s cheek; she knew that the wood, even that hour, was warm under the
fire. What might a whisper now, a smile then, a kindness, a word, a hand
laid softly upon his hair, work in the days to come?

She turned back to her work, her mind stirred out of its sluggish rut,
the swirl of her new thoughts quickening in her blood. Isom Chase would
not die; he would live on and on, harder, drier, stingier year by year,
unless a bolt from heaven withered him or the hand of man laid him low.
What might come to him, he deserved, even the anguish of death with a
strangling cord about his neck; even the strong blow of an ax as he
slept on his bed, snatching from him the life that he had debased of all
its beauty, without the saving chance of repentance in the end.

She had thought of doing it with her own hand; a hundred ways she had
planned and contrived it in her mind, goaded on nearer and nearer to it
by his inhuman oppressions day by day. But her heart had recoiled from
it as a task for the hand of a man. If a man could be raised up to it, a
man who had suffered servitude with her, a man who would strike for the
double vengeance, and the love of her in his heart!

She went to the door again, gripping the stove-lid lifter in her little
hand, as the jangle of harness came to her when Joe passed with the
team. He rode by toward the field, the sun on his broad back, slouching
forward as his heavy horses plodded onward. The man in him was asleep
yet, yes; but there was a pit of fire as deep as a volcano's throat in
his slumbering soul.

If she could lift him up to it, if she could pluck the heart out of him
and warm it in her own hot breast, then there would stand the man for
her need. For Isom Chase would not die. He would live on and on, like a
worm in wood, until some strong hand fed him to the flames.

CHAPTER IV

A STRANGER AT THE GATE

Rain overtook Isom as he was driving home from town that evening, and
rain was becoming one of the few things in this world from which he
would flee. It aggravated the rheumatism in his knotted toes and stabbed
his knee-joints with awl-piercing pains.

For upward of forty-five years Isom had been taking the rains as they
came wherever they might find him. It made him growl to turn tail to
them now, and trot to shelter from every shower like a hen.

So he was in no sweet humor as he drew near his own barn-yard gate with
the early autumn downpour already finding its way through his coat