tement well under control. He
listened intently to Everett's hurried but succinct account of the
situation and crisis in his own and the Alloway business affairs, as
he puffed away, and his old eyes lighted with excitement at the rush
of the tale of high finance.

And when at last Everett paused for lack of breath, after his dramatic
climax, the old philosopher lay back on his high-piled feather pillows
and blinked out into the candle-light, puffed in silence for a few
minutes, then made answer in his own quizzical way with a radiant
smile from out under his beetling white brows:

"Well," he said between puffs, "looks like fortune is, after all, a
curious bird without even tail feathers to steer by nor for a man to
ketch by putting salt on. Gid failed both with a knife in the back and
a salt shaker to ketch it, but you were depending on nothing but a
ringdove coo, as far as I can see, when it hopped in your hand. I
reckon you'll get your answer."

"Are you willing--to have me ask for it, Mr. Alloway?" asked Everett
with a radiant though slightly embarrassed smile.

"Yes," answered Uncle Tucker as he knocked the ashes out of his pipe
against the table and looked straight into Everett's eyes. "After a
man has plowed a honest, straight-furrowed field in life it's no
more'n fair for Providence to send a-loving, trusting woman to meet
him at the bars. Good night, and don't forget to latch the front door
when you have finally torn yourself away from that moonlight!"

And the call of the young moon that came with the warm garden-scented
gusts of winds that were sweeping across Harpeth Valley was a riot in
Everett's veins as he made his way through the silent hall toward the
moonlit porch on the top step of which he could see Rose Mary sitting
in the soft light, but a lusty young snore from a dark room on the
left made him remember that there was one greeting he had missed. He
bent over the General's little cot, across which lay a long shaft of
the white light from the hilltops, and was about to press his lips on
the warm, breath-stirred ones of the small boy, but he restrained
himself in time from offering to the General in his defenseless sleep
what would have been an insult to him awake, and contented himself
with a most cautious and manly clasp of the chubby little hand.

"Ketch it, Tobe, ketch it--don't let Aunt Viney's vase be broked,"
murmured Stonie as he turned on his side and buried his head still
deeper in the