Mrs. Jane Hemingway, Ann Boyd's long and persistent enemy, sat in the passage which connected the two parts of her house, a big, earthernware churn between her sharp knees, firmly raising and lowering the bespattered dasher with her bony hands. She was a woman past fifty; her neck was long and slender, and the cords under the parchment-like skin had a way of tightening, like ropes in the seams of a tent, when she swallowed or spoke. Her dark, smoothly brushed hair was done up in the tightest of balls behind her head, and her brown eyes were easily kindled to suspicion, fear, or anger.

Her brother-in-law, Sam Hemingway, called "Hem" by his intimates, slouched in from the broad glare of the mid-day sun and threw his coat on a chair. Then he went to the shelf behind the widow, and, pouring some water into a tin pan from a pail, he noisily bathed his perspiring face and big, red hands. As he was drying himself on the towel which hung on a wooden roller on the weather-boarding of the wall, Virginia Hemingway, his niece, came in from the field bringing a pail of freshly gathered dewberries. In appearance she was all that George Wilson had claimed for her. Slightly past eighteen, she had a wonderful complexion, a fine, graceful figure, big, dreamy, hazel eyes, and golden-brown hair, and, which was rare in one of her station, she was tastily dressed. She smiled as she showed her uncle the berries and playfully "tickled" him under the chin.

"See there!" she chuckled.

"Pies?" he said, with an unctuous grin, as he peered down into her pail.

"I thought of you while I was gathering them," she nodded. "I'm going to try to make them just as you like them, with red, candied bars criss-crossing."

"Nothing in the pie-line can hold a candle to the dewberry unless it's the cherry," he chuckled. "The stones of the cherries sorter hold a fellow back, but I manage to make out. I et a pie once over at Darley without a stone in it, and you bet your life it was a daisy."

He went into his room for his tobacco, and Virginia sat down to stem her berries. He returned in a moment, leaning in the doorway, drawing lazily at his pipe. The widow glanced up at him, and rested her dasher on the bottom of the churn.

"I reckon folks are still talking about Ann Boyd and her flouncing out of meeting like she did," the widow remarked. "Well, that was funny, but what was the old thing to do? It would take a more brazen-faced woman than she is, if such a thing exists, to sit still and hear all he said."

"Yes, they are still hammering at the poor creature's back," said Sam, "and that's one thing I can't understand, nuther. She's got dead loads of money—in fact, she's independent of the whole capoodle of you women. Now, why don't she kick the dust o' this spot off of her heels an' go away whar she can be respected, an', by gosh! be let alone one minute 'fore she dies. They say she's the smartest woman in the state, but that don't show it—living on here whar you women kin throw a rock at her every time she raises her head above low ground."

"I've wondered why she don't go off, too," the widow said, as she peered down at the floating lumps of yellow butter in the snowy depths of her vessel, and deftly twirled her dasher in her fingers to make them "gather"; "but, Sam, haven't you heard that persons always want to be on the spot where they went wrong? I think she's that way. And when the facts leaked out on her, and her husband repudiated her and took the child away, she determined to stay here and live it down. But instead of calling humility and submission to her aid, she turned in to stinting and starving to make money, and now she flaunts her prosperity in our faces, as if that is going to make folks believe any more in her. Money's too easily made in evil ways for Christian people to bow before it, and possessions ain't going to keep such men as Brother Bazemore from calling her down whenever she puts on her gaudy finery and struts out to meeting. It was a bold thing for her to do, anyway, after berating him as she did when he went to her to get the use of her grove for the picnic."

"They say she didn't know Bazemore was to preach that day," said Sam. "She'd heard that the presiding elder was due here, and I'm of the opinion that she took that opportunity to show you all she wasn't afraid to appear in public."

Virginia Hemingway threw a handful of berry-stems out into the sunshine in the yard. "She's a queer woman," she said, innocently, "like a character in a novel, and, somehow, I don't believe she is as bad as people make her out. I never told either of you, but I met her yesterday down on the road."

"You met her!" cried Mrs. Hemingway, aghast.

"Yes, she was going home from her sugar-mill with her apron full of fresh eggs that she'd found down at her hay-stacks, and just as she got close to me her dress got caught on a snag and she couldn't get it loose. I stopped and unfastened it, and she actually thanked me, though, since I was born, I've never seen such a queer expression on a human face. She was white and red and dark as a thunder-cloud all at once. It looked like she hated me, but was trying to be polite for what I'd done."

