Nan stepped from the road and pushed aside the thick underbrush to find a dry spot to place her foot. The gnats danced before her and buzzed in her ears. She brushed them aside and so pushed on until she could see the road again. A lean, yellow horse, tackled to the shafts of a broken top-buggy with bits of rope as well as worn straps, stood in the roadway. The man on the seat, talking to another on the ground, was Mr. Gedney Raffer, the timberman who was contending at law with Uncle Henry.
It was he who had said: “I'd give money, I tell ye, to see Hen Sherwood git his.”
There had fallen a silence, but just as Nan recognized the mean looking old man on the carriage seat, she heard the second man speak from the other side of the buggy.
“I tell you like I done Hen himself, Ged; I don't wanter be mixed up in no land squabble. I ain't for neither side.”
It was Toby. Nan knew his voice, and she remembered how he had answered Uncle Henry at the lumber camp, the first day she had seen the old lumberman. Nan could not doubt that the two men were discussing the argument over the boundary of the Perkins Tract.
Gedney Raffer snarled out an imprecation when old Toby had replied as above. “Ef you know which side of your bread the butter's on, you'll side with me,” he said.
“We don't often have butter on our bread, an' I ain't goin' ter side with nobody,” grumbled Toby Vanderwiller.
“S-s!” hissed Raffer. “Come here!”
Toby stepped closer to the rattletrap carriage. “You see your way to goin' inter court an' talkin' right, and you won't lose nothin' by it, Tobe.”
“Huh? Only my self-respect, I s'pose,” grunted the old lumberman, and Nan approved very much of him just then.