d, and looked
at Ollie, his hand, hovering like a grub curved beside the chimney,
shading the light from his eyes.

"So he brought a Bible, did he?"

"Yes."

"Well, he's welcome to it," said Isom. "I don't care what anybody that
works for me reads--just so long as he _works_!"

Isom's jubilation over his bondboy set his young wife's curiosity
astir. She had not noted any romantic or noble parts about the youth in
the casual, uninterested view which she had given him that day. To her
then he had appeared only a sprangling, long-bodied, long-legged,
bony-shouldered, unformed lad whose hollow frame indicated a great
capacity for food. Her only thought in connection with him had been
that it meant another mouth to dole Isom's slender allowance out to,
more scheming on her part to make the rations go round. It meant
another one to wash for, another bed to make.

She had thought of those things wearily that morning when she heard the
new voice at the kitchen door, and she had gone there for a moment to
look him over; for strange faces, even those of loutish farm-hands, were
refreshing in her isolated life. She had not heard what the lad was
saying to Isom, for the kitchen was large and the stove far away from
the door, but she had the passing thought that there was a good deal of
earnestness or passion in the harangue for a farm-hand to be laying on
his early morning talk.

When she found the Bible lying there on top of Joe's hickory shirt, she
had concluded that he had been talking religion. She hoped that he would
not preach at his meals. The only religion that Ollie knew anything of,
and not much of that, was a glum and melancholy kind, with frenzied
shoutings of the preacher in it, and portentous shaking of the beard in
the shudderful pictures of the anguish of unrepentant death. So she
hoped that he would not preach at his meals, for the house was sad
enough, and terrible and gloomily hopeless enough, without the kind of
religion that made the night deeper and the day longer in its dread.

Now Isom's talk about the lad's blood, and his expression of high
confidence in his fealty, gave her a pleasant topic of speculation. Did
good blood make men different from those who came of mongrel strain, in
other points than that of endurance alone? Did it give men nobility and
sympathy and loftiness, or was it something prized by those who hired
them, as Isom seemed to value it in Joe, because it lent strength to the
arms?