The widow Donelson glances across from the corn bread she is mixing.
“The runner who came on ahead,” she says, addressing the blooming Rachel, “reports the party as being due to-morrow. Mr. Jackson, the new State's Attorney, who will come with it, is to board and lodge with us.”
The blooming Rachel looks brightly up. The drunken Robards likewise looks up; but his face is gloomy with incipient jealousy.
“A Mr. Jackson, eh?” he sneers. Then, to the blooming Rachel: “It's mighty likely you'll find in him a new lover to try your wiles on.”
The blooming Rachel colors and her black eyes snap, but she holds her tongue. The widow Donelson is also silent. The mother and daughter have found wordlessness the best return to those insults, which it is the habit of the jealous drunkard to hurl at his pretty wife.
The runner made true report, and the party in which travels the horse-faced Andy makes its appearance next day. Tall, slender, elegant, self-possessed, and with a manner which marks him above the common, he is disliked by the drunken Robards on sight. When he declines to drink with that sot, the dislike crystallizes into hatred. The outrageous jealousy of Robards has found a new reason for its green-eyed existence, and he already goes drunkenly pondering the slaughter of the horse-faced Andy. Since he will never advance beyond the pondering stage, for certain reasons called “craven” among men of clean courage, his homicidal lucubrations are the less important.
Andy the horse-faced does not notice Robards. He does, however, notice with a thrill of pleasure the beautiful Rachel, and is glad to find his lines are down in such pleasant places.
He is vastly taken with the boarding house of the widow Donelson, and incautiously says as much. He praises her corn pone and fried squirrel, and vehemently avers that her hog and hominy are the best he ever ate.
Rachel the blooming does not allow her husband's jealousy to interrupt hospitality, and piles high the young State's Attorney's plate with these delicacies. She even brings out a store of wild honey and cream—dainties sparse and few and far between in these rude regions. She calls this “hospitality”; her jealous drunkard of a husband calls it “making advances.” He says that in the course of a long, and he might have added misspent, life, he has observed that a coquette, with designs on a man's heart, never fails to begin by making an ally of his stomach.
“Hence,” says the drunken deductionist, “that honey and cream.”