"I got a letter. He wrote to Burtonville and directed it to Mrs. Angeline Weaver, and the postmaster give it to some of your uncle Samuel's folks, and they put it in another envelope and backed it to me here. I thought at first I wouldn't say anything about it, but it seemed as if I'd ought to tell you; it doesn't hurt you any, but it's awful hard on the—the Moxom girls."
The man shifted his weight, and kicked awhile with his other foot.
"Well, I'd just give him the go-by," he announced resolutely. "You're a decent man's widow, and that's enough. He's never"—
"Oh, I ain't saying anything against your step-paw, Jason," the old woman broke in anxiously. "He was an awful good man. It seems queer to think it was the way it was. Dear me, it's all so kind of confusing!"
The poor woman looked down with much the same embarrassment over her matrimonial redundance that a man might feel when suddenly confronted by twins.
"I'm sure I don't see how I could help thinking he was dead," she went on after a little silence, "when he wrote he was going off on that trip and might never come back, and the man that was with him wrote that they got lost from each other, and water was so scarce and all that. And then, you know, I didn't get married again till you was 'most ten years old, Jason. I'm sure I don't know what to do. I don't want to mortify anybody, but I'd like to know just what's my dooty."
"Well, I can tell you easy enough." The man's voice was getting beyond control, but he drew it in with a quick, angry breath. "Just drop the whole thing. If he's got on for forty years, mother, I guess he can manage for the rest of the time."
"But it ain't so easy managin' when you begin to get old, Jason. I know how that is."
Her son jerked the lines impatiently, and the colt gave a nervous start.
"I suppose you know this farm really came to you from your paw, don't you, Jason?" she asked humbly.