They've every one, down to Deanie, had mo' than the six weeks schoolin'
that the laws calls for," snarled Himes.

"You wasn't thinking of putting Deanie in the mill--not _Deanie_--was
you?" asked Johnnie breathlessly.

"Why not?" inquired Himes. "She'll get no good runnin' the streets here
in Cottonville, and she can earn a little somethin' in the mill. I'm a
old man, an sickly, and I ain't long for this world. If them chaps is
a-goin' to do anything for me, they'd better be puttin' in their licks."

Johnnie looked from the little girl's pink-and-white infantile
beauty--she sat with the child in her lap--to the old man's hulking,
powerful, useless frame. What would Deanie naturally be expected to do
for her stepfather?

"Nobody's asked my opinion," observed Shade Buckheath, who made one of
the family group, "but as far as I can see there ain't a thing to hurt
young 'uns about mill work; and there surely ain't any good reason why
they shouldn't earn their way, same as we all do. I reckon they had to
work back on Unaka. Goin' to set 'em up now an make swells of 'em?"

Johnnie looked bitterly at him but made no reply.

"They won't take them at the Hardwick mill," she said finally. "Mr.
Stoddard has enforced the rule that they have to have an affidavit with
any child the mill employs that it is of legal age; and there's nobody
going to swear that Deanie's even as much as twelve years old--nor
Lissy--nor Pony--nor Milo. The oldest is but eleven."

Laurella had bought a long chain of red glass beads with a heart-shaped
pendant. This trinket occupied her attention entirely while her daughter
and husband discussed the matter of the children's future.

"Johnnie," she began now, apparently not having heard one word that had
been said, "did you ever in your life see anything so cheap as this here
string of beads for a dime? I vow I could live and die in that
five-and-ten-cent store at Watauga. There was more pretties in it than I
could have looked at in a week. I'm going right back thar Monday and git
me them green garters that the gal showed me. I don't know what I was
thinkin' about to come away without 'em! They was but a nickel."

Pap Himes looked at her, at the beads, and gave the fierce,
inarticulate, ludicrously futile growl of a thwarted, perplexed animal.

"Mother," appealed Johnnie desperately, "do you want the children to go
into the mill?"

"I don't know but they might as well--for a spell," said Laurella Hi