etters in
her hand. This time she scarcely looked at the photographic van, but
with dilated eyes and set teeth pursued her path into the springing
weeds. The photographer, who had returned, looked at her, however, and
found her individuality so attractive that he watched her swift step
until it took her out of sight within the doorway of a brick residence
detached from the village by a meadow and long lawn.

The young man opened his car and prepared for business. His landlady was
going to bring her grandchild to be photographed. A locker received his
primitive couch, and he further cleared the deck for action by stowing
in the back apartment where he prepared his chemicals all remaining
litter. Jim Croddy and kindred spirits ventured to look in.

"See here, boys," inquired the photographer, "couldn't one of you get me
a bucket of water from somewhere?"

They would all do it. The heartiest and most obliging set of idlers in
the world, they almost fought for the pail, and two, taking it between
them, cantered to the pump in front of the post-office. The rest were
fain to enter, treading each other's bare heels as they tumbled up the
steps.

"Don't you want your pictures taken?" inquired the artist, quizzically
surveying his shaggy crowd.

"We ain't got no money," replied Bill Stillman, the smallest but
readiest-tongued.

"You got money, Bill," retorted Leonard Price, a parchment-colored wisp
of nineteen who had recently become a widower.

"I got to git clo'es with it if I hev'. There's Mallston: git him to set
for _his_ picter."

Mallston was hooted for as he came across the dewy grass on feet of
brawn, shaming puny rustics by his huge physique. The photographer
mentally limned him: a bushy, low-browed head and dark, reddish,
full-lipped face, bearded; muscle massed upon his arms and
tatter-clothed legs; a deep, prominent chest; hands large, black,
powerful; the whole man advancing with a lightness which in some
barbaric conqueror would have been called dignified grace.

Mallston had nothing to answer for himself. He stood folding his arms
and looking in. It was said he had African blood in his veins--barely
enough to stain the red of his skin, pinch up his children's hair and
give them those mournful, passionate black eyes through which the
tragedy of the race always looks. But so vague, so mere a hearsay, was
this negro stain, if it existed at all, that he had married a white
wife, and moved in society uncha