the parlor.

"Old sneaky, slinkin', miserly Isom!" she denounced. "I always felt that he was the kind of a man to do a trick like that. Shootin' was too good for him--he orto been hung!"

In her room upstairs Ollie, while entirely unaware of Mrs. Greening's vehement arraignment of Isom, bitterly indorsed it in her heart. She sat on her tossed bed, the sickness of disappointment heavy over her. An hour ago wealth was in her hand, ease was before her, and the future was secure. Now all was torn down and scattered by an old yellow paper which prying, curious, meddlesome old Sol Greening had found. She bent her head upon her hand; tears trickled between her fingers.

Perhaps Isom had a son, unknown to anybody there. There was that period out of his life when he was at business college in St. Louis. No one knew what had taken place in that time. Perhaps he had a son. If so, they would oust her, turn her out as poor as she came, with the memory of that hard year of servitude in her heart and nothing to compensate for it, not even a tender recollection. How much better if Joe had not come between her and Curtis Morgan that night--what night, how long ago was it now?--how much kinder and happier for her indeed?

With the thought of what Joe had caused of wreckage in her life by his meddling, her resentment rose against him. But for him, slow-mouthed, cold-hearted lout, she would have been safe and happy with Morgan that hour. Old Isom would have been living still, going about his sordid ways as before she came, and the need of his money would have been removed out of her life forever.

Joe was at the bottom of all this--spying, prying, meddling Joe. Let him suffer for it now, said she. If he had kept out of things which he did not understand, the fool! Now let him suffer! Let him hang, if he must hang, as she had heard the women say last night he should. No act of hers, no word----

"The wagons is coming, honey," said Mrs. Greening at her door. "We must git ready to go to the graveyard now."

CHAPTER XI

PETER'S SON

Mint grew under the peach-trees in Colonel Henry Price's garden, purple-stemmed mint, with dark-green, tender leaves. It was not the equal of the mint, so the colonel contended with provincial loyalty, which grew back in Kentucky along the clear, cool mountain streams. But, picked early in the morning with the dew on it, and then placed bouquet-wise in a bowl of fresh well-water, to stand thus until needed, it made a very competent subst.i.tute for the Kentucky herb.

In that cool autumn weather mint was at its best, and Colonel Price lamented, as he gathered it that morning, elbow-deep in its dewy fragrance, that the need of it was pa.s.sing with the last blaze of October days.

Yet it was comforting to consider how well-balanced the seasons and men's appet.i.tes were. With the pa.s.sing of the season for mint, the desire for it left the palate. Frosty mornings called for the comfort of hot toddy, wintry blasts for frothing egg-nog in the cup. Man thirsted and nature satisfied; the economy of the world was thus balanced and all was well. So reasoned Colonel Price comfortably, after his way.

Colonel Price straightened up from his mint-picking with dew on his arm and a flush of gathered blood in his cheeks above his beard. He looked the philosopher and humanitarian that he was that morning, his breast-length white beard blowing, his long and thick white hair brushed back in a rising wave from his broad forehead. He was a tall and spare man, slender of hand, small of foot, with the crinkles of past laughter about his eyes, and in his face benevolence. One would have named him a poet at first look, and argued for the contention on further acquaintance.

But Colonel Price was not a poet, except at heart, any more than he was a soldier, save in name. He never had trod the b.l.o.o.d.y fields of war, but had won his dignified and honorable t.i.tle in the quiet ways of peace.

Colonel Price was nothing less than an artist, who painted many things because they brought him money, and one thing because he loved it and could do it well.

He painted prize-winning heifers and horses; portraits from the faces of men as nature had made them, with more or less fidelity, and from faded photographs and treasured daguerreotypes of days before and during the war, with whatever embellishments their owners required. He painted plates of apples which had taken prizes at the county fair, and royal pumpkins and kingly swine which had won like high distinctions. But the one thing he painted because he loved it, and could do it better than anybody else, was corn.

At corn Colonel Price stood alone. He painted it in bunches hanging on barn doors, and in disordered heaps in the husk, a gleam of the grain showing here and there; and he painted it sh.e.l.led from the cob. No matter where or how he painted it, his corn always was ripe and seasoned, like himself, and always so true to nature, color, form, crinkle, wrinkle, and guttered heart, that farmers stood before it marveling.

Colonel Price's heifers might be--very frequently they were--hulky and b.u.mpy and out of proportion, his horses strangely foreshortened and hindlengthened; but there never was any fault to be found with his corn.

Corn absolved him of all his sins against animate and inanimate things which had stood before his brush in his long life; corn apotheosized him, corn lifted him to the throne and put the laurel upon his old white locks.

The colonel had lived in Shelbyville for more than thirty years, in the same stately house with its three Ionic pillars reaching from ground to gable, supporting the two balconies facing toward the east. A square away on one hand was the court-house, a square away on the other the Presbyterian church; and around him were the homes of men whom he had seen come there young, and ripen with him in that quiet place. Above him on the hill stood the famous old college, its maples and elms around it, and coming down from it on each side of the broad street which led to its cla.s.sic door.

Colonel Price turned his thoughts from mint to men as he came across the dewy lawn, his gleanings in his hand, his bare head gleaming in the morning sun. He had heard, the evening before, of the arrest of Peter Newbolt's boy for the murder of Isom Chase, and the news of it had come to him with a disturbing shock, almost as poignant as if one of his own blood had been accused.

The colonel knew the sad story of Peter marrying below his estate away back there in Kentucky long ago. The Newbolts were blue-gra.s.s people, ent.i.tled to mate with the best in the land. Peter had debased his blood by marrying a mountain girl. Colonel Price had held it always to Peter's credit that he had been ashamed of his _mesalliance_, and had plunged away into the woods of Missouri with his bride to hide her from the eyes of his aristocratic family and friends.

Back in Kentucky the colonel's family and the Newbolt's had been neighbors. A few years after Peter made his dash across the Mississippi with his bride, and the journey on horseback to his new home, young Price had followed, drawn to Shelbyville by the fame of that place at a seat of culture and knowledge, which even in that early day had spread afar. The colonel--not having won his t.i.tle then--came across the river with his easel under one arm and his pride under the other. He had kept both of them in honor all those years.