"Good Lord, if it ain't Johnnie! I was 'feared she Wouldn't git here
to-night," she ejaculated when she saw the girl. "Take her out on the
porch, Shade; I ain't got a minute now. Pap's poorly again, and I'm
obliged to put the late supper on the table for them thar gals--the
night shift's done eat and gone. I'll show her whar she's to sleep at,
after while. I don't just rightly know whar Pap aimed to have her stay,"
she concluded hastily, as something boiled over on the stove. Johnnie
set her bundle down in the corner of the kitchen.

"I'll help," she said simply, as she drew the excited coffee-pot to a
corner of the range and dosed it judiciously with cold water.

"Well, now, that's mighty good of you," panted worried Mavity Bence.
"How queer things comes 'round," she ruminated as they dished up the
biscuits and fried pork. "I helped you into the very world, Johnnie. I
lived neighbour to your maw, and they wasn't nobody else to be with her
when you was born, and I went over. I never suspicioned that you would
be helpin' me git supper down here in the settlement inside o'
twenty year."

Johnnie ran and fetched and carried, as though she had never done
anything else in her life, intent on the one task. She was alive in
every fibre of her young body; she saw, she heard, as these words cannot
always be truthfully applied to people.

"Did Shade tell you anything about Louvania?" inquired the woman at
length.

"No," replied Johnnie softly, "but I seen it in the paper."

Louvania Bence, the only remaining child of the widow, had, two weeks
before, left her work at the mill, taken the trolley in to Watauga,
walked out upon the county bridge across the Tennessee and jumped off.
Johnnie had read the published account, passed from hand to hand in the
mountains where Pap Himes and Mavity Bence had troops of kin and where
Louvania was born. The statement ran that there was no love affair, and
that the girl's distaste for her work at the cotton mill must have been
the reason for the suicide.

"That there talk in the newspaper wasn't right," Louvania's mother
choked. "They wasn't a word of truth in it. You know in reason that if
Louvany hated to work in the mill as bad as all that she'd have named it
to me--her own mother--and she never did. She never spoke a word like
it, only to say now and ag'in, as we all do, that it was hard, and that
she'd--well, she did 'low she'd ruther be dead, as gals will; but she
couldn't have