It was in the latter part of August. Breezes with just a touch of autumnal crispness bore down from the mountain-sides, clipping from their stems the first dead and dying leaves, and swept on across Ann Boyd's level cotton-fields, where she was at work at the head of a score of cotton-pickers—negro men, boys, women, and girls. There were certain social reasons why the unemployed poor white females would not labor under this strange woman, though they needed her ready money as badly as the blacks, and that, too, was a constant thorn in the flesh of Ann's pride. She could afford to pay well for work, inasmuch as her planting and harvesting were invariably profitable. She had good agricultural judgment, and she used it. Even her cotton picking would average up better to the acre than any other farmer's, for she saw to it that her workers put in good time and left no white, fluttering scrap on stalk, leaf, or bole to attract the birds looking for linings for their winter's nests. When her black band had left a portion of her field, it was as if a forest fire had swept over it, leaving it brown and bare. The negroes were always ready to work for her, for the best of them were never criticised for having done so. The most fault-finding of her enemies had even been glad of the opportunity to call attention to the fact that only negroes would sink so low as to toil by her side. But the blacks didn't care, and in their taciturn fidelity they never said aught against her. As a rule, the colored people had contempt for the "pore white trash," and reverenced the ex-slave-holder and his family; but Ann Boyd was neither one nor the other. She was rich, and therefore powerful—a creature to be measured by no existing standards. When they worked for their old owners and others of the same impoverished class, they were asked to take in payment old clothing, meat—and not the choicest—from the smoke-house, and grain from the barn, or a questionable order to some store-keeper who, being dubious about the planter's account himself, usually charged double in self-protection. But on Ann's place it was different. At the end of each day, hard, jingling cash was laid into their ready palms, and it was symbolic of the freedom which years before had been talked about so much, but which somehow had appeared in name only. Yes, Ann Boyd was different. Coming in closer contact with her than the whites, they knew her better and felt her inherent worth. They always addressed her as "Miss Ann," and as "Miss Ann" she was known among them far and near—a queer, powerful individuality about whose private life—having naught to lose or gain by it—they never gossiped.

On the present day, when the sun dipped below the mountain-top, Ann raised the cow's horn, which she always wore at her belt, and blew a resounding blast upon it. This was the signal that the day's toil was ended, and yet so faithful were her black allies that each tried to complete the row he happened to be on before he brought in his bag. The crop for the year was good over all that portion of the state, and the newspapers, which Ann read carefully by candle-light at night, were saying that, owing to the little cotton being produced in other parts of the South, the price was going to be high. And that meant that Ann Boyd would be a "holder" in the market—not needing ready money, her bales would remain in a warehouse in Darley till the highest price had been reached in the long-headed woman's judgment, which in this, too, was always good—so good, in fact, that the Darley cotton speculators were often guided by it to their advantage.

The gathering-bags all in the cotton-house, Ann locked the rusty padlock, paid the toilers from her leather bag, and trudged home to her well-earned supper. When that was prepared and eaten, she moved her chair to the front porch and sat down; but the air was cool to unpleasantness, and she moved back into the gracious warmth of the big, open fire. All the afternoon her heart had thrilled over a report that Jane Hemingway's small cotton crop was being hastily and carelessly gathered and sold at the present low price by the man who held a mortgage on it. It pleased Ann to think that Jane would later hear of her own high receipts and be stung by it. Then, too, she had heard that Jane was more and more concerned about her bodily affliction and the inability to receive proper treatment. Yes, Jane was getting payment for what she had done in such an underhanded way, and Ann was glad of it.

