“Of course, and loyally. That doesn’t prevent my thinking that she does unwise things.”
“O—oh!!”
“Like giving a little girl one hundred dollars at a time to spend in foolishness.”
Dorothy protested: “It wasn’t to be foolishness. It was to make people happy. You yourself say that to ‘spread happiness’ is the only thing worth while!”
“Surely, but it doesn’t take Uncle Sam’s greenbacks to do that. Not many of them. When you’ve lived as long as I have you’ll have learned that the things which dollars do not buy are the things that count. Hello! ‘By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.’”
The blacksmith rose as he finished his quotation and went to the wide doorway, across which a shadow had fallen, and from whence the sound of an irritable: “Whoa-oa, there!” had come.
It was a rare patron of that old smithy and Seth concealed his surprise by addressing not the driver but the horse:
“Well, George Fox! Good-morning to you!”
George Fox was the property of miller Oliver Sands, and the Quaker and his steed were well known in all that locality. He was a fair-spoken man whom few loved and many feared, and between him and the “Learned Blacksmith” there was “no love lost.” Why he had come to the smithy now Seth couldn’t guess; nor why, as he stepped down from his buggy and observed, “I’d like to have thee look at George’s off hind foot, farrier. He uses it——” he should do what he did.
How it was “used” was not explained; for, leaving the animal where it stood, the miller sauntered into the building, hands in pockets, and over it in every part, even to its owner’s private bedroom, as if he had a curiosity to see how his neighbor lived. Seth would have resented this, had it been worth while and if the miller’s odd curiosity had not aroused the same feeling in himself. It was odd, he thought; but Seth Winters had nothing to hide and he didn’t care. It was equally odd that George Fox’s off hind foot was in perfect condition and had been newly shod at the other smithy, over the mountain, where all the miller’s work was done.