he fish were bigger
than above; she learned to shoot with her father's old gun, which had
been sent back when he got a musket, shot like a man and better than
most men; she hoed the patch, she tended the cow till it was lost, and
then she did many other things. Her mother declared that, when Chris
died (Chris was the boy who died of fever), but for Vashti she could not
have got along at all, and there were many other women in the pines who
felt the same thing.

When the news came that Bob Askew was killed, Vashti was one of the
first who got to Bob's wife; and when Billy Luck disappeared in a
battle, Vashti gave the best reasons for thinking he had been taken
prisoner; and many a string of fish and many a squirrel and hare found
their way into the empty cabins because Vashti "happened to pass by."

From having been rather stigmatized as "that Vashti Mills", she came to
be relied on, and "Vashti" was consulted and quoted as an authority.

One cabin alone she never visited. The house of old Mrs. Stanley, now
almost completely buried under its unpruned wistaria vine, she never
entered. Her mother, as has been said, sometimes went across the bottom,
and now and then took with her a hare or a bird or a string of fish--on
condition from Vashti that it should not be known she had caught them;
but Vashti never went, and Mrs. Mills found herself sometimes put to it
to explain to others her unneighborliness. The best she could make of it
to say that "Vashti, she always DO do her own way."

How Mrs. Stanley's wood-pile was kept up nobody knew, if, indeed, it
could be called a wood-pile, when it was only a recurring supply of
dry-wood thrown as if accidentally just at the edge of the clearing.
Mrs. Stanley was not of an imaginative turn, even of enough to explain
how it came that so much dry-wood came to be there broken up just the
right length; and Mrs. Mills knew no more than that "that cow was always
a-goin' off and a-keepin' Vashti a-huntin' everywheres in the worl'."

All said, however, the women of the district had a hungry time, and the
war bore on them heavily as on everyone else, and as it went on they
suffered more and more. Many a woman went day after day and week after
week without even the small portion of coarse corn-bread which was
ordinarily her common fare. They called oftener and oftener at the
house of their neighbors who owned the plantations near them, and always
received something; but as time went on the