.
Going over to her cottage, he was told by her mother, a glinty-eyed,
shrewd looking, hard featured woman--that Samantha was "mighty nigh
dead."

"Oh, she's mighty nigh dead, is she," said Jud with a tinge of
sarcasm--"I've heurn of her bein' mighty nigh dead befo'. Well, I
wanter see her."

The mother looked at him sourly, but barred the doorway with her
form. Jud fixed his hard cunning eyes on her.

"Cyant see her; I tell you--she's mighty po'ly."

"Well, cyant you go an' tell her that Mister Jud Cyarpenter is here
an' 'ud like to kno' if he can be of any sarvice to her in orderin'
her burial robe an' coffin, or takin' her last will an' testerment."

With that he pushed himself in the doorway, rudely brushing the woman
aside. "Now lem'me see that gyrl--" he added sternly--"that loom is
got to run or you will starve, an' if she's sick I want to kno' it.
I've seed her have the toe-ache befo'."

The door of the room in which Samantha lay was open, and in plain
view of the hall she lay with a look of pain, feigned or real, on
her face. She was a woman past forty--a spinster truly--who had been
in the mill since it was first started, and, as she came from a South
Carolina mill to the Acme, had, in fact, been in a cotton mill, as
she said--"all her life." For she could not remember when, as a child
even, she had not worked in one.

Her chest was sunken, her shoulders stooped, her whole form corded
and knotted with the fight against machinery. Her skin, bronzed and
sallow, looked not unlike the hard, fine wood-work of the loom, oiled
with constant use.

Jud walked in unceremoniously.

"What ails you, Samanthy?" he asked, with feigned kindness.

"Oh, I dunno, Jud, but I've got a powerful hurtin' in my innards."

"The hurtin' was so bad," said her mother, "that I had to put a hot
rock on her stomach, last night."

She motioned to a stone lying on the hearth. Jud glanced at it--its
size staggered him.

"Good Lord! an' you say you had that thing on her stomach? Why didn't
you send her up to the mill an' let us lay a hot steam engine on
her?"

"What you been eatin', Samanthy?" he asked suddenly.

"Nuthin', Jud--I aint got no appetite at all!"

"No, she aint eat a blessed thing, hardly, to-day," said her
mother--"jes' seemed to have lost her appetite from a to izzard."

"I wish the store'd keep wild cherry bark and whiskey--somethin' to
make us eat. We cyant work unless we can eat," said Samantha,
woefully