JEFF WARREN and the two women of his family were on their way back to their former home. A wagon, a rickety affair on wabbly wheels, covered by a clay-stained canvas stretched over hoops, and drawn by a skeleton of a horse, contained all their earthly possessions. Peering under the hood of the wagon, an observer might see two musty straw mattresses, an old hair-covered trunk, a table, three chairs, a box of dishes, and a sooty collection of pots, pans, kettles, pails, and smoothing-irons. Carefully wrapped in bedquilts, and tied with ropes, was the household joy, a cottage-organ. Tethered to the wagon in the rear was a cow which tossed her head impatiently under the rope around her horns, and dismally mooed to her following calf.

Jeff now belonged to the shiftless class of small farmers that drifts from one landowner to another, renting a few acres on shares and failing on at least every other crop. The three members of the family were equal partners in misfortune; for both Mrs. Rundel and her sister quite frequently toiled in the fields, using the hoe, the scythe, the spade, and in emergencies, when Warren's rheumatism was at its worst, even the plow. Still of irascible temper, and grown more sensitive under adversity, Jeff had quarreled or fought with almost every man from whom he had rented land, until he now found few who would deal with him.

As he walked at the side of the wagon in which his companions were riding, along the narrow mountain road, trampling down the underbrush which bordered the way, he had still about him a remnant of the old debonair mien which had made him a social favorite in his younger days.

Amanda, as is the case with many women who have foresworn matrimonial and maternal cares, had withstood the blight of time remarkably well. Her round, rosy face had few new angles or lines, and her voice rang with youthful joy when she spoke of once more beholding familiar scenes and faces. It was her sister who had changed to a noticeable degree. There was a lack-luster expression about Addie's light-brown eyes, which had been so childlike and beautiful. Her hair was thinner; her skin had yellowed and withered; her teeth, for the most part, were gone, and those which remained appeared too prominent, isolated as they were in bare gums, when she forced a smile over some remark of her cheerful sister.

Crude as she was, Addie had followed, her poor mental hands always outstretched to grasp it, an ever-receding masculine ideal. In Jeff Warren, with his love of music and courage before men and gallantry to all women, she had once believed she had found it. But ideals do not thrive so well under hardship as violets rooted in filth, and Addie's heart constantly ached for the lost and the unattainable.

Suddenly Jeff turned to his companions and smiled. “I reckon I've got a big surprise for you both,” he chuckled, his hand resting on the wagon-bed. “'Tain't the first o' April, but I've been foolin' you. I tol' you this was White Rock Mountain, but it ain't no such a thing. It is the south spur of our old Bald, and as soon as we pass through that gap up thar we'll see Grayson right at the foot.”

“You don't say!” Amanda clapped her hands in delight. “Lord, Lord, I shorely shall be tickled to get back! I want to shake hands with everybody within reach. You'll never pull me away again, Jeff—never!”

Addie, in her turn, said nothing. She scarcely smiled. She was inexpressibly pained by the thought of having to live among old friends and associates in the dismantled log cabin Jeff had reluctantly described. A reminiscent sob rose and died within her as she recalled the comfortable farm-house to which Ralph Rundel, who now seemed almost faultless, had taken her as a bride. To this another pang of memory was added. By her conduct, innocent though it was, she had driven her only child from her, and how many times had her tired heart gone back to the sturdy youth who had toiled so uncomplainingly, and, young as he was, borne so many burdens! Was Paul alive or dead? she often asked herself. If alive, how he must hate her! If dead, then the baby, which she now sometimes recalled with the awakening yearning of a mother's dry breast, was gone forever.

Slowly the horse tugged up the slope. “Whoa!” Amanda cried out suddenly. “I'm goin' to jump out an' walk on to the top. I'm simply crazy to git a look at the valley. Somehow it seems like the Promised Land flowin' with milk an' honey.”

Only too willingly the horse stopped, and she sprang down to the ground.

“Don't you want to walk a little, Addie?” she asked. “You'd better limber up your legs. I'm as stiff as a pair o' tongs.”

Mrs. Warren sadly shook her head and Jeff tossed the reins into her lap.

“Well, you drive,” he said. “We'll walk on to the top an' take a peep. I agree with you, Mandy. I don't feel like I'll ever want to leave this country ag'in. I want to die an' be buried among my kin.”

The two moved faster than the tired horse, and Addie saw them on the brow of the mountain, outlined against the blue expanse beyond. She noticed Jeff pointing here and there and waving his hand; even at that distance the glow of his animation was observable. Reaching the top, Mrs. Rundel caught their words, and in the depths of her despondency she wondered over their gratification.

