et him ruin my wall?" John snorted. "Not on your life! His mortar
joints are as thick as the mud in the cracks of a log cabin. I'll do it
to-night after I go home, but not before. I don't believe any man ought
to let one job stand idle in order to try to hook another. To-morrow is
Saturday. They couldn't get the bid anyway till Monday. There will be
plenty of time."

As John finished he was turning to the scaffold. "Well, all right,"
Cavanaugh called after him. "That will have to do."

CHAPTER III

When the steam-whistles of the shops and mills of Ridgeville blew that
afternoon at dusk John descended from the scaffold and put his tools
away. He was the last of the workers on the spot, and when he had put on
his coat he went around to the side of the building and with a critical
eye scanned the wall he had worked on that day.

"It will look all right when it is washed down with acid," he mused.
"That will straighten the lines and tone it up."

He was too late for the car and walked home. He found Jane Holder in the
kitchen, preparing supper. She was a slight woman of thirty-five, dark,
erect, with brown, twinkling eyes and short chestnut hair which had not
regained its normal length since it was cut during a spell of fever the
preceding winter. Touches of paint showed on her yellowish cheeks, and
her false teeth gave to her thin-lipped mouth a rather too full, harsh
expression.

"Oh, here you are!" She smiled. "I know you are hungry as a bear, but I
had my hands full with all sorts of things. I was sewing on my new
organdie and got the waist plumb out of joint. Your ma promised to help
fit it on me, but Harrington, one of those horse-dealers, come by in a
hurry to drive her to Rome behind two brag blacks, and she dropped me
and my work to get ready. She is always doing me that way. She makes a
cat's-paw of me. May Tomlin is going to have a dance at her house
to-night and wrote Harrington to bring her. She left me clean out,
though when May stayed here that time I was nice to her and introduced
her to all my friends. Your ma didn't care a rap about me. She was
going, and that was enough for her."

John simply grunted and turned away. He had not heard half she said. On
the back porch was a tin wash-basin and a cedar pail. He wanted to bathe
his face and hands, for his skin was clammy and coated with sand and
brick-dust, but the pail was empty, so he took it to the well close by
and filled it. He was about t