his business day just for the pleasure
of returning and talking with her.

Isom was too self-centered, and unconscious of his wife's uncommon
prettiness, to be jealous or suspicious of Morgan's late goings or early
returns. If a man wanted to pay him four dollars a week for the pleasure
of carrying up water, cutting stove-wood or feeding the calves, the fool
was welcome to do it as long as his money held.

So it was that old Isom, blind and deaf and money-mad, set with his own
hand and kindled with his own breath, the insidious spark which trustful
fools before his day have seen leap into flame and strip them of honor
before the eyes of men.

Morgan made a long stay of it in that section, owing to the density of
the population, he claimed, and the proximity of several villages which
he could reach in a few miles' drive. He was in his third week when Isom
was summoned on jury service to the county seat.

Twelve dollars had passed from the book agent's hands into Isom's, and
Isom grinned over it as the easiest money that it ever had been his
pleasure to collect. He put it away with his savings, which never had
earned interest for a banker, and turned the care of the farm over to
Joe.

Jury service at the county seat was an uncertain thing. It might last a
day, and then it might tie a man up for two or three weeks, but Isom was
able to leave home with a more comfortable feeling than ever before. He
had a trustworthy servant to leave behind him, one in whose hands
everything would be safe, under whose energy and conscientious effort
nothing would drag or fall behind.

Isom felt that he could very well afford to spread on a little
soft-soap, as flattery was provincially called, and invest Joe with a
greater sense of his responsibility, if possible. When occasion
required, Isom could rise to flattery as deftly as the best of them. It
was an art at which his tongue was wonderfully facile, considering the
fact that he mingled so seldom with men in the outside doings of life.
His wits had no foil to whet against and grow sharp, save the hard
substance of his own inflexible nature, for he was born with that shrewd
faculty for taking men "on the blind side," as they used to call that
trick in Missouri.

"I'm turnin' the whole farm over to you to look after like it was your
own while I'm away," said he, "and I'm doing it with the feeling that
it's in worthy hands. I know you're not the boy to shirk on me when my
back's tur