AT five o'clock Ordway followed the uneven board walk to the end of the main street, and then turning into a little footpath which skirted the railroad track, he came presently to the abandoned field known in Tappahannock as Bullfinch's Hollow. Beyond a disorderly row of negro hovels, he found a small frame cottage, which he recognised as the house to which he had brought Kit Berry on the night when he had dragged him bodily from Kelly's saloon. In response to his knock the door was opened by the same weeping woman—a small withered person, with snapping black eyes and sparse gray hair brushed fiercely against her scalp, where it clung so closely that it outlined the bones beneath. At sight of Ordway a smile curved her sunken mouth; and she led the way through the kitchen to the door of a dimly lighted room at the back, where a boy of eighteen years tossed deliriously on a pallet in one corner. It was poverty in its direst, its most abject, results, Ordway saw at once as his eyes travelled around the smoke stained, unplastered walls and rested upon the few sticks of furniture and the scant remains of a meal on the kitchen table. Then he looked into Mrs. Berry's face and saw that she must have lived once amid surroundings far less wretched than these.
"Kit was taken bad with fever three days ago," she said, "an' the doctor told me this mornin' that the po' boy's in for a long spell of typhoid. He's clean out of his head most of the time, but whenever he comes to himself he begs and prays me to send for you. Something's on his mind, but I can't make out what it is."
"May I see him now?" asked Ordway.
"I think he's wanderin', but I'll find out in a minute."
She went to the pallet and bending over the young man, whispered a few words in his ear, while her knotted hand stroked back the hair from his forehead. As Ordway's eyes rested on her thin shoulders under the ragged, half soiled calico dress she wore, he forgot the son in the presence of the older and more poignant tragedy of the mother's life. Yet all that he knew of her history was that she had married a drunkard and had brought a second drunkard into the world.
"He wants to speak to you, sir—he's come to," she said, returning to the doorway, and fixing her small black eyes upon Ordway's face. "You are the gentleman, ain't you, who got him to sign the pledge?"
Ordway nodded. "Did he keep it?"
Her sharp eyes filled with tears.
"He hasn't touched a drop for going on six weeks, sir, but he hadn't the strength to hold up without it, so the fever came on and wore him down." Swallowing a sob with a gulp, she wiped her eyes fiercely on the back of her hand. "He ain't much to look at now," she finished, divided between her present grief and her reminiscent pride, "but, oh, Mr. Smith, if you could have seen him as a baby! When he was a week old he was far and away the prettiest thing you ever laid your eyes on—not red, sir, like other children, but white as milk, with dimples at his knees and elbows. I've still got some of his little things—a dress he wore and a pair of knitted shoes—and it's them that make me cry, sir. I ain't grievin' for the po' boy in there that's drunk himself to death, but for that baby that used to be."
Still crying softly, she slunk out into the kitchen, while Ordway, crossing to the bed, stood looking down upon the dissipated features of the boy who lay there, with his matted hair tossed over his flushed forehead.