"Suppose you was the father of this baby, and had to be drug here by the scruff of the neck to own it, wouldn't you think I'd done the poor little thing harm enough just by—by that, without tackin' you onto him for the rest of his life? No, sir!" She stood up and took a step backward. "You go and tell everybody—tell Ruby Adair, that I say this child hasn't any father; he never had any, but he's got a mother, and a mother that thinks too much of him to disgrace him by marrying a coward, which is more than she'll be able to say for her children if she ever has any! Now go!"
For Value Received
A soft yellow haze lay over the San Jacinto plain, deepening into purple, where the mountains lifted themselves against the horizon. Nancy Watson stood in her cabin door, and held her bony, moistened finger out into the tepid air.
"I believe there's a little breath of wind from the southeast, Robert," she said, with a desperate hopefulness; "but the air doesn't feel rainy."
"Oh, I guess the rains'll come along all right; they gener'lly do." The man's voice was husky and weak. "Anyway, the barley'll hold its own quite a while yet."
"Oh, yes; quite a long while," acquiesced his wife, with an eager, artificial stress on the adjective. "I don't care much if the harvest isn't earlier'n usual; I want you to pick up your strength."
She turned into the room, a strained smile twitching her weather-stained face. She was glad Robert's bed was in the farthest corner away from the window. The barley-field that stretched about the little redwood cabin was a pale yellowish green, deeper in the depressions, and fading almost into brown on the hillocks. There had been heavy showers late in October, and the early sown grain had sprouted. It was past the middle of November now, and the sky was of that serene, cloudless Californian blue which is like a perpetual smiling denial of any possibility of rain.