so, suh,” he answered unsteadily, with the first note of respect he had ever shown.

“You get to sleep now. Here—swallow this!” The doctor eased the dark head back on the pillow and tucked the blankets about him, stirred up the fire, and opened a window to admit a breath of snarling storm. “I’ll leave my door open; you just shout if you need anything or if you get to feeling bad. I’ll be down, two—three times before morning, anyway.” He snapped off the light and herded Glen out of the kitchen.

“Glen, you get to bed fast as you make it! Nice time of night for you—” he fumed as he always did, but halfway upstairs he gave her a commendatory pat. “Good girl. Nerve. Kept your mouth shut and minded me. ’Night.”

Help was summoned in the morning to move the young mountaineer to an upper chamber where he spent three days in feverish pain, and when he was able to sit up in a high-backed rocker he made his position plain. The old woman had carried her point in death as she had not done in life. He had come down, and he would stay down, and permit himself to be “fotched on,” to the fulfilling of the old crone’s dream for him.

[43]“But I am not aiming to be beholden,” he stated with his scant civility. “If yo’all will get me work in the mill and a place to live, and tote me, just once, to the night school, I will make out to do fo’ myself.”

[43]

“All right, son.” Dr. Darrow was carefully casual about it. “Guess I can fix you up. Tollivers—know ’em?—come from up your way—they’ll feed and sleep you for next to nothing, and there’ll be no trouble about getting into the mill. But about school—I believe the best thing’d be for Glen, here,” he nodded toward his daughter, waiting silently for the patient’s tray, “to find out how much you know, and maybe coach you a little. It’ll save you time.”

Young Manders turned his hawklike gaze upon her. He looked at her rather often, but always with an impersonal scrutiny.

“Is she fotched on?” Patent disapproval in look and tone. “I was not aiming to get me wimmin larning.”

His diction was curious, richly colored with accent and interlarded with crudities, and yet giving an effect of dignity. Glen thought the fact that he never slighted a final g had something to do with it.

Dr. Darrow grinned. “You’ll find it’s all of a piece, down here, Luke.” 

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