t said, 'There was a good man ruined by a woman.'
The West'd never think anything or anybody missed you, 'cept yourself.
When you went North, it never missed you; when you come back, its jaw
fell. You wasn't fit to black George's boots."

Black Andy's mouth took on a bitter sort of smile, and his eyes drooped
furtively as he struck the damper of the stove heavily with his foot; then
he replied, slowly:

"Well, that's all right; but if I wasn't fit to black his boots, it ain't
my fault. I git my nature honest, as he did. We wasn't any cross-breeds, I
s'pose. We got the strain direct, and we was all right on her side."

He jerked his head toward Aunt Kate, whose face was growing pale. She
interposed now.

"Can't you leave the dead alone?" she asked, in a voice ringing a little.
"Can't you let them rest? Ain't it enough to quarrel about the living?
Cassy'll be here soon," she added, peering out of the window, "and if I
was you I'd try and not make her sorry she ever married a Baragar. It
ain't a feeling that'd make a sick woman live long."

Aunt Kate did not strike often, but when she did she struck hard. Abel
Baragar staggered a little under this blow, for, at the moment, it seemed
to him that he saw his dead wife's face looking at him from the chair
where her sister now sat. Down in his ill-furnished heart, where there had
been little which was companionable, there was a shadowed corner. Sophy
Baragar had been such a true-hearted, brave-souled woman, and he had been
so impatient and exacting with her, till the beautiful face, which had
been reproduced in George, had lost its color and its fire, had become
careworn and sweet with that sweetness which goes early out of the world.
In all her days the vanished wife had never hinted at as much as Aunt Kate
suggested now, and Abel Baragar shut his eyes against the thing which he
was seeing. He was not all hard, after all.

Aunt Kate turned to Black Andy now.

"Mebbe Cassy ain't for long," she said. "Mebbe she's come out for what she
came out for before. It seems to me it's that, or she wouldn't have come;
because she's young yet, and she's fond of her boy, and she'd not want to
bury herself alive out here with us. Mebbe her lungs is bad again."

"Then she's sure to get another husband out here," said the old man,
recovering himself. "She got one before easy, on the same ticket." With
something of malice he looked over at Black Andy.

"If she can sing and dance as she