Thomas McBirney crossed one leg over the other, and looked down pensively at his calloused hands.
“I don’t know as I had ought to,” he said slowly. “But after all, we’re happy here. The children was born here. Our little girl—Molly, you know, that’s dead—she seems to be running over the place still. Seems like I can feel her near me, plenty of times. Don’t you feel that way, ma?”
Mary McBirney nodded, with her tender smile.
“So,” went on Thomas McBirney, “I don’t know as I ought to leave. But I tell you what I can do, Mr. Carson, and what I’d be proud to do. Times when I wasn’t busy here at the farm, I could drive back into the mountains to visit men I know, and men I don’t exactly know but that I’ve heard tell of, and I could get them to working on chairs for you. Then they’d haul them down to your place; and maybe some of them who ain’t as hard to pry loose from the rocks as I be, will move down beside your factory.”
“Thomas makes the best chairs I ever set in,” declared Mary McBirney with pride. “Talk about getting other men to make chairs! There ain’t none of them can come up to him.”
“I engage your whole output then,” declared Mr. Carson, apparently not at all vexed that his fine plan had been disarranged. “Get to work, Mr. McBirney, and get your boy to work. I’ll sell the chairs for you at better rates than you ever dreamed of.”
“And if you do that,” declared Thomas McBirney, “you’ll take your commission. This has got to be on a business basis, sir.”
“Of course, of course,” answered Mr. Carson hastily. He saw that it would be very easy to hurt the pride of this independent man. “We’ll agree on the commission, and I’ll take it. Of course I shall need money to build my cottages and to run the business.”
Hi had been wriggling like a worm on the bench where he sat beside Carin, and now, with much blinking and twisting, he managed to say, addressing himself to Mr. Carson: