“M'ri!” cried Silas.
“Mebbe, marm, you are over-worrited ternight,” said the stranger softly; “wimmen is all feelin', God bless 'em! an' how yer son loved ye, a tellin' of yer bright eyes an' red cheeks——”
She turned to him with fierce eagerness. “He couldn't keer fur me, I wan't the kind. I don't mind me of hardly ever kissin' him. I worked him hard; I was cross an' stingy. He sed to me, 'There's houses that is never homes, mother.' I sneered an' blamed him for his little present.” She ran and brought the vase. “I've kept that, Mr. Brown, over twenty years, but when he give it to me, bought outer his poor little savin's, I scolded him. I never let him hev the boys here to pop corn or make candy; it was waste and litter. Oh, I know what he meant; this was never a home.”
“But he only spoke kind of ye alius.”
“Did you know Jim? Been gone this ten year, an' never a word.”
Silas, a queer shadow on his face, looked eagerly at Brown.
“I did know him,” slowly and cautiously—“he was a cowboy in Texas, as brave as the best.”
“He could ride,” cried Maria, “as part of a horse, an' Tige was the dead image of that Washington horse in the pictur, an' Jim used to say thet girl there in the blue gown was his girl—the one with the bouquet; an' I used to call him silly. I chilled all the fun he hed outer him, an' broken-speerited an' white-faced he drifted away from us, as far away as them in the graveyard, with the same weary look as they hed in goin'.”
“An' he took keer of much as a hundred cattle,” said Silas; “they has thet meny I've heerd, in Texas?”
“They has thousands; they loses hundreds by drought——”