"You had no business touching her dirty skirt," the widow flared up. "The next thing you know it will go out that you and her are thick. It would literally ruin a young girl to be associated with a woman of that stamp. What on earth could have possessed you to—"

"Oh, come off!" Sam laughed. "Why, you know you've always taught Virgie to be considerate of old folks, and she was just doing what she ought to have done for any old nigger mammy."

"I looked at it that way," said the girl, "and I'm not sorry, for I don't want her to think I hate her, for I don't. I think she has had a hard life, and I wish it were in my power to help her out of her trouble."

"Virginia, what are you talking about?" cried Mrs. Hemingway. "The idea of your standing up for that woman, when—"

"Well, Luke King used to defend her," Virginia broke in, impulsively, "and before he went away you used to admit he was the finest young man in the county. I've seen him almost shed tears when he'd tell about what she'd done for him, and how tender-hearted and kind she was."

"Tender-hearted nothing!" snapped Mrs. Hemingway, under a deep frown. "Luke King was the only person that went about her, and she tried to work on his sympathies for some purpose or other. Besides, nobody knows what ever become of him; he may have gone to the dogs by this time; it looks like somebody would have heard of him if he had come to any good in the five years he's been away."

"Somehow, I think she knows where he is," Virginia said, thoughtfully, as she rose to put her berries away.

When she had gone, Sam laughed softly. "It's a wonder to me that Virgie don't know whar Luke is, herself," he said. "I 'lowed once that the fellow liked her powerful; but I reckon he thought she was too young, or didn't want to take the matter further when he was as poor as Job's turkey and had no sort of outlook ahead."

"I sort o' thought that, too," the widow admitted, "but I didn't want Virginia to encourage him when he was accepting so much from that woman."

Sam laughed again as he knocked the ashes from his pipe and cleaned the bowl with the tip of his finger. "Well, 'that woman,' as you call her, is a power in the land that hates her," he said. "She knows how to hit back from her fortress in that old farm-house. George Wilson knows what it means not to stand by her in public, so does Abe Longley, that has to drive his cattle to grass two miles over the mountains. Jim Johnston, who was dead sure of renting her northeast field again next year, has been served with a notice to vacate, and now, if the latest news can be depended on, she's hit a broad lick at half the farmers in the valley, and, while I'm a sufferer with the balance, I don't blame her one bit. I'd 'a' done the same pine-blank thing years ago if I'd stood in her shoes."

"What's she done now?" asked the woman at the churn, leaning forward eagerly.

"Done? Why, she says she's tired o' footing almost the entire wheat-threshing bill for twenty measly little farmers. You know she's been standing her part of the expenses to get the Empire Company to send their steam thresher here, and her contribution amounted to more than half. She's decided, by hunky, to plant corn and cotton exclusively next year, and so notified the Empire Company. They can't afford to come unless she sows wheat, and they sent a man clean from Atlanta to argue the matter with her, but she says she's her own boss, an' us farmers who has land fittin' for nothing but wheat is going to get badly left in the lurch. Oh, Bazemore opened the battle agin her, and you-uns echoed the war-cry, an' the battle is good on. I'll go without flour biscuits and pie-crust, but the fight will be interesting. The Confed' soldiers made a purty good out along about '61, an' they done it barefooted an' on hard-tack an' water. If you folks are bent on devilling the hide off of the most influential woman in our midst, just because her foot got caught in the hem of her skirt an' tripped her up when she was a thoughtless young girl, I reckon us men will have to look on an' say nothing."

"She did slip up, as you say," remarked the widow, "and she's been a raging devil ever since."

"Ay! an' who made her one? Tell me that." Sam laughed. "You may not want to hear it, Jane, but some folks hint that you was at the bottom of it—some think lazy Joe Boyd would have stayed on in that comfortable boat, with a firm hand like hern at the rudder, if you hadn't ding-donged at him and told tales to him till he had to pull out."

"Huh! They say that, do they?" The widow frowned as she turned and looked straight at him. "Well, let 'em. What do I care? I didn't want to see as good-hearted a man as he was hoodwinked."

"I reckon not," Sam said, significantly, and he walked out of the passage down towards the barn. "Huh!" he mused, as he strode along crumbling leaf-tobacco of his own growing and filling his pipe. "I come as nigh as pease tellin' the old woman some'n' else folks say, an' that is that she was purty nigh daft about Joe Boyd, once upon a time, and that dashing Ann cut her out as clean as a whistle. I'll bet that 'ud make my sister-in-law so dern hot she'd blister from head to foot."