t another. Was she, his wife, to be less resourceful, less
self-respecting than that old Negro woman? Was she to endure what Aunt
Dolcey would not?

Suddenly she snatched out the little old family album from its place
in the top of the desk secretary, an old-fashioned affair bound in
shabby brown leather with two gilt clasps. Here were more pictures of
the Dean line--his grandfather, more bearded than his father, his Dean
vein even more prominent; his grandmother, another meek woman.

"Probably the old wretch beat her," thought Annie angrily.

Another page and here was great-grandfather himself, in middle age,
his picture--a faded daguerreotype--showing him in his Sunday best,
but plainly in no Sunday mood. "Looks like a pirate," was Annie's
comment. There was no picture of great-grandmother. "Probably he
killed her off too young, before she had time to get her picture
taken." And Annie's eyes darted blue fire at the supposed culprit. She
shook her brown little fist at him. "You started all this," she said
aloud. "You began it. If you'd had a wife who'd've stood up to you
you'd never got drunk and killed a man, and you wouldn't have left
your family a nasty old mad vein in the middle of their foreheads,
looking perfectly unChristian. I just wish I had you here, you old
scoundrel! I'll bet I'd tell you something that'd make your ears
smart."

She banged to the album and put it in its place.

"Well, not me!" said Annie. "Not me! I'm not going to be bullied and
scared to death by any man with a bad temper, and the very next time
Mister Wes flies off the handle and raises Cain I'm going to raise
Cain, two to his one. I won't be scared! I won't be a little gump and
take such actions off any man. We'll see!"

It is easy enough to be bold and resolute and threaten a picture. It
is easy enough to plot action either before or after the need for it
arises. But when it comes to raising Cain two to your husband's one,
and that husband has been a long and successful cultivator of that
particular crop--why, that is quite a different thing.

Besides, as it happened, Annie did not wholly lack sympathy for his
next outburst, which was directed toward a tramp, a bold dirty
creature who appeared one morning at the kitchen door and asked for
food.

"You two Janes all by your lonesome here?" he asked, stepping in.

Wes had come into the house for another shirt--he had split the one he
was wearing in a mighty bout with the grubbin