ime he had spread a piece of cornbread
with Bossy's butter. He had drunk a cup of her milk.

Millie lost no moment. She mixed mustard in a cup of hot water and
Robert downed it almost at a gulp.

"He begun to puke and purge until I thought his gizzard would sure come
up next," Millie told it afterward. "All that live-long night he puked
and strained till he got so weakened his head hung over the side of the
bed and hot water poured out of his mouth same as if he had water brash.
Along toward morning Doc Robbins come riding by. He had a bottle of
apple brandy and we mixed it with wild honey. It wasn't long till Robert
got ease. Doc set a while and about the middle of the morning he give
Robert two heaping spoonfuls of castor oil."

From then on no one could coax Robert Burns to touch a mouthful of
butter nor drink a cup of sweet milk. Though he drank his fill of
buttermilk with never a pain.

As for the shaded grove where the cow had grazed, every tree was cleared
away--at Doc Robbins's orders. The sunlight poured into the place and
soon there was a green meadow where once the shaded plot had been
covered with a poisoned vegetation. Cows grazed at their will over the
place with no ill effects.

Still Robert had no hankering for butter or sweet milk.

"You've no need to fear milk sick now," Doc Robbins tried to reassure
Robert. "It's never found where there's sunlight." Though he could never
figure out whether the deep shade produced a poisonous gas that settled
on the vegetation, or whether it came from some mineral in the ground,
he did know, and so did others, that whatever the cause it disappeared
when sunlight took the place of dense shade.

The incident was scarcely forgotten when ill luck again befell Millie
and Robert. Their barn burned to the ground, reducing their harvest and
their only mule to ashes.

Tongues wagged. "Bad luck comes to the couple married on horseback."

Everyone the countryside over was convinced of the truth of the old
superstition one fall when a tragedy unheard-of overtook Millie at
sorghum-making.

No one ever knew how it happened. But some said that Brock Cyrus's
half-witted boy was the cause of it. He shouted, "Look out thar!" and
Millie, looking up from her task of feeding cane stalks into the mill,
saw, or thought she saw, her babe, Little Robert, toddling toward the
boiling pans. She screamed and lunged forward, and as she did so the
mule started on a run. The beam to which