“We’ll clear the place with the first cutting this year. It’s just the thing for Uncle Jim,” Leigh asserted.
“Yep, Jim’s in clover—alfalfa, ruther. You had a good business head when you run your bluff some years ago, an’ you wan’t only nineteen then. You walked into my place an’ jest bought that land on sheer bluff.” Champers laughed uproariously, but he grew sober in the next minute.
“Miss Shirley,” he said gravely, “I ain’t got much style nor sentiment in my makin’s, but I’ve honestly tried to be humane by widders an’ orphans. I’ve done men to keep ’em from doin’ me, or jest ’cause they was danged easy, but I never wronged no woman, not even my wife, who divorced me years ago back East ’cause I wouldn’t turn my old mother out o’ doors, but kep’ her and provided for her long as she lived.” 338
Nobody in Kansas had ever heard Darley Champers mention his home relations before. Leigh looked at him gravely, and the sympathy in her deep blue eyes was grateful to the uncultured man before her.
“Miss Shirley, I ain’t wantin’ to meddle none, but I come down here to ask you if you know anything about your father?”
Leigh gave a start and stared at her questioner, but her woman’s instinct told her that only kindly purpose lay back of his question.
He had sat down on the edge of the porch and Leigh stood leaning against the trellis, clutching the narrow slats, as she looked at him.
“I think he is dead,” she answered slowly. “Uncle Jim says he must be. He was a bad man, made bad not by blood but by selfishness. The Shirleys are a fine family.”
“Excuse me for sayin’ it, Miss, but you took every good trait of that family, an’ Nature jest shied every bad trait as far from you as it took the sins of our old savage Anglo-Saxon ancestors off of our heads; them that used to kill an’ eat their neighborin’ tribes, like the Filipinos, they was. Don’t never forget that you’re a Shirley an’ not a Tank. Your grandma’s name was Tank, I’ve been told.”
Leigh made no response, but something in her face and in the poise of her figure bespoke the truth of Darley Champers’ words.