s had come almost involuntarily. The old man stared at the
speaker breathing hard.

"What's Johnnie Consadine got to do with it?" he inquired finally. "I'm
the stepdaddy of the children--and Johnnie's stepdaddy too, for the
matter of that--and what I say goes."

"Did you hire the children at the Victory?" inquired Stoddard, swiftly.
Back across his memory came the picture of Johnnie with her poor little
sheep for the shambles clustered about her on the bridge before the
Victory mill. "Did you hire the children to the factory?" he repeated.

"Now Mr. Stoddard," began the old man, between bluster and whine, "I
talked about them chaps to the superintendent of yo' mill, an' you-all
said you didn't want none of that size. And one o' yo' men--he was a
room boss, I reckon--spoke up right sassy to me--as sassy as Johnnie
Consadine herself, and God knows she ain't got no respect for them
that's set over her. I had obliged to let 'em go to the Victory; but I
don't think you have any call to hold it ag'in me--Johnnie was plumb
impident about it--plumb impident."

Stoddard glanced up at the windows and made as though to dismount. All
night at his pillow had stood the accusation that he had been cruel to
Johnnie. Now, as Himes's revelations went on, and he saw what her futile
efforts had been, as he guessed a part of her sufferings, it seemed he
must hurry to her and brush away the tangle of misunderstanding which he
had allowed to grow up between them.

"They've worked over that thar chap, off an' on, all night," the old man
said. "Looks like, if they keep hit up, she'll begin to think somethin's
the matter of her."

Gray realized that his visit at this moment would be ill-timed. He would
ride on through the Gap now, and call as he came back.

"I had obliged to find me a place whar I could hire out them chaps," the
miserable old man before him went on, garrulously. "They's nothin' like
mill work to take the davilment out o' young 'uns. Some of them chaps'll
call you names and make faces at you, even whilst you' goin' through the
mill yard--and think what they'd be ef they _wasn't_ worked! I'm a old
man, and when I married Laurelly and took the keepin' o' her passel o'
chaps on my back, I aimed to make it pay. Laurelly, she won't work."

He looked helplessly at Stoddard, like a child about to cry.

"She told me up and down that she never had worked in no mill, and she
was too old to l'arn. She said the noise of the thing fr