, but not knowing
how, nodded simply. In a few days the other children went back to the
cabin, and day and night Grayson went to see the child, until it was
out of danger, and afterwards. It was not long before the women in
town complained that the mother was ungrateful. When they sent things
to eat to her the servant brought back word that she had called out,
"'Set them over thar,' without so much as a thanky." One message was
that "she didn' want no second-hand victuals from nobody's table."
Somebody suggested sending the family to the poor-house. The mother
said "she'd go out on her crutches and hoe corn fust, and that the
people who talked 'bout sendin' her to the po'-house had better save
their breath to make prayers with." One day she was hired to do some
washing. The mistress of the house happened not to rise until ten
o'clock. Next morning the mountain woman did not appear until that
hour. "She wasn't goin' to work a lick while that woman was a-layin'
in bed," she said, frankly. And when the lady went down town, she too
disappeared. Nor would she, she explained to Grayson, "while that
woman was a-struttin' the streets."

After that, one by one, they let her alone, and the woman made not a
word of complaint. Within a week she was working in the fields, when
she should have been back in bed. The result was that the child
sickened again. The old look came back to its face, and Grayson was
there night and day. He was having trouble out in Kentucky about this
time, and he went to the Blue Grass pretty often. Always, however, he
left money with me to see that the child was properly buried if it
should die while he was gone; and once he telegraphed to ask how it
was. He said he was sometimes afraid to open my letters for fear that
he should read that the baby was dead. The child knew Grayson's voice,
his step. It would go to him from its own mother. When it was sickest
and lying torpid it would move the instant he stepped into the room,
and, when he spoke, would hold out its thin arms, without opening its
eyes, and for hours Grayson would walk the floor with the troubled
little baby over his shoulder. I thought several times it would die
when, on one trip, Grayson was away for two weeks. One midnight,
indeed, I found the mother moaning, and three female harpies about the
cradle. The baby was dying this time, and I ran back for a flask of
whiskey. Ten minutes late with the whiskey that night woul