Isom smacked his lips over the recollection. The promise of it was sweet to his taste.

Ollie's heart stirred a little. She wondered if someone had entered that house at last who would be able to set at defiance its stern decrees.

She hoped that, if so, this breach in the grim wall might let some sunlight in time into her own bleak heart. But she said nothing to Isom, and he talked on.

"I made a good pick when I lit on that boy," said he, with that old wise twist of the head; "the best pick in this county, by a long shot. I choose a man like I pick a horse, for the blood he shows. A blooded horse will endure where a plug will fall down, and it's the same way with a man. Ollie, don't you know that boy's got as good a strain in him as you'll find in this part of the country?"

"I never saw him before today, I don't know his folks," said she, apparently little interested in her husband's find.

Isom sat silent for a while, looking at the worn floor.

"Well, he's bound out to me for two years and more," said he, the comfort of it in his hard, plain face. "I'll have a steady hand that I can depend on now. That's a boy that'll do his duty; no doubt in my mind about that. It may go against the grain once in a while, Ollie, like our duty does for all of us sometimes; but, no matter how it tastes to him, that boy Joe, he'll face it.

"He's not one of the kind that'll shirk on me when my back's turned, or steal from me if he gets a chance, or betray any trust I put in him.

He's as poor as blue-John and as proud as Lucifer, but he's as straight as the barrel of that old gun. He's got Kentucky blood in him, and the best of it, too."

"He brought a funny little Bible with him," said Ollie in low voice, as if communing with herself.

"Funny?" said Isom. "Is that so?"

"So little and fat," she explained. "I never saw one like it before. It was there on the bench this morning with his bundle. I put it up by his bed."

"Hum-m," said Isom reflectively, as if considering it deeply. Then: "Well, I guess it's all right."

Isom sat a good while, fingering his stiff beard. He gave no surface indication of the thoughts which were working within him, for he was unlike those sentimental, plump, thin-skinned people who cannot conceal their emotions from the world. Isom might have been dreaming of gain, or he might have been contemplating the day of loss and panic, for all that his face revealed. Sun and shadow alike pa.s.sed over it, as rain and blast and summer sun pa.s.s over and beat upon a stone, leaving no mark behind save in that slow and painful wear which one must live a century to note. He looked up at his wife at length, his hand still in his beard, and studied her silently.

"I'm not a hard man, Ollie, like some people give me the name of being,"

he complained, with more gentleness in his voice than she had heard since he was courting her. He still studied her, as if he expected her to uphold common report and protest that he was hard and cruel-driving in his way. She said nothing; Isom proceeded to give himself the good rating which the world denied.

"I'm not half as mean as some envious people would make out, if they could find anybody to take stock in what they say. If I'm not as honey-mouthed as some, that's because I've got more sense than to diddle-daddle my time away in words when there's so much to do. I'll show you that I'm as kind at heart, Ollie, as any man in this county, if you'll stand by me and do your part of what's to be done without black looks and grumbles and growls.

"I'm a good many years older than you, and maybe I'm not as light-footed and light-headed as you'd like a husband to be, but I've got weight to me where it counts. I could buy out two-thirds of the young fellers in this county, Ollie, all in a bunch."

"Yes, Isom, I guess you could," she allowed, a weary drag in her voice.

"I'll put a woman in to do the work here in the fall, when I make a turn of my crops and money comes a little freer than it does right now," he promised. "Interest on my loans is behind in a good many cases, and there's no use crowdin' 'em to pay till they sell their wheat and hogs.

If I had the ready money in hand to pay wages, Ollie, I'd put a n.i.g.g.e.r woman in here tomorrow and leave you nothing to do but oversee. You'll have a fine easy time of it this fall, Ollie, when I turn my crops."

Ollie drained the dishpan and wrung out the cloths. These she hung on a line to dry. Isom watched her with approval, pleased to see her so housewifely and neat.

"Ollie, you've come on wonderful since I married you," said he. "When you come here--do you recollect?--you couldn't hardly make a mess of biscuits that was fit to eat, and you knew next to nothing about milk and b.u.t.ter for all that you was brought up on a farm."

"Well, I've learned my lesson," said she, with a bitterness which pa.s.sed over Isom's head.

Her back was turned to him, she was reaching to hang a utensil on the wall, so high above her head that she stood on tiptoe. Isom was not insensible to the pretty lines of her back, the curve of her plump hips, the whiteness of her naked arms. He smiled.

"Well, it's worth money to you to know all these things," said he, "and I don't know but it's just as well for you to go on and do the work this summer for the benefit of what's to be got out of it; you'll be all the better able to oversee a n.i.g.g.e.r woman when I put one in, and all the better qualified to take things into your own hands when I'm done and in the grave. For I'll have to go, in fifteen or twenty years more," he sighed.

Ollie made no reply. She was standing with her back still turned toward him, stripping down her sleeves. But the sigh which she gave breath to sounded loud in Isom's ears.

Perhaps he thought she was contemplating with concern the day when he must give over his strivings and h.o.a.rdings, and leave her widowed and alone. That may have moved him to his next excess of generosity.

