"I don't know how it is, Uncle Tucker," she said one day toward the end of June, when the deadly drought which had kept back the transplanting of the tobacco had ended in three days of heavy rain—"I don't know how it is, but the thing I miss most—and I miss her every minute—is the lying I had to do. It gave me something to think about, somehow. I used to stay awake at night and plan all sorts of pleasant lies that I could tell about the house and the garden, and the way the war ended, and the Presidents of the Confederacy—I made up all their names—and the fuss with which each one was inaugurated, and the dresses their wives and daughters wore. It's all so dull when you have to stop pretending and begin to face things just as they are. I've lied for almost thirty years, and I reckon I've lost my taste for the truth."
"Well, it will come back, dear," responded Tucker reassuringly; "but I think you need a change if a woman ever did. What about that week you're to spend with the Weatherbys?"
"I'm going to-morrow," answered Cynthia shortly. "Lila is sick with a cold and wants me; but how you and Christopher will manage to get on is more than I can say."
"Oh, we'll worry along with Docia, never fear," replied Tucker, hobbling into his seat at the supper table, as Christopher came in from the woods with the heavy moisture dripping from his clothes.
"It's cleared off fine and there's to be a full moon tonight," said the young man, hanging up his hat. "If the rain had come a week later the tobacco would have been ruined. I've just been taking it up out of the plant-bed."
"You'll begin setting it out to-morrow, I reckon, then," observed
Tucker, watching Cynthia as she cut up his food.
"Oh, I'm afraid to wait—the ground dries so quickly. Jacob Weatherby is going to set his out to-night, and I think I'll do the same. There's a fine moon, and I shouldn't wonder if every farmer in the county was in the fields till daybreak."
He ate his supper hurriedly, and then, taking down his hat, went out to resume his work. At the door he had left his big split basket of plants, and, slipping his arm through the handle, he crossed the yard in the direction of the field. As he turned into the little path which trailed in wet grass along the "worm" fence, Jacob Weatherby came stepping briskly through the mud in the road and stopped to ask him if he had got his ground ready for the setting out. "I've been lookin' for hands myself," added the old man in his cheery voice, "for I could find work for a dozen men to-night, but to save my life I can't scrape up more'n a nigger here an' thar. Bill Fletcher has been out ahead of me, it seems."
"Well, I'll be able to help you to-morrow, I think," answered Christopher. "I hope to get my own work done to-night." Then he asked. with a trifling hesitation: "How is Lila's cold?"
A sudden light broke over old Jacob's face, and he nodded in his genial fashion.