must be crazy!"

"There, it's out. Needn't hop up like that, mad as a hornet, at me.
I'm not the one hints and shrugs. It's the whole lot of your precious
'boys'--boys; indeed! and needing spanking more'n they ever did in
their lives."

Jessica's swift pacing of the wide porch came to a sudden halt, and
she dropped down again at Mrs. Benton's feet, feeling as if the floor
had given way beneath her tread.

"This, then, was what my mother meant, that very day when I came back,
that Ephraim was happier where he was! The dear old fellow; thrown to
the street by his graceless Stiffleg; picked up with a leg full of
broken bones; a prisoner in a hospital all these weeks; giving all his
savings of years to us; and the 'boys' he's lived with since before I
was born accusing him of--theft! Aunt Sally, it's too monstrous to be
true!"

"'Tis, indeedy. Seem's if the Evil One had been let loose, here at
Sobrante, when the word of a half-wit--poor half, at that--is held
proof against the entire life of an honest old man."

Aunt Sally was so deeply moved that, for once, she allowed herself a
moment's respite from unceasing industry, unconsciously holding a
patchwork block to her moist eyes, and slowly swaying the great rocker
as she sorrowfully reflected that:

"I raised him the best I could, that boy John. I gave him a pill once
a week, regular, to keep his bile down. I washed him every Saturday
night and spanked him after I got through. I never let him eat butter
when he had gravy, and I made him say his prayers night and morning. I
had a notion that such wholesome rearin' would turn him out a decent
man; and now, just see!"

In spite of her own distress, Jessica laughed.

"Aunt Sally, if anybody but yourself hinted that John wasn't a
'decent' man you'd do something dreadful to punish the slanderer."

"Suppose I should? Wouldn't I have a right? Ain't he my own?"

Jessica smiled faintly, but sat for a long time silent. The talkative
woman in the rocker also kept silence, brooding over many things.
Finally she burst forth:

"I don't see why it is that just as soon as a body gets into smooth
sailing, along comes a storm and upsets things again. There was your
mother, beginning to feel she could go ahead and do what her husband
wanted to, and now here's this bad feeling among her trusted hired
men. Suspicion is the pisenest yarb that grows. The folks that could
suspect old 'Forty-niner' of wrong things'll be plumb ready to