Other things had not gone to please Ann of late. She had tried her best to be in sympathy with Luke King's action in paying out his last dollar of ready money for a farm for his family, whom she heartily despised for their treatment of her, but she could not see it from the young man's sanguine and cheerful stand-point. She had seen the Bruce family driving by in one of the old-fashioned vehicles the Dickersons had owned, and the sight had seemed ludicrous to her. "The boy will never amount to anything," she said. "He'll be poor all his life. He'll let anybody impose on him." And yet she loved him with a strange, insistent affection she could hardly understand. Even when she had bitterly upbraided him for that amazing act of impulsive generosity, as he sat in her doorway the next morning, and she saw the youthful blaze of enthusiasm in his eyes as he essayed to justify his course by the theories of life which had guided him in his professional career—even then an impulse was tugging at her heart to listen and believe the things he was so ardently declaring would free her from her bondage to hate and avarice. She could have kissed him as she might have kissed a happy, misguided son, and yet her coldness, her severity, she argued, was to be for his ultimate good. He had sent her copies of his new paper, with his editorials proudly marked in blue pencil. They were all in the same altruistic vein, and, strange to say, the extracts printed from leading journals all over the South in regard to his work were full of hearty approval. He had become a great factor for good in the world. He was one man who had the unfaltering courage of his convictions. Ann laughed to herself as she recalled all she had said to him that day. No wonder that he had thrown it off with a smile and a playful kiss, when such high authorities were backing him up. True, he might live in such a way as never to need the money which had been her weapon of defence, and he might finally rise to a sort of penniless greatness. Besides, his life was one thing, hers another. No great calamity had come to him in youth, such as she had known and so grimly fought; no persistent enemy was following his track with the scent and bay of a blood-hound, night and day seeking to rend him to pieces.

These reflections were suddenly disturbed by a most unusual sound at that time of night. It was the sharp click of the iron gate-latch. Ann's heart sprang to her throat and seemed to be held there by taut suspense. She stood up, her hand on the mantel-piece, bending her ears for further sounds. Then she heard a heavy, even tread approaching. How could it be? And yet, though a score of years had sped since it had fallen on her ears, she knew it well. "It can't be!" she gasped. "It's somebody else that happens to walk like him; he'd never dare to—"

The step had reached the porch. The sagging floor bent and creaked. It was Joe Boyd. She knew it now full well, for no one else would have paused like that before rapping. There was silence. The visitor was actually feeling for the door-latch. It was like Joe Boyd, after years of absence, to have thought to enter her house as of old without the formality of announcing himself. He tried the latch; the door was fast. He paused another moment, then rapped firmly and loudly. Ann stood motionless, her face pale and set almost in a grimace of expectancy. Then Boyd stalked heavily to the window at the end of the porch; she saw his bushy head and beard against the small square of glass. As one walking in sleep, Ann stepped close to the window, and through the glass their eyes met in the first visual greeting since he had gone away.

"Open the door, Ann," he said, simply. "I want to see you."

"Huh, you do, do you?" she cried. "Well, you march yourself through that gate an' come round here in daytime. I see myself opening up at night for you or anybody else."

He pressed his face closer to the glass. His breath spread moisture upon it, and he raised his hands on either side of his head that he might more clearly see within.

"I want to see you, Ann," he repeated, simply. "I've been riding since dinner, and just got here; my hoss is lame."

"Huh!" she sniffed. "I tell you, Joe Boyd, I'll not—" She went no further. Something in his aging features tied her tongue. He had really altered remarkably; his face was full of lines cut since she had seen him. His beard had grown rough and bristly, as had his heavy eyebrows. How little was he now like the once popular beau of the country-side who had been considered the best "catch" among young farmers! No, she had not thought of him as such a wreck, such an impersonation of utter failure, and even resignation to it.

"I reckon you'd better open the door an' let me in, Ann," he said. "I won't bother you long. I've just a few words to say. It's not about me. It's about Nettie."

"Oh, it's about the child!" Ann breathed more freely. "Well, wait a minute, till I make a light."

He saw her go to the mantel-piece and get a candle and bend over the fire. There was a sudden flare of bluish flame as the dripping tallow became ignited in the hot ashes, then she straightened up and placed the light on a table. She moved slowly to the door and opened it. They stood face to face. He started—as if from the habit of general greeting—to hold out his rough hand, but changed his mind and rubbed it awkwardly against his thigh as his dumb stare clung to hers.

"Yes," he began, doggedly, "it's about Nettie." He had started to close the door after him, but, grasping the shutter firmly, Ann pushed it back against the wall.

"Let the door stand open," she said, harshly.

"Oh," he grunted, stupidly, "I didn't know but somebody passin' along the road might—"

"Well, let 'em pass and look in, too," Ann retorted. "I'd a sight rather they'd pass and see you here in open candle-light than to have the door of my house closed with us two behind it. Huh!"

