s honor
worked to death, and Uncle Jim. I've got to do something. They sell good
whisky at the store, and just smell me."

But Onnie wept, and Rawling, for sheer pity, sent her out of the
dining-room.

"She--she scares me!" Sanford said. "It's not natural, Dad, d' you
think?"

He was sitting on his bed, newly bathed and pensive, reviewing the day.

"Why not? She's alone here, and you're the only thing she's fond of.
Stop telling her about things or she'll get sick with worry."

"She's fond of Margot and Pete, but she's just idiotic about me. She did
scare me!"

Rawling looked at his son and wondered if the boy knew how attractive
were his dark, blue eyes and his plain, grave face. The younger children
were beautiful; but Sanford, reared more in the forest, had the forest
depth in his gaze and an animal litheness in his hard young body.

"She's like a dog," Sanford reflected. "Only she's a woman. It's sort
of--"

"Pathetic?"

"I suppose that's the word. But I _do_ love the poor old thing. Her
letters are rich. She tells me about all the new babies and who's
courting who and how the horses are. It _is_ pathetic."

* * *

He thought of Onnie often the next winter, and especially when she wrote
a lyric of thanksgiving after the family had come to Rawling's Hope in
April, saying that all would be well and trouble would cease. But his
father wrote differently:

"You know there is a strike in the West Virginia mines, and it has sent
a mass of ruffians out looking for work. We need all the people we can
get, but they are a pestiferous outfit. I am opening up a camp in Bear
Run, and our orders are enormous already, but I hate littering the
valley with these swine. They are as insolent and dirty as Turks. Pete
says the village smells, and has taken to the woods. Onnie says the new
Irish are black scum of Limerick, and Jim Varian's language isn't
printable. The old men are complaining, and altogether I feel like Louis
XVI in 1789. About every day I have to send for the sheriff and have
some thug arrested. A blackguard from Oil City has opened a dive just
outside the property, on the road to the station, and Cameron tells me
all sorts of dope is for sale in the hoarding-houses. We have
cocaine-inhalers, opium-smokers, and all the other vices."

After this outburst Sanford was not surprised when he heard from Onnie
that his father now wore a revolver, and that the overseers of the
sawmill did the same.

On the fi