“Not a new buildin' of any sort that I kin make out,” she heard her husband saying. “Thar, you kin see Jim Hoag's house above the bunch o' trees. It's had a fresh coat o' paint lately; look how bright the window-blinds are!”

“An' how green an' fresh everything seems!” commented the more poetic spinster. “Looks like thar's been plenty o' rain this summer. Oh, I love it—I love it! It's home—the only home I ever knowed.”

The horse paused close by them. The cow mooed loudly, and the calf trotted briskly up to her and began to butt her flabby bag with his sleek head.

“That looks like a different-shaped steeple on the Methodist meetin'-house,” Amanda commented, as she shaded her eyes from the sun and stared steadily off into the distance.

“I believe you are right, by hunky,” Jeff agreed. “This un is fully ten foot taller, unless them trees around it has been topped since we left.” He turned to his wife, and a shadow of chagrin crept across his face as he said: “I see the house whar you an' Rafe used to live—thar, just beyond Hoag's flour-mill. Well, thar's no use cryin' over spilt milk, old girl; you ain't goin' back to comfort like that, as scanty as it seemed when you had it, an' I was goin' to do such wonders in the money line. We'll have to swallow a big chunk o' pride to put up with a hut like our'n among old friends, but we've got to live life out, an' the cabin is the best we kin get at present, anyway.”

Addie, holding the reins in her thin fingers, rose to her full height, her weary eyes on her old home, which stood out with considerable clearness on the red, rain-washed slope beyond a stretch of green pasture. She saw the side porch, and remembered how Paul's cradle had stood there on warm afternoons, where she and Amanda had sat and sewed. Again that sense of lost motherhood stirred within her, and she was conscious of a sharp contraction of the muscles of her throat. Surely, she mused, after all there was no love like that of a mother's for her child, and in her own case there was so much to regret. The child had been beautiful—every one had noticed that. Its little hands were so chubby and pink; its lips like a cupid's bow. As a baby it had smiled more than any baby she had ever seen, and yet in boyhood the smile had gradually given way to a scowl of ever-increasing discontent and weariness of life and its clashing conditions.

Amanda and Jeff were now descending the mountain, and the horse plodded along behind them. They must hurry on, Jeff said, for the sun would soon be down and they must get to the cabin before dark, so as to unload and shape things up for the night. Fortunately, as he took care to remind them, they would not have to pass through the village, as the hut stood in the outskirts of the place, close to Hoag's property line.

Reaching the foot of the mountain, they took a short cut through some old unfenced fields to the cabin. Here their forebodings were more than realized. The two-roomed hut was worse than they had expected. It was built of logs, and had a leaning chimney made of sticks and clay. The rain had washed the clay out of the cracks between the logs of the walls, and the openings were stuffed with rags, paper, and dried moss. The door shutter, with broken hinges, was lying on the ground. The doorstep was a single log of pine, which the former inmate of the hut had chopped half away for kindling-wood. The wooden shutters to the tiny, glassless windows had gone the same way, along with several boards of the flooring.

“Mayburn lied to me like a dirty dog!” Jeff growled, his face dark with anger. “He said it was in decent shape—good enough for any farmer. When I see 'im I'll—”

“Yes, you will want to fight 'im, an' then we'll have no roof over us at all,” Amanda said, with a smile designed to soften her own disappointment as well as his. “I tell you, Jeff, we've got to make the best of it an' be thankful. We'll have decent neighbors, I'll bet. Look at that nice house right in our yard.”

“That's it,” Jeff thundered. “Mayburn wrote me this shack was all the house he had, an' that one is his, an' is empty. He insulted me by sizin' me up that way before I even got here.”

“Well, he'd have insulted hisse'f by puttin' us in it without the money to pay for it.” Amanda had no intention of adding fuel to her brother-in-law's wrath. “A fine house like that would be worth fifteen dollars a month at the lowest. You better not tackle 'im about it; he might offer it to us cash in advance—then I'd like to know what we'd do. You said this momin' that we'd have to buy our first groceries on a credit. Jeff, yore pride has been yore drawback long enough; you've got to smother it or it will smother you. Now pick up that door an' hang it some way or other. I won't sleep in a house that can't be shut up at night.”

Warren, quite beside himself in disappointment and ill-humor, replaced the shutter and then went to work unloading the furniture. He soon had it all within. Then he announced that he must leave them, to go up to the Square to buy the supplies of food they needed.

The two sisters had finished all that was to be done in the cabin, and were out in the desolate yard waiting for Warren to return.

