ross the soft brown
furrows to his side.

"I'd have come to the fence when I saw you, if I hadn't had the colt,"
he said kindly. "What's wanted?"

The old woman's face twitched. She pushed her sunbonnet back with one
trembling hand.

"Jason," she said, with a little jerk in her voice, "your paw's alive."

The man arranged the lines carefully along the colt's back; then he took
off his hat and wiped the top of his head on his sleeve, looking away
from his mother with heavy, dull embarrassment.

"I expect you'd 'most forgot all about him," pursued the old woman, with
a vague reproach in her tone.

"I hadn't much to forget," answered the man, resentment rising in his
voice. "He hasn't troubled himself about me."

"Well, he didn't know anything about you, Jason, he went away so soon
after we was married. It's a dreadful position to be placed in. It 'u'd
be awfully embarrassing to--to the Moxom girls."

The man gave her a quick, curious glance. He had never heard her speak
of his half-sisters in that way before.

"They're so kind of high-toned," she went on, "just as like as not
they'd blame me. I'm sure I don't know what to do."

Jason kicked the soft earth with his sunburnt boot.

"Where is he?" he asked sullenly.

"In Californay."

"How'd you hear?"

"I got a letter. He wrote to Burtonville and directed it to Mrs.
Angeline Weaver, and the postmaster give it to some of your uncle
Samuel's folks, and they put it in another envelope and backed it to me
here. I thought at first I wouldn't say anything about it, but it
seemed as if I'd ought to tell you; it doesn't hurt you any, but it's
awful hard on the--the Moxom girls."

The man shifted his weight, and kicked awhile with his other foot.

"Well, I'd just give him the go-by," he announced resolutely. "You're a
decent man's widow, and that's enough. He's never"--

"Oh, I ain't saying anything against your step-paw, Jason," the old
woman broke in anxiously. "He was an awful good man. It seems queer to
think it was the way it was. Dear me, it's all so kind of confusing!"

The poor woman looked down with much the same embarrassment over her
matrimonial redundance that a man might feel when suddenly confronted by
twins.

"I'm sure I don't see how I could help thinking he was dead," she went
on after a little silence, "when he wrote he was going off on that trip
and might never come back, and the man that was with him wrote that they
got lost from each oth