with spiderwebs, plastered with the nests of wasps. A dormer window jutted toward the east like a hollow eye, designed, no doubt, and built by Isom Chase himself, to catch the first gleam of morning and throw it in the eyes of the sleeping hired-hand, whose bed stood under it.
Isom came down directly, took his lantern, and went to the barn to look after a new-born calf. Where there was profit, such as he counted it, in gentleness, Isom Chase could be as tender as a mother. Kind words and caresses, according to his experience, did not result in any more work out of a wife so he spared them the young woman at the table, as he had denied them the old one in her grave.
As Isom hurried out into the soft night, with a word 32 about the calf, Ollie made a bitter comparison between her lot and that of the animals in the barn. Less than six months before that gloomy night she had come to that house a bride, won by the prospect of ease and independence which Chase had held out to her in the brief season of his adroit courtship. The meanest men sometimes turn out to be the nimblest cock-pheasants during that interesting period, and, like those vain birds of the jungles, they strut and dance and cut dazzling capers before the eyes of the ladies when they want to strike up a matrimonial bargain.
Isom Chase had done that. He had been a surprising lover for a dry man of his years, spurring around many a younger man in the contest for Ollie’s hand. Together with parental encouragement and her own vain dreams, she had not found it hard to say the word that made her his wife. But the gay feathers had fallen from him very shortly after their wedding day, revealing the worm which they had hidden; the bright colors of his courtship parade had faded like the fustian decorations of a carnival in the rain.
Isom was a man of bone and dry skin, whose greed and penury had starved his own soul. He had brought her there and put burdens upon her, with the assurance that it would be only for a little while, until somebody could be hired to take the work off her hands. Then he had advanced the plea of hard times, when the first excuse had worn out; now he had dropped all pretenses. She was serving, as he had married her to serve, as he had brought her there in unrecompensed bondage to serve, and hope was gone from her horizon, and her tears were undried upon her cheeks.
Isom had profited by a good day’s work from Joe, and he had not been obliged to drive him to obtain it. So he was in great spirits when he came back from the barn, where he had found the calf coming on sturdily and with great promise. He put out the lantern and turned the lamp down a shade 33 seeing that it was consuming a twentieth more oil than necessary to light Ollie about her work. Then he sat down beside the table, stretching his long legs with a sigh.
Ollie was washing the few dishes which had served for supper, moving between table and sink with quick competence, making a neat figure in the somber room. It was a time when a natural man would have filled his pipe and brought out the weekly paper, or sat and gossiped a comfortable hour with his wife. But Isom never had cheered his atrophied nerves with a whiff of tobacco, and as for the county paper, or any paper whatever except mortgages and deeds, Isom held all of them to be frauds and extravagances which a man was better off without.
“Well, what do you think of the new hand?” asked Isom, following her with his eyes.
“I didn’t pay any particular notice to him,” said she, her back toward him as she stood scraping a pan at the sink.
“Did you hear what he said to me this morning when he was standin’ there by the steps?”
“No, I didn’t hear,” listlessly, indifferently.
“H’m–I thought you was listening.”
“I just looked out to see who it was.”
“No difference if you did hear, Ollie,” he allowed generously–for Isom. “A man’s wife ought to share his business secrets, according to my way of lookin’ at it; she’s got a right to know what’s going on. Well, I tell you that chap talked up to me like a man!”
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 34 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 35 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 passed over it, as rain and blast and summer sun pass 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 36 freer than it does right now,” he promised. “Interest on my loans is behind in a good many cases, and there’s