e a hoe, he
was the best hand at an axe "in the stump", in the district, and Mrs.
Stanley was kept in game if not in meal.

The Millses dilated on his worthlessness, and Vashti, grown to be a
slender slip of a girl with very bright eyes and a little nose, was
loudest against him in public; though rumor said she had fallen afoul of
her youngest brother and boxed his jaws for seconding something she had
said of him.

The Mills's enmity was well understood, and there were not wanting those
to take Darby's side. He had grown to be the likeliest young man in the
district, tall, and straight as a sapling, and though Vashti flaunted
her hate of him and turned up her little nose more than it was already
turned up at his name, there were many other girls in the pines who
looked at him languishingly from under their long sun-bonnets, and
thought he was worth both the Mills boys and Vashti to boot. So when
at a fish-fry the two Mills boys attacked him and he whipped them both
together, some said it served them right, while others declared they
did just what they ought to have done, and intimated that Darby was less
anxious to meet their father than he was them, who were nothing more
than boys to him. These asked in proof of their view, why he had
declined to fight when Old Cove had abused him so to his face. This was
met by the fact that he "could not have been so mighty afeared," for he
had jumped in and saved Chris Mills's life ten minutes afterward, when
he got beyond his depth in the pond and had already sunk twice. But,
then, to be sure, it had to be admitted that he was the best swimmer on
the ground, and that any man there would have gone in to save his worst
enemy if he had been drowning. This must have been the view that Vashti
Mills took of the case; for one day not long afterward, having met Darby
at the cross-roads store where she was looking at some pink calico, and
where he had come to get some duck-shot and waterproof caps, she turned
on him publicly, and with flashing eyes and mantling cheeks, gave him
to understand that if she were a man he "would not have had to fight two
boys," and he would not have come off so well either. If anything, this
attack brought Darby friends, for he not only had whipped the Mills boys
fairly, and had fought only when they had pressed him, but had, as has
been said, declined to fight old man Mills under gross provocation; and
besides, though they were younger than he, the Mills boys