"I'm going to let Joe help you around the house a good deal, Ollie,"

said he. "He'll make it a lot easier for you this summer. He'll carry the swill down to the hogs, and water 'em, and take care of the calves.

That'll save you a good many steps in the course of the day."

Ollie maintained her ungrateful silence. She had heard promises before, and she had come to that point of hopelessness where she no longer seemed to care. Isom was accustomed to her silences, also; it appeared to make little difference to him whether she spoke or held her peace.

He sat there reflectively a little while; then got up, stretching his arms, yawning with a noise like a dog.

"Guess I'll go to bed," said he.

He looked for a splinter on a stick of stove-wood, which he lit at the stove and carried to his lamp. At the door he paused, turned, and looked at Ollie, his hand, hovering like a grub curved beside the chimney, shading the light from his eyes.

"So he brought a Bible, did he?"

"Yes."

"Well, he's welcome to it," said Isom. "I don't care what anybody that works for me reads--just so long as he _works_!"

Isom's jubilation over his bondboy set his young wife's curiosity astir. She had not noted any romantic or n.o.ble parts about the youth in the casual, uninterested view which she had given him that day. To her then he had appeared only a sprangling, long-bodied, long-legged, bony-shouldered, unformed lad whose hollow frame indicated a great capacity for food. Her only thought in connection with him had been that it meant another mouth to dole Isom's slender allowance out to, more scheming on her part to make the rations go round. It meant another one to wash for, another bed to make.

She had thought of those things wearily that morning when she heard the new voice at the kitchen door, and she had gone there for a moment to look him over; for strange faces, even those of loutish farm-hands, were refreshing in her isolated life. She had not heard what the lad was saying to Isom, for the kitchen was large and the stove far away from the door, but she had the pa.s.sing thought that there was a good deal of earnestness or pa.s.sion in the harangue for a farm-hand to be laying on his early morning talk.

When she found the Bible lying there on top of Joe's hickory shirt, she had concluded that he had been talking religion. She hoped that he would not preach at his meals. The only religion that Ollie knew anything of, and not much of that, was a glum and melancholy kind, with frenzied shoutings of the preacher in it, and portentous shaking of the beard in the shudderful pictures of the anguish of unrepentant death. So she hoped that he would not preach at his meals, for the house was sad enough, and terrible and gloomily hopeless enough, without the kind of religion that made the night deeper and the day longer in its dread.

Now Isom's talk about the lad's blood, and his expression of high confidence in his fealty, gave her a pleasant topic of speculation. Did good blood make men different from those who came of mongrel strain, in other points than that of endurance alone? Did it give men n.o.bility and sympathy and loftiness, or was it something prized by those who hired them, as Isom seemed to value it in Joe, because it lent strength to the arms?

Ollie sat on the kitchen steps and turned all this over in her thoughts after Isom had gone to bed.

Perhaps in the new bondboy, who had come there to serve with her, she would find one with whom she might talk and sometimes ease her heart.

She hoped that it might be so, for she needed chatter and laughter and the common sympathies of youth, as a caged bird requires the seed of its wild life. There was hope in the new farm-hand which swept into her heart like a refreshing breeze. She would look him over and sound him when he worked, choring between kitchen and barn.

Ollie had been a poor man's child. Isom had chosen her as he would have selected a breeding-cow, because nature, in addition to giving her a form of singular grace and beauty, had combined therein the utilitarian indications of ability to plentifully reproduce her kind. Isom wanted her because she was alert and quick of foot, and strong to bear the burdens of motherhood; for even in the shadow of his decline he still held to the hope of his youth--that he might leave a son behind him to guard his acres and bring down his name.

Ollie was no deeper than her opportunities of life had made her. She had no qualities of self-development, and while she had graduated from a high school and still had the ornate diploma among her simple treasures, learning had pa.s.sed through her pretty ears like water through a funnel.

It had swirled and choked there a little while, just long enough for her to make her "points" required for pa.s.sing, then it had sped on and left her unenc.u.mbered and free.

Her mother had always held Ollie's beauty a greater a.s.set than mental graces, and this early apprais.e.m.e.nt of it at its trading value had made Ollie a bit vain and ambitious to mate above her family. Isom Chase had held out to her all the allurements of which she had dreamed, and she had married him for his money. She had as well taken a stone to her soft bosom in the hope of warming it into yielding a flower.

Isom was up at four o'clock next morning. A few minutes after him Ollie stumbled down the stairs, heavy with the pain of broken sleep. Joe was snoring above-stairs; the sound penetrated to the kitchen down the doorless cas.e.m.e.nt.

"Listen to that feller sawin' gourds!" said Isom crabbedly.

The gloom of night was still in the kitchen; in the corner where the stove stood it was so dark that Ollie had to grope her way, yawning heavily, feeling that she would willingly trade the last year of her life for one more hour of sleep that moist spring morning.

Isom mounted the kitchen stairs and roused Joe, lumbering down again straightway and stringing the milk-pails on his arms without waiting to see the result of his summons.

"Send him on down to the barn when he's ready," directed Isom, jangling away in the pale light of early day.