r. He
saw the flick of her skirt as her nimble heels flew up the three steps
of the kitchen porch, and he wondered why she was glad that he was not
religious, and why she had gone away like that, so fast. The pigs were
clamoring, shriller, louder. It was no hour for a youth who had not yet
wetted his feet in manhood's stream to stand looking after a pair of
heels and try to figure out a thing like that.

As Joe had said, he was not religious, according to catechisms and
creeds. He could not have qualified in the least exacting of the many
faiths. All the religion that he had was of his own making, for his
mother's was altogether too ferocious in its punishments and too dun and
foggy in its rewards for him.

He read the Bible, and he believed most of it. There was as much
religion, said he, in the Commandments as a man needed; a man could get
on with that much very well. Beyond that he did not trouble.

He read the adventures of David and the lamentations of Jeremiah, and
the lofty exhortations of Isaiah for the sonority of the phrasing, the
poetry and beauty. For he had not been sated by many tales nor blunted
by many books. If he could manage to live according to the Commandments,
he sometimes told his mother, he would not feel uneasy over a better way
to die.

But he was not giving this matter much thought as he emptied the
swill-pails to the chortling hogs. He was thinking about the red in
Ollie's cheeks, like the breast of a bright bird seen through the
leaves, and of her quick flight up the path. It was a new Ollie that he
had discovered that morning, one unknown and unspoken to before that
day. But why had her face grown red that way, he wondered? Why had she
run away?

And Ollie, over her smoking pan on the kitchen stove, was thinking that
something might be established in the way of comradeship between herself
and the bound boy, after all. It took him a long time to get acquainted,
she thought; but his friendship might be all the more stable for that.
There was comfort in it; as she worked she smiled.

There was no question of the need in which Ollie stood of friendship,
sympathy, and kind words. Joe had been in that house six months, and in
that time he had witnessed more pain than he believed one small woman's
heart could bear. While he was not sure that Isom ever struck his wife,
he knew that he tortured her in endless combinations of cruelty, and
pierced her heart with a thousand studied pangs. Often,