"No, I'll never name Buddy to you again," said Sylvane soberly. "If you and me ever talks of him, you'll have to mention it first. But if there is anything I can do for you, Sis' Callie, you know you have but to ask."
"I know that, Sylvane," Callista assured him, with a certain eagerness in her tone. "And they is something—something that I reckon nobody could do as well as you could. I need—I just have obliged to get my things from—from up yon in the Gap. Would you go fetch 'em for me, Brother?"
Sylvane, after all, was kin to Lance. He could not keep down a little thrill of pride, that his brother had thus far forced Callista's hand. But he answered gravely—almost sadly,
"I'll go this day, if you say so."
Securing permission from Ajax to absent himself, the boy hitched his old mule to the buckboard and hurried off to the home at the head of Lance's Laurel. Whether or not he found all of Callista's belongings packed and ready, what was said between the two men, no one knew. He returned near nightfall with Callista's trunk and one or two sizable bundles, while Spotty meekly led roped to the rear axle of the buckboard. Callista 290 helped him into her cabin with the bundles; but when he would have untied Spotty she remonstrated.
"I surely thought you were fixing to take the cow over to yo' house," she said shortly. "It doesn't belong here."
"It was said to be yours," Sylvane told her, true to his promise not to mention his brother's name, even inferentially. "I 'lowed that the baby and—and all—would need the milk. Reckon you best leave her stay."
"No," said Callista positively. "The cow's nothing I have any concerns with. Maybe Sis' Roxy could make use of the milk. Take her along home, Sylvane, or drive her back where she came from—or turn her loose, for all of me."
And then Sylvane knew whether his brother had failed in care for the child.
When Callista came in from disposing of this question of the cow, she found her mother standing, inclined, as usual, to be tearful, over the boxes and bundles. Coming on one of these latter with a peculiar knot which Lance always used, and which he had once taught her the secret of, Callista experienced a sick revulsion of feeling.