“We don’t say nothin’ about sich matters in these hills, stranger,” said Joslin quietly. “I’m a-tellin’ ye if I went in thar with ye, ye’d be all right. But I hain’t a-goin’. Ye kain’t noways hire me.”
“You’re pretty danged independent,” rejoined Haddon testily. “The woman here just told me that you’re wearing my coat and my shoes right now. You must be hard up against it. Probably you were run out of these hills, and that’s why you want to get outside. And now I offer you fair pay—good pay, in fact—five dollars a day, or ten—just to go in and show me the timber and coal in that country, which you don’t own but we own—and you say you won’t go. Is that the way you treat a stranger?”
“Hit mought be the way to treat some strangers. As fer yore shoes an’ coat, ye needn’t say I’m a-wearin’ ‘em no longer.” And so, deliberately, Joslin removed both the shoes and the coat, and stood coatless and barefooted, leaning against the gallery rail. He felt with a certain mortification the straight gaze of the young woman who had sat listening quietly. She spoke now.
“Mr. Joslin,” said she in the low and even tones usual for her speaking voice, “I think you need those things. I quite understand how you feel about wearing them, but you will oblige me very much by keeping them until you are able to earn something better.”
David Joslin, the shame, humiliation and hot anger of his heart struggling for mastery, turned to her, for the moment unable to speak. Then, silently as he had removed the offending articles, he replaced them.
“I thank ye, Ma’am,” said he. “I reckon ye know better’n I do what I’d orter do.”
“Well, sir,” said she, turning toward him in the twilight a face that to him had the charm of an angel’s, “my husband wants you to go back in there with him. Why is it impossible?”
“Hit’s impossible, Ma’am, because when I make up my mind to a thing it’s impossible to change it.”
She sat looking at him curiously. Never in all her life had she seen a personality more powerful than that of this half-wild heathen who stood before her. The feel of the iron of his soul came upon her with strange effect.