Then Bud slipped off in the dawn of the coming light.
CHAPTER XXIII
GOD WILL PROVIDE
In a few days Shiloh was up, but the mere shadow of a little waif, following the old man around the place. She needed rest and good food and clothes; and Bull Run and Seven Days and Appomattox and Atlanta needed them, and where to get them was the problem which confronted the grandfather.
Shiloh's narrow escape from death had forever settled the child-labor question with him—he would starve, “by the Grace of God,” as he expressed it, before one of them should ever go into the mill again.
He had a bitter quarrel about it with Mrs. Watts; but the good old man's fighting blood was up at last—that hatred of child-slavery, which had been so long choked by the smoke of want, now burst into a blaze when the shock of it came in Shiloh's collapse—a blaze which was indeed destined “to light the valley with a torch of fire.”
On the third day Jud Carpenter came out to see about it; but at sight of him the old man took down from the rack over the hall door the rifle he had carried through the war, and with a determined gesture he stopped the employment agent at the gate: “I am a man of God, Jud Carpenter,” he said in a strange voice, rounded with a deadly determination, “but in the name of God an' humanity, if you come into that gate after my little 'uns, I'll kill you in yo' tracks, jes' as a bis'n bull 'ud stamp the life out of a prowlin' coyote.”