"Well," he said, a blear in his big, weary eyes, "you know best, I reckon. I admit I don't go deep into such matters. It's sorter funny to see you so particular, though, and with—with me."

He walked to the fire and mechanically held out his hands to the warmth. Then, with his back to the red glow, he stood awkwardly, his eyes on the floor. After a pause, he said, suddenly: "If you don't mind, Ann, I'd rather set down. I'm tired to death, nearly, from that blasted long ride. Coming down-hill for five or six miles on a slow, stiff-jointed hoss is heavy on a man as old as I am."

She reached behind her and gave him a chair, but refused to sit down herself, standing near him as he sank into the chair; and, quite in his old way, she noticed he thrust out his pitifully ill-shod feet to the flames and clasped his hair-grown hands in his lap—that, too, in the old way, but with added feebleness.

"You said it was about the child," Ann reminded him. "Ain't she well?"

"Oh yes, she's well an' hearty," Boyd made haste to reply. "I reckon you may think it's odd fer me to ride away over here, but, Ann, I'm a man that feels like I want to do my full duty if I can in this life, and I've been bothering a lots here lately—a lots. I've lost sleep over a certain delicate matter, but nothing I kin do seems to help me out. It's a thing, you see, that I couldn't well ask advice on, and so I had to tussle with it in private. Finally I thought I'd just ride over and lay the whole thing before you."

"Well, what is it?" Ann asked.

"It's about the hardest thing to talk about that I ever tried to approach," Boyd said, with lowered glance, "but I reckon I'll have to get it out and be done with it, one way or another. You see, Ann, when the law gave me the custody of the child I was a younger man, with more outlook and health and management, in the judgment of the court, than I've got now, and I thought that what I couldn't do for my own flesh and blood nobody else could, and so I took her off."

"Yes, you took her off!" Ann straightened up, and a sneer touched her set features; there was a sarcastic, almost triumphant cry of vindictiveness in her tone.

"Yes, I thought all that," Boyd continued. "And I meant well, but miscalculated my own capacity and endurance. Instead of making money hand over hand as folks said almost any man could do out West, I sunk all I put in. We come back this way then, and I located in Gilmer, thinking I'd do better on soil I understood, and among the kind o' folks and religion I was used to, but it's been down-hill work ever since then. When Nettie was little it didn't seem like so much was demanded, but now, Ann, she's like all the balance o' young women of her age. She wants things like the rest around her, an' she pines for them, an' sulks, and—and makes me feel awful. It's a powerful hard matter for me to dress her like some o' the rest about us, and she's the proudest thing that ever wore shoe-leather."

"Oh, I see!" said Ann. "She's going about, too, with—she's bein' courted by some feller or other."

"Yes, Sam Lawson, over there, a likely young chap, has taken a big fancy to her, and he's good enough, too, but I reckon a little under the influence of his daddy, who is a hard-shell Baptist, a man that believes in sanctification and talks it all the time. Well, to come down to it, things between Nettie and Sam is sorter hanging fire, and Nettie's nearly crazy for fear it will fall through. And that's why, right now, I screwed up to the point of coming to see you."

"You thought I could help her out in her courting?" Ann sneered, and yet beneath her sneer lay an almost eager curiosity.

"Well, not that exactly"—Joe Boyd spread out his rough fingers very wide to embrace as much of his dust-coated beard as possible; he pulled downward on a rope of it, and let his shifting glance rest on the fire—"not that exactly, Ann."

"Well, then, I don't understand, Joe Boyd," Ann said; "and let me tell you that no matter what sort of young thing I was when we lived together, I'm now a business woman, and a successful one, and I have a habit of not beating about the bush. I talk straight and make others do the same. Business is business, and life is short."

"Well, I'll talk as straight as I can," Boyd swallowed. "You see, as I say, old Lawson is a narrow, grasping kind of a man, and he can't bear the idea of his only boy not coming into something, even if it's very little, and I happen to know that he's been expecting my little farm over there to fall to Nettie."

"Well, won't it?" Ann demanded.

Boyd lowered his shaggy head. There was a piteous flicker of despair in the lashes of the eyes Ann had once loved so well.

