"You bring 'em here, an' Cass'll make ye a blueberry cake to eat hot with butter melt'n' on hit 'at'll make ye think the world's a good place to live in."
"I'll do it," he said, laughing, and took his solitary path up the steep. Halfway to his cabin, he heard quick, scrambling steps behind him, and, turning, saw little Hoyle bringing Cassandra's small melon-shaped basket, covered with a white cloth.
"I said I could run faster'n you could. Cass, she sont some th' chick'n fry." He thrust the basket at Thryng and turned to run home.
"Here, here!" David called after the twisted, hunched little figure. "You tell your sister 'thank you very much,' for me. Will you?"
"Yas, suh," and the queer little gnome disappeared among the laurel below.
In the morning, David found the place of the Widow Timms, and her son agreed to come down the next day and accept wages for work. A weary, spiritless young man he was, and the home as poverty-stricken as was that of Decatur Irwin, and with almost as many children. It was with a feeling of depression that David rode on after his call, leaving the grandmother seated in the doorway, snuff stick between her yellow teeth, the grandchildren clustering about her knees, or squatting in the dirt, like young savages. Their father lounged in the wretched cabin, hardly to be seen in the windowless, smoke-blackened space nearly filled with beds heaped with ragged bedclothes, and broken splint-bottomed chairs hung about with torn and soiled garments.
The dirt and disorder irritated David, and he felt angered at the clay-faced son for not being out preparing his little patch of ground. Fortunately, he had been able to conceal his annoyance enough to secure the man's promise to begin work next day, or he would have gained nothing but the family's resentment for his pains. Already David had learned that a sort of resentful pride was the last shred of respectability to which the poorest and most thriftless of the mountain people clung—pride of he knew not what, and resentfulness toward any who, by thrift and labor, were better off than themselves.
He reasoned that as the young man had been Frale's helper at the still, no doubt corn whiskey was at the bottom of their misery. This brought his mind to the thought of Frale himself. The young man had not been mentioned between him and Cassandra since the day she sought his help. He thought he could not be far from the still, as he forded Lone Pine Creek, on his way to the home of Hoke Belew, whose wife he was going to see.
David was interested in this young family; they seemed to him to be quite of the better sort, and as he put space between himself and the Widow Timms' deplorable state, his irritation gradually passed, and he was able to take note of the changes a week had wrought in the growing things about him.
More than once he diverged to investigate blossoming shrubs which were new to him, attracted now by a sweet odor where no flowers appeared, until closer inspection revealed them, and now by a blaze of color against the dark background of laurel leaves and gray rocks. Ah, the flaming azalea had made its appearance at last, huge clusters of brilliