He turned to her, as if for her consent to give expression to his mysterious terms. She nodded, and he went on:
“In the winter time, ma’am, to tell you the plain truth, 8 Joe wouldn’t be worth wages to me, and in the summer not very much. A boy that size and age eats his head off, you might say.
“But I’ll make you this offer, out of consideration of my friendship for Peter, and your attachment for the old place, and all of that stuff: I’ll take Joe over, under writing, till he’s twenty-one, at ten dollars a month and all found, winter and summer through, and allow you to stay right on here in the house, with a couple of acres for your chickens and garden patch and your posies and all the things you set store on and prize. I’ll do this for you, Missis Newbolt, but I wouldn’t do it for any other human being alive.”
She turned slowly to him, an expression of mingled amazement and fear on her face.
“You mean that you want me to bind Joe out to you till he’s his own man?” said she.
“Well, some call it by that name,” nodded Chase, “but it’s nothing more than any apprenticeship to any trade, except–oh, well, there ain’t no difference, except that there’s few trades that equal the one the boy’ll learn under me, ma’am.”
“You’re askin’ me to bind my little son–my only child left to me of all that I bore–you want me to bind him out to you like a nigger slave!”
Her voice fell away to a whisper, unable to bear the horror that grew into her words.
“Better boys than him have been bound out in this neighborhood!” said Chase sharply. “If you don’t want to do it, don’t do it. That’s all I’ve got to say. If you’d rather go to the poorhouse than see your son in steady and honorable employment, in a good home, and learning a business under a man that’s made some success of it, that’s your lookout, not mine. But that’s where you’ll land the minute you set your foot out in that road. Then the county court’ll take your boy and bind him out to somebody, and you’ll have no 9 word to say in the matter, at all. But you can suit yourself.”
“It–kind of–shook me,” she muttered, the mother-love, the honor and justice in her quailing heart shrinking back before the threat of that terrible disgrace–the poorhouse.