“I see 'im,” Amanda cried. “He's comin' through the broom-sedge. He's took that way to keep from passin' Abe Langston's an' havin' to say howdy, He'll have to git over that or we'll never git along. He's got to take his medicine. The Lord's hard on 'im, but Jeff never was much of a Lord's man. It's the meek an' humble that the Lord favors, an' Jeff kicks ag'in' the pricks too much. Nothin' but a strong coffin an' plenty o' earth on top of it will ever humble that man.”

“He walks like he's bothered about something.” Mrs. Warren sighed, her slow gaze following her approaching husband's bowed form as he trudged through the thickening twilight. “Do you suppose they have refused to credit him?”

“I reckon not, for I see a bag o' something under his arm; but he's upset—you kin depend on it. He knows we are hungry, an' he'd strike a livelier gait than that if he wasn't mad as Tucker.”

As Jeff drew near they moved forward to meet him.

“Did you git anything to eat? That's what I want to know,” Amanda said, with her usual disregard of even the darkest of his moods.

It was as if he were going to make no response; but her eager hands were on the tow bag under his arm, and he sullenly answered in the affirmative.

“Smoked bacon.” She winked cheerfully at her sister. “I smell it. Sugar-cured in the bargain. Coffee, too, already parched an' ground. I'd know that a mile off if the wind wras in the right direction. I'm glad I put on the kettle.”

Jeff strode on heavily and deposited the bag at the door.

“We've all got to bunk in one room for to-night,” Amanda told him, as she untied the bag and began to take out the parcels. “There is no way fixed to keep the cow an' calf apart, an' she's got to graze or we can't have milk in the mornin', so I shut the calf up in the other room. It won't do no harm; it's clean and as gentle as a pet dog.”

“That's no way to do!” Jeff loweringly protested. “A thing like that would make us the laughin'-stock of the whole county. Besides, do you know that—” He seemed to hesitate, and then, as if he was thinking of something too unpleasant for discussion, he turned abruptly away. The two women saw him walk out to the well in the yard and stand still, his gaze on the village lights in the distance.

“What do you reckon is the matter with 'im?” Addie inquired, listlessly.

“Go to higher powers 'an me if you want to know,” Amanda retorted, as she proceeded to prepare supper. “Something shore has rubbed 'im the wrong way. He was out o' sorts when he left us, an' he's ready to kill somebody now.”

A few minutes later supper was on the table and Jeff was summoned. He entered the dimly lighted room, dropped his hat on a bed, and sat down at one end of the table. He was hungry, as the others well knew, and yet he ate with less apparent relish than usual. Amanda kept up an incessant flow of half-philosophical chatter with more or less comforting intent, but no part of it evoked comment from the head of the family.

Supper over, Jeff rose, reached for his hat, and was stalking out with bowed head at the low doorway, when Amanda suddenly uttered a little scream of astonishment.

“What's that in your—ain't that a pistol in your hip-pocket, Jeff Warren?” she demanded, while her weaker sister stared in slow, childlike wonder.

Impulsively and somewhat guiltily Warren slapped his hand on his bulging pocket and turned, blinking doggedly at the questioner.

“That's what it is!” he answered. His tone was sullen and defiant.

“Whar did you get it?” Amanda was now on her feet, leaning toward him in the meager light.

“I swapped my watch for it,” Jeff muttered; and he drew the brim of his hat lower over his burning eyes.

“Your watch!” Amanda cried. “Why, what are we goin' to do for a timepiece now? Besides, we didn't have to go armed all along that lonely mountain road; what is the need of a pistol here in the edge of town, among old friends an' law-abidin' neighbors?”

“That's my business,” Warren snarled, and he turned out into the dark. “Folks will know it's my business, too. You jest lie low an' see if they don't. I'll take care of number one.”

“I know how you'll take care of number one,” Amanda sneered. “It will be by ignorin' number three, like you always have done when you get the devil in you as big as the side of a house. Right now you are just itchin' for a row with somebody, an' you are goin' to have it if I don't take you in hand.”

Warren's innate gallantry checked the hot outburst, the forerunner of which was quivering on his white lips, and without a word he went back to the well and stood with his hand on the windlass, a pitiful symbol of human discontent outlined against the star-strewn sky.

