"What did Dodson have to say—is he coming across?" I demanded of him before he got quite to my gate.
"Not if he can help it," he answered as he came close and leaned against one of the tall stone posts, so that his grandly shaped head with its ante-bellum squirls of hair was silhouetted against the white-starred wistaria vine in a way that made me frantic for several buckets of monochrome water-colors and a couple of brushes as big as those used for white-washing. In about ten great splotches I could have done a masterpiece of him that would have drawn artistic fits from the public of gay Paris. I never see him that I don't long for a box of pastels or get the ghost of the odor of oil-paint in my nose.
"The whole thing will be settled in a month," he continued, with a sigh that had a hint of depression in it and an astral shape of Sallie manifested itself hanging on his shoulder. However, I controlled myself and listened to him. "There is to be a meeting of the directors of both roads over in Bolivar in a few weeks and they are to come to some understanding. The line across the river is unquestionably the cheapest and best grade and there is no chance of getting them to run along our bluff—unless we can show them some advantage in doing so, and I can't see what that will be."
"What makes it of advantage for a railroad to run through any given point in a rural community like this, Cousin James?" I asked, with a glow of intellect mounting to my head, the like of which I hadn't felt since I delivered my Junior thesis in Political Economy with Jane looking on, consumed with pride.
"Towns that have good stock or grain districts around them with good roads for hauling do what is called 'feeding' a railroad," he answered. "Bolivar can feed both roads with the whole of the Harpeth Valley on that side of the river. They'll get the roads, I'm thinking. Poor old Glendale!"
"Isn't there anything to feed the monsters this side of the river?" I demanded, indignant at the barrenness of the south side of the valley of Old Harpeth.
"Very little unless it's the scenery along the bluff," he replied, with the depression sounding still more clearly in his voice and his shoulders drooped against the unsympathetic old stone post in a way that sent a pang to my heart.
"Jamie, is all you've got tied up in the venture?" I asked softly, using the name that a very small I had given him in a long ago when the world was young and not full of problems.
"That's not the worst, Evelina," he answered in a voice that was positively haggard. "But what belongs to the rest of the family is all in the same leaky craft. Carruthers put Sallie's in himself, but I invested the mites belonging to the others. Of course, as far as the old folks are concerned, I can more than take care of them, and if anything happens there's enough life insurance and to spare for them. I don't feel exactly responsible for Sallie's situation, but I do feel the responsibility of their helplessness. Sallie is not fitted to cope with the world and she ought to be well provided for. I feel that more and more every day. Her helplessness is very beautiful and tender, but in a way tragic, don't you think?"
I wish I had dared tell him for the second time that day what I did think on the subject but I denied myself such frankness.