e a piece of gingerbread.

I ate it ravenously.

Then I asked, "Where is Tip?"

"He's gone down the walley to my brother-in-law, Harmon Shadrack's.
He's tryin' to borry a me-yule."

"A what?"

"A me-yule. The colt was dead beside you in the creek. Him and me
fixed up the buggy agin, and he's gone to borry Harmon's me-yule so as
you uns can git back to Black Log."

"Tip's left Black Log forever," I said firmly.

Then John Shadrack's widow laughed. She laughed so hard that she blew
the ashes out of her pipe, and they showered down over my face, and
made me wink and sputter.

"There--there," she said solicitously, dusting them away with her hand.
"But it tickled me so to hear you say Tip wasn't goin' back. Why, he's
been most crazy since you come. He's afraid his wife'll marry agin
before he gits home. I've been tellin' him how nice it was to have you
both, and that jest makes him roar. He's never been away so long
before."

"He thinks maybe Nanny will give him up this time?"

"Exact."

The old woman smoked in silence a long while. Then she said suddenly,
"She must be a lovely woman."

"Who?" I asked.

"Tip's wife."

"Who told you?" I demanded.

"Tip."

This was strange in a fugitive husband, one who had fled across the
mountains to escape a perpetual yammering.

"Tip!" I said.

"Yes, Tip," she answered. "Him and me was settin' there in the kitchen
last night, and you was sleepin' away in here, and he told me all about
Black Log. It must be a lovely place--Black Log--so different from
Happy Walley. There's no folks here, that's the trouble. There's
Harmonses a mile down the walley, and below him there's the Spinks a
mile, and up the walley across the run there's my brother, Joe Smith,
and his family--but we don't often have strangers here. The tax
collector, he was up last month, and then you come. You have been a
treat. I ain't enjoyed anything so much for a long time. There's
nothin' like company."

"Even when it can't talk?" I said.

"But I could powwow," she answered cheerily. "Between fixin' up the
buggy, and cookin' and makin' you and Tip comfortable and powwowin'
you, I ain't had a minute's time to think--it's lovely."

"What has Tip been doing all this while?"

"Talkin' about his wife. She _must_ be nice. Did you ever hear her
sing?"

"I should say I had," I answered.

The whining strains of "Jordan's Strand" came wandering out of the
past, out of the kitchen,