“I ain't a-goin' to put my hands in dish-water till my mind's at ease,” Amanda said to her sister. “Poor thing! I reckon you feel so bad about the way we are fixed that you ain't bothered about Jeff's fits: But it's different with your sister Mandy. When you was a young gal I worried about whether you'd git married or not. Later I was bothered about your first choice an' his jealous suspicions. Next I turned into a wet-nurse; I walked the floor with your baby at night, stickin' splinters in my feet at every step, an' now I've got to keep your last investment from danglin' from the gallows like a scarecrow on a pole.”

Together the two women went to the brooding man at the well.

“What ails you, Jeff?” the wife began, with a timid sigh. “Anybody can see you are out o' sorts.”

“Well, I'll tell you what's the matter,” Warren fumed. “If I'd knowed it sooner I'd 'a' left you two beyant the mountain an' come on an' got it over with. I don't want to disturb women with a thing o' this sort.”

“Wayburn's goin' to turn us out, that's my guess,” Amanda dropped. “The shack ain't no better'n a stable for hosses, but we can't have even that without more cash than we've got.”

“No, he's had one of his old quarrels with somebody,” Mrs. Warren suggested, despondently.

“I hain't had one, but I'm goin' to,” Jeff threatened. “This State simply ain't wide enough, or long enough, to hold me and the dirty young pup that left me lyin' in the road for dead an' went off an' gloated over me. He was a boy then, but he's a man now, an' fully responsible.”

“Why, what are you talkin' about?” Amanda's inquiring stare shifted excitedly back and forth between her sister's startled face and the sinister one of her brother-in-law. “Is Paul alive—have you heard from him?”

“Heard from 'im?” Jeff's white lip curled and trembled like that of a snarling opossum. “I hain't heard from him personally yet, nor seed 'im, but he's back here struttin' around in fine clothes with plenty o' money in his pocket, an' sayin' that—”

“Oh, Jeff, oh, Jeff, are you sure?” Mrs. Warren had turned pale, and it was as if she were about to faint. Amanda threw a strong arm about her and firmly shook her. “Don't keel over,” she said, almost fiercely. “I want to know about this thing right now. All this dinky-dinky talk about shootin' may pass on some occasions, but when the big strappin' hulk I work for gits on a high jackass an' talks about killin' my own blood-nephew because he's got more clothes an' money than we got—well, I'll be in the game myself, that's the long an' short of it, I'll be in it tooth an' toe-nail.”

Never had Warren's gallantry been swathed in a blanket of such soaking dampness. He stared at his verbal antagonist with a fresh and uncurtained vision, and seemed unable to formulate a suitable reply.

“Never mind me.” Amanda's tone became distinctly conciliatory, and she smiled faintly: “I won't kill you till I git at the facts, anyway. I'm dyin' to know about the boy. Go on an' tell us.”

Jeff hesitated for a moment and then slowly complied. “He's back from the West. He got a fine education, an' worked his way up somehow. He's got a job on big pay managin' for Jim Hoag—he's got a hundred or more hands under him, an' the whole' county's braggin' about 'im. He rides around from one place to another with his head high in the air, givin' orders. When he landed here he told some cock-an'-bull tale about thinkin' I was underground, an' wanted the law to act, an' the like, but he's a liar.”

“Oh, I'm so glad; I'm so glad!” Amanda hugged her stupefied sister to her breast impulsively and kissed the sallow brow. “I always thought thar was come-out in that boy, an' now I know it. I'm dyin' to see 'im.”

“Well, he ain't dyin' to see you, or his mammy, either, in the plight you are in!” Jeff hurled at her. “They say he lives at Hoag's, an' goes gallivantin' about the country with that Atlanta gal, Ethel Mayfield. He's mad because we are back here to disgrace him with our dirt an' rags. He's the only livin' man that ever gloated over me, an' he's hand an' glove with my lifelong enemy. If you think I'm goin' to set back, an'—an'—”

“I don't care whether you set back, stand back, or roll back,” Amanda's eyes rekindled. “If you fetch a hair o' that boy's head I'll pull every one you got out an' leave 'em for bird's-nests. It's Paul's prosperity that's stickin' in your craw. Hand me that pistol!”

Jeff swayed defiantly backward, but she caught his arm and turned him round by sheer strength. “Give it to me, I say, or you'll never darken that cabin-door. When I give in to you an' Addie marryin' after all that slanderous talk you agreed, as a man o' honor, to withdraw all charges ag'in that poor boy. You did that, an' now stick a cannon in the scat o' your pants an' lie in wait for 'im like a cutthroat in the dark. Gi' me that thing!”

Reluctantly Warren complied, and stood silent as Amanda scrutinized the weapon in her hand. “We kin swap it for meal an' bacon,” she said. “Now let's all go to bed. I'm plumb fagged out.”