"It's mortgaged to the hilt, Ann," he gulped, "and next Wednesday if I can't pay down five hundred to Carson in Darley, it will go under the hammer. That will bust Nettie's love business all to flinders. Old Lawson's got Sam under his thumb, and he'll call it off. Nettie knows all about it. She's no fool for a girl of her age; she found out about the debt; she hardly sleeps a wink, but mopes about with red eyes all day long. I thought I had trouble away back when me 'n' you—away back there, you know—but I was younger then, and this sorter seems to be my fault."

Ann fell to quivering with excitement as she reached for a chair and leaned upon it, her stout knee in the seat, her strong, bare arms resting on the back.

"Right here I want to ask you one question, Joe Boyd, before we go a step further. Did Mary Waycroft make a proposal to Nettie—did Mary Waycroft hint to Nettie that maybe I'd be willing to help her along in some substantial way?"

The farmer raised a pair of shifting eyes to the piercing orbs above him, and then looked down.

"I believe she did something of the sort, Ann," he said, reluctantly, "but, you see—"

"I see nothing but this," Ann threw into the gap left by his sheer inability to proceed—"I see nothing but the fact that my proposition scared her nearly to death. She was afraid it would get out that she was having something to do with me, and now, if I do rescue this land from public sale, I must keep in the background, not even let her know where the money is coming from."

"I didn't say that," Boyd said, heavily stricken by the combined force of her tone and words. "The—the whole thing's for you to decide on. I've tussled with it till I'm sick and tired. I wouldn't have come over if I hadn't thought it was my bounden duty to lay it before you. The situation has growed up unforeseen out of my trouble and yours. If you want the girl's land to go under hammer and bust up her marriage, that's all right. I won't cry about it, for I'm at the end of my rope. You see, law or no law, she's yore natural flesh and blood, jest as she is mine, an' she wasn't—the girl wasn't responsible fer what you an' me tuck a notion to do away back there. The report is out generally that everything you touch somehow turns to gold—that you are rolling in money. That's the reason I thought it was my duty—by God, Ann Lincoln"—his eyes were flashing with something like the fire which had blazed in them when he had gone away in his health and prime—"I wouldn't ask you for a red cent, for myself, not if I was dying for a mouthful of something to eat. I'm doing this because it seems right according to my poor lights. The child's happiness is at stake; you can look at it as you want to and act as you see fit."

Ann bit her lip; a shudder passed over her strong frame from head to foot. She lowered her big head to her hands. "Sometimes," she groaned, "I wish I could actually curse God for the unfairness of my lot. The hardest things that ever fell to the fate of any human being have been mine. In agony, Jesus Christ prayed, they say, to let His cup pass if possible. His cup! What was His cup? Just death—that's all; but this is a million times worse than death—this here crucifixion of pride—this here forcing me to help and protect people who deny me, who shiver at a hint of my approach, yelling 'Unclean, unclean!' like the lepers outside the city gates—beyond the walls that encompass accepted humanity. Joe Boyd"—she raised her face and stared at him—"you don't no more know me than you know the stars above your head. I am no more the silly girl that you married than I am some one else. I learned the lesson of life away back there when you left in that wagon with the child of my breast. I have fought a long battle, and I'm still fighting. To me, with all my experience, you—you poor little thing—are a baby of a man. You had a wife who, if she does say it, had the brain of a dozen such men as you are, and yet you listened to the talk of a weak, jealous, disappointed woman and came and dared to wipe your feet on me, spit in my face, and drag my name into the mire of public court. I made no defence then—I don't make any now. I'll never make any. My life shall be my defence before God, and Him only. I wish it could be a lesson to all young women who are led into misfortune such as mine. To every unfortunate girl I'd say, 'Never marry a man too weak to understand and appreciate you.' I loved you, Joe Boyd, as much as a woman ever loved a man, but it was like the love of a strong man for a weak, dependent woman. Somehow I gloried in your big, hulking helplessness. What I have since done in the management of affairs I wanted to do for you."

