ut I'll bet you get sore yourself and
tell your wife what-for, now and then. I didn't get a square deal, but
that's all right. I'm giving a better deal than I got. Now you can keep
that money and pay it out to Marie as she needs it, for herself and the
kid. But for the Lord's sake, Judge, don't let that wildcat of a mother
of hers get her fingers into the pile! She framed this deal, thinking
she'd get a haul outa me this way. I'm asking you to block that little
game. I've held out ten dollars, to eat on till I strike something. I'm
clean; they've licked the platter and broke the dish. So don't never ask
me to dig up any more, because I won't--not for you nor no other darn
man. Get that."

This, you must know, was not in the courtroom, so Bud was not fined for
contempt. The judge was a married man himself, and he may have had a
sympathetic understanding of Bud's position. At any rate he listened
unofficially, and helped Bud out with the legal part of it, so that Bud
walked out of the judge's office financially free, even though he had
a suspicion that his freedom would not bear the test of prosperity,
and that Marie's mother would let him alone only so long as he and
prosperity were strangers.

CHAPTER THREE. TEN DOLLARS AND A JOB FOR BUD

To withhold for his own start in life only one ten-dollar bill from
fifteen hundred dollars was spectacular enough to soothe even so bruised
an ego as Bud Moore carried into the judge's office. There is an
anger which carries a person to the extreme of self-sacrifice, in the
subconscious hope of exciting pity for one so hardly used. Bud was
boiling with such an anger, and it demanded that he should all but give
Marie the shirt off his back, since she had demanded so much--and for so
slight a cause.

Bud could not see for the life of him why Marie should have quit for
that little ruction. It was not their first quarrel, nor their worst;
certainly he had not expected it to be their last. Why, he asked the
high heavens, had she told him to bring home a roll of cotton, if she
was going to leave him? Why had she turned her back on that little home,
that had seemed to mean as much to her as it had to him?

Being kin to primitive man, Bud could only bellow rage when he should
have analyzed calmly the situation. He should have seen that Marie too
had cabin fever, induced by changing too suddenly from carefree girlhood
to the ills and irks of wifehood and motherhood. He should have kno