unsatisfying, but he reasoned that it must be on account of there
being so little of him but gristle and bone.

Joe looked ahead now to the term of his bondage under Isom; the prospect
gave him an uneasy concern. He was afraid that the hard fare and harder
work would result in stunting his growth, like a young tree that has
come to a period of drought green and promising, and stands checked and
blighted, never again to regain the hardy qualities which it needs to
raise it up into the beauty of maturity.

The work gave him little concern; he knew that he could live and put on
strength through that if he had the proper food. So there would have to
be a change in the fare, concluded Joe, as he sat there while Isom
discussed the merits of dandelion and jowl. It would have to come very
early in his term of servitude, too. The law protected the bondman in
that, no matter how far it disregarded his rights and human necessities
in other ways. So thinking, he pushed away from the table and left the
room.

Isom drank a glass of water, smacked his dry lips over its excellencies,
the greatest of them in his mind being its cheapness, and followed it by
another.

"Thank the Lord for water, anyhow!" said he.

"Yes, there's plenty of that," said Ollie meaningly.

Isom was as thick-skinned as he was sapless. Believing that his
penurious code was just, and his frugality the first virtue of his life,
he was not ashamed of his table, and the outcast scraps upon it. But he
looked at his young wife with a sharp drawing down of his spiked brows
as he lingered there a moment, his cracked brown hands on the edge of
the table, which he had clutched as he pushed his chair back. He seemed
about to speak a rebuke for her extravagance of desire. The frown on his
face foreshadowed it, but presently it lifted, and he nodded shrewdly
after Joe.

"Give him a couple of eggs mornings after this," said he, "they've fell
off to next to nothing in price, anyhow. And eat one yourself once in a
while, Ollie. I ain't one of these men that believe a woman don't need
the same fare as a man, once on a while, anyhow."

His generous outburst did not appear to move his wife's gratitude. She
did not thank him by word or sign. Isom drank another glass of water,
rubbed his mustache and beard back from his lips in quick, grinding
twists of his doubled hand.

"The pie-plant's comin' out fast," said he, "and I suppose we might as
well eat it--nothing else but h