dly grin.

"I never saw you but once," reflected Noah Ezekiel, "and that was the
Sunday at Mt. Pisgah when my dad lambasted you in his sermon for
fiddlin' for the dance Saturday night."

"That sermon," Bob's smile was still a little rueful, "lost me the best
job I had ever had."

"Oh, well," consoled the hill billy, "if you hadn't lost it somethin'
might have fell on you. That's what I always think when I have to move
on." And he repeated with a nonchalant air a nonsensical hill parody:

_I eat when I'm hungry,
I drink when I'm dry,
And if a tree don't fall on me
I'll live till I die._

Then his eyes veered round to Bob's fiddle lying to one side on the
grass.

"I notice," he grinned, "dad did not convert you."

"No," said Bob, "but he cured me--almost. I've only played the thing
twice since."

Rogeen picked up his fiddle and started for his horse.

"Well, so long, Noah. You've got a nice place to work out here." His
eyes swept almost covetously over the five-thousand-acre ranch, level
as a floor, not a stump or a stone. "If I had this ranch I'd raise six
thousand bales of cotton a year, or know the reason why."

"That ain't what the last fellow said," remarked the hill billy,
grinningly. "Reedy Jenkins was out yesterday figuring on buyin' the
lease; and he said: 'If I had it--I'd raise the rent.'"

CHAPTER II

Bob was out in front of the hardware store dressed in a woollen shirt
and overalls, and bareheaded, setting up a cotton planter, when an old
gentleman in a linen duster, who had been pacing restlessly up and down
the walk like a distant relative waiting for the funeral procession to
start, stopped on the sidewalk to watch him work. Whether it was the
young man's appearance, his whistling at his work or merely the way he
used his hands that attracted the old gentleman was not certain. But
after a moment he remarked in a crabbedly friendly tone:

"Young man, you know your business."

"The other fellow's business, you mean," replied Bob without looking up
from the bolt he was adjusting. "It is not mine, you know." Bob had
been repeating during the last two days the remark of the hill
billy--"I'm a willin' cuss, but I ain't got no brains." He had begun
to wonder if he was not in the same wagon. He had always thought he
had brains, but here he was at twenty-eight no better off than the hill
billy. Perhaps not as well, for Noah Ezekiel Foster was getting more
per month