ment on her land. Almost day
and night it stood before her as a mute reminder of her difficult
undertaking. This morning, in the golden light, against the mountain
background, it seemed an inspiration, as a flag of peace might appear to
a tired soldier. Hank Bradley was the orphaned son of old Welborne's
sister, and he lived in his uncle's home in lieu of any other that was
available. He had made trips to the West and had remained away for
indefinite periods, the last being the time he had come home with the
carelessly announced death of his companion, Dick Wrinkle. The uncle and
nephew were an incongruous pair: old Welborne, with his miserly grasp on
the vitals of half the county, and the devil-may-care Bradley, whose
wild ways made him the constant talk of the community. Old Silas gave no
thought to the fellow's reform. As the administrator of his sister's
estate, he doled out honestly enough the various sums in rents,
dividends, and interest to which the young man was entitled after his
liberal fees as administrator had been deducted, and even smiled when
told of Bradley's reckless and almost criminal escapades. Henley had
once remarked in his keenly observant way that Welborne, being the next
of kin, would be glad to hear that his nephew had died with his boots on
in some one of the lynching affairs to which Bradley was suspected of
being a party.

Dixie had reached the farthest end of one of her longest cotton-rows,
and was turning to work homeward on another, when the branches of the
bushes of a near-by coppice parted and Bradley, with a fowling-piece on
his arm, appeared.

"Good gracious, you _are_ a queer girl!" he laughed, as he advanced to
the low fence and climbed to a seat upon it. "Working here like a
corn-field nigger in sun hot enough to bake a potato, when you could
have been gliding through the shade behind my horse--to say nothing of
the picnic and dance when we got there."

She pushed back the hood of her bonnet and smiled faintly.

"Driving and dancing ain't paying debts," she said, "and there is no
other time to do this work. You know your uncle well enough to
understand what he expects of folks unlucky enough to be on his books."

"That's another thing I can't understand," the young man said, bracing
his heels on one of the rails, and, with his gun across his lap, he
began to twist his stiff brown mustache, while his dark eyes rested with
growing warmth on her trim figure. "What in the name of