"Well, sir, Pa was plumb flabbergasted. He leaned against the gate-post and puffed for air, and Ma was the same way. But he wouldn't touch the money. 'It's plain open-and-shut stealing,' he said, when he riz to the surface, 'and we are simply going to hitch a hoss to the buggy and take the money back.'
"Well, it looked like it was no go. I argued and produced evidence till I was black in the face, but Pa just kept saying he wouldn't sanction no such deal, and Ma she agreed with him. So you bet I felt like a whipped school-boy as me and him set side by side and drove into town. He was bewailing all the way that he'd fetched into the world an only son that was no better than a hog-thief in principle, an', if I didn't change, me 'n him would have to part.
"When we got to the square I saw Tobe Wilks standing in the door of the store, and I saw that he was mad. At first I thought he'd found out about the hoss, but I saw it wasn't that as soon as he reached the buggy.
"'Now, I'll tell you right now,' he said to Pa, when the old man drawed the roll out and started to hand it to him over my legs. 'You sha'n't come here and try to back down in a fair trade like that. I made it before witnesses, and your boy said he had your consent. I've sent the hoss out home, and I don't do business that way.' Pa tried to get in a word, but Tobe 'ud cut him short as soon as he opened his mouth, so the old man couldn't do anything but wave the money at him.
"'If you get the hoss you'll do it by law,' Tobe went on, fairly frothing at the mouth, 'and I'll put your boy in the pen for selling stolen property. You can't browbeat me, you old hog.'
"'Old hog!' I heard Pa grunt in his beard, and he stuffed the roll down in his pants pocket. Now Pa wouldn't take advantage of his worst enemy in a trade, but he'd fight a bosom friend if he was insulted. And before I could bat my eyes he had lit out of the buggy, and him and Wilks was engaged in a scrap that'ud make two wildcats go off and take lessons. The town marshal run up and parted them by the aid of bystanders, and some of 'em persuaded me to drive Pa home. He was a good, holy man, but he cussed all the way, and ended by saying that Wilks never should see hair nor hide of that money. And he never offered it back again, neither, and him and Wilks never spoke for two years. Pa bought a fine Kentucky mare with the money, and used to chuckle every time she'd pass him. He got so he thought hoss-trading wasn't the worst crime on earth."
"And what became of the hoss?" the listener asked.
"I never knew," Henley answered; "men don't advertise such things when they go against them. But one day, during election, Tobe asked me to cast a vote for his son, and I promised to do it, and we got kinder friendly. As he was leaving me he turned back and laid his hand on my shoulder and said, 'Alf, I've wondered many a time what in the name of common-sense your Pa wanted with that hoss.'
"'So have I,' said I, and he went one way and me another."
Pomp, the negro porter, was entering the door, and with a laugh Cahews turned to meet him.
CHAPTER III
Dixie Hart turned her head drowsily on her pillow and opened her eyes and closed them again. "Oh, I could sleep, sleep, sleep till doomsday," she said to herself. "I wish I didn't have to get up. I'd like to take one day off. I could lie here flat on my back till night. But, old girl, you've got to be up an' doing."
She heard the clucking and scratching of her hens, the chirping of the tiny chickens, and the lusty crowing of her roosters in their answering calls to neighboring fowls, the neighing of her horse in the stable, the mooing of her cow in the barn-yard.
"They are all begging me to hurry," she mused. "They don't want to sleep; they've had their fill through the night, while I had to be up. Well, repining don't make good dining, and here goes."
She dressed herself, went out on the little kitchen porch, bathed in fresh, cool well-water, and, with a coarse towel which hung from a nail on the door-jamb, she rubbed her face, arms, and neck till they glowed like the reddening skies.
"My two women, as sound as they pretend to sleep, are crazy for their coffee," she smiled, "but they've got to wait, like people at a circus do, till the animals are fed. The older folks get, the earlier they go to bed and the earlier they rise. Heaven only knows where it will end. If mine could get their suppers early enough they would say good-night at sundown and good-morning when it was so dark you couldn't see 'em in their night-clothes."
"Dixie, is that you, darling?" It was Mrs. Hart's voice, and it came from the open window of a tiny room with a sloping roof which jutted out from the end of the kitchen.
"Yes'm. What is it, mother?"
"Nothing." A thin hand drew a white curtain aside, and a pale, wrinkled face, surrounded by dishevelled iron-gray hair, appeared above the window-sill. "I just wanted to know if you was up. I heard you through the night. Your aunt was suffering, wasn't she?"
"Yes, she couldn't sleep," Dixie replied, as she spread the damp towel out on the shelf where the coming sun's rays would dry it. "She says she sat too long at the spring yesterday. I got up and rubbed her arms and chest twice with the new liniment. It smells like it's got laudanum in it; but it didn't deaden her pain."
"I'd 'a' got up myself," Mrs. Hart said, in her plaintive tone, "but I can't see good enough to help."
"It's well you didn't," Dixie said, lightly, "for you'd just have made double trouble. I'd have laid down my patient and let her grin and bear her pain while I was trotting you back to bed and making you lie there. Don't you ever get up and go stumbling about in the dark while I'm attending to anything like that."
"I think I'll get up and make the coffee while you are feeding," Mrs. Hart said. "Mandy nearly dies waiting for it to come after she wakes up."
"That's right, lay it on her," Dixie laughed, impulsively. "You are getting like a ripe old toper who is always begging whiskey for somebody else. You let that coffee-pot alone. The last time you tried your hand at it you put in a double quantity of corn-meal and couldn't understand why it didn't have a familiar smell as it was boiling."
"I believe a body does become a slave to the habit," the old woman agreed. "The other day you was over at Carlton, and left enough already made for dinner, I accidentally spilled it, and me and Mandy went nearly crazy. It was one of her bad days, and she couldn't get up, and I couldn't find the coffee."
"I remember," Dixie answered, "and you both swigged so much at supper to make up for it that you wanted to talk all night. Oh, you two are a funny lot! But you've got to wait this time, sure. I'm going to feed these things and stop their noise."
She had reference to half a hundred fowls, young and old, that were squawking loudly and fluttering on the steps and even the porch floor. She disappeared in the kitchen and returned in a moment with a dish-pan half filled with corn-meal, and into this she poured a quantity of water, and with her hand stirred the mass into a thick mush. This she began to throw here and there over the yard like a sower of grain till the voices of the fowls had ceased and they had fled from the porch. Then she took up a pail of swill in the kitchen and bore it down to a pen containing a couple of fat pigs and emptied it into their wooden trough. Going into a little corn-crib adjoining the stable and wagon-shed, she brought out a bucketful of wheat-bran and fed it to the cow, which stood trying to lick the back of a sleek young calf over the low fence in another lot. "I'll milk you after breakfast," she said, as she stroked the cow's back. "The calf will have to wait; I can't attend to all humanity and the brute creation at the same time. You'll feel more like suckling the frisky thing, anyway, after you've filled your insides."
The