"Oh, I know all that, Ann, but this is no time or place to—"

"But it's got to be the time and place," she retorted, shaking a stiff finger in his face. "I want to show you one side of this matter. I won't mention names, but a man, an old man, come to me one day. He set there on my door-step and told me about his life of his own free will and accord, because he'd heard of mine, and wanted to comfort me. He'd just buried his wife—a woman he'd lived with for thirty-odd years, and big tears rolled down his cheeks while he was talking. He said he was going to tell me what he'd never told a living soul. He said away back, when he was young, he loved his wife and courted her. He saw that she loved him, but she kept holding off and wouldn't give in till he was nearly distracted; then he said her mother come to him and told him what the trouble was. It was because the girl had had bad luck like I did. She loved him and wanted to make him a good wife, but was afraid it would be wrong. He said he told the girl's mother that it made no difference to him, and that he then and there promised never on this earth to mention it to her, and he never did. She was the woman he lived with for a third of a century in holy wedlock, and who he couldn't speak of without shedding tears. Now, Joe Boyd, here's my point—the only difference I can see in that woman's conduct and mine is that I would have told you, but I didn't think you was the kind of a man to tell a thing like that to. I didn't think you was strong enough, as a man, but I thought your happiness and mine depended on our marriage, and so after you had dogged my steps for years I consented. So you see, if—if, I say—you had gone and let the old matter drop, you wouldn't have been in the plight you are now, and our child would have had more of the things she needed."

"There are two sides to it," Boyd said, raising a sullen glance to her impassioned face. "And that reminds me of an old man I knew about. He was the best husband that ever walked the earth. He loved his wife and children, and when he was seventytwo years of age he used to totter about with his grandchildren all day long, loving them, with his whole heart. Then one day proof was handed him—actual proof—that not a speck of his blood flowed in their veins. He was hugging one of the little ones in his arms when he heard the truth. Ann, it killed him. That's t'other side. You nor me can't handle a matter as big and endless as that is. The Lord God of the universe is handling ours. We can talk and plan, but most of us, in a pinch, will do as generations before us have done in sech delicate matters."

"I suppose so." Ann's lips were white; there was a wild, hunted look in her great, staring eyes.

"I tried to reason myself out of the action I finally took," Boyd went on, deliberately, "but there was nothing else to do. I was bothered nigh to death. The thing was running me stark crazy. I had to chop it off, and I'm frank to say, even at this late day, that I don't see how I could have done otherwise. But I didn't come here to fetch all this up. It was just the other matter, and the belief that it was my duty to give you a chance to act on it as you saw fit."

"If her wedding depends on it, the farm must be saved," Ann said, quietly. "I give away money to others, why shouldn't I to—to her? I'll get a blank and write a check for the money."

He lowered his head, staring at the flames. "That's for you to decide," he muttered. "When the debt is paid the land shall be deeded to her. I'll die rather than borrow on it again."

Ann went to the clock on the mantel-piece and took down a pad of blank checks and a pen and bottle of ink. Placing them on the table, she sat down and began to write with a steady hand and a firm tilt of her head to one side.

"Hold on!" Boyd said, turning his slow glance upon her. "Excuse me, but there's one thing we haven't thought of."

Ann looked up from the paper questioningly. "What is that?"

"Why, you see, I reckon I'd have to get that check cashed somewhere, Ann, and as it will have your name on it, why, you see, in a country where everybody knows everybody else's business—"

"I understand," Ann broke in—"they would know I had a hand in it."

"Yes, they would know that, of course, if I made use of that particular check."

Ann Boyd rested her massive jaw on her hand in such a way as to hide her face from his view. She was still and silent for a minute, then she rose, and, going to the fire, she bent to the flame of a pine-knot and destroyed the slip of paper.

"I don't usually keep that much money about the house," she said, looking down on him, "but I happen to have some hidden away. Go out and get your horse ready and I'll bring it to you at the fence."

He obeyed, rising stiffly from his chair and reaching for his worn slouch hat.

He was standing holding his bony horse by the rein when she came out a few minutes later and gave him a roll of bills wrapped in a piece of cloth.

"Here it is," she said. "You came after it under a sense of duty, and I am sending it the same way. I may be made out of odd material, but I don't care one single thing about the girl. If you had come and told me she was dead, I don't think I'd have felt one bit different. It might have made me a little curious to know which of us was going next—you, me, or her—that's all. Good-bye, Joe Boyd."

"Good-bye, Ann," he grunted, as he mounted his horse. "I'll see that this matter goes through right."