uctions
and my conclusions are correct."

"Well, ma'am," he said, "ez I wuz sayin', no human eye wuz to have read
this here. But since you have read it, I feel it's my bounden duty, in
common justice to another, to tell you the straight of it, even though
in doin' so I'm breakin' a solemn pledge."

So he told her--the how and the why and the where and the when of it;
details of which the reader is aware.

"I thought I wasn't very far wrong, and I wasn't," she said when he had
finished his confession. She was quiet for a minute, her eyes fixed on
the farther wall. Then: "Judge Priest, unwittingly, it seems, you have
been the god of the machine. I wonder if you'd be willing to continue
to serve?"

"Ef it lies within my powers to do so--yessum, and gladly."

"It does lie within your power. I want you to have the necessary papers
drawn up which will signalize my giving over to my mother my share of
that money which the railway paid two weeks ago, and then if you will
send them to me I will sign them. I want this done at once, please--as
soon as possible."

"Ma'am," he said, "it shall be as you desire; but ef it's all the same
to you I'd like to write out that there paper with my own hand. I kin
think of no act of mine, official or private, in my whole lifetime which
would give me more honest pleasure. I'll do so before I leave this
house." He did not tell her that by the letter of the law she would be
giving away what by law was not hers to give. He would do nothing to
spoil for her the sweet savor of her surrender. Instead he put a
question: "It would appear that you have changed your mind about this
here matter since I seen you last?"

"It was changed for me," she said. "This paper helped to change it for
me; and you, too, helped without your knowledge; and one other, and most
of all my baby here, helped to change it for me. Judge Priest, since my
baby came to me my whole view of life seems somehow to have been
altered. I've been lying here to-day with her beside me, thinking
things out. Suppose I should be taken from her, and suppose her father
should be taken, too, and she should be left, as I was, to the mercy of
the world and the charity of strangers. Suppose she should grow up, as I
did--although until I read that paper I didn't know it--beholden to the
goodness and the devotion and the love of one who was not her real
mother. Wouldn't she owe to that other woman more than she could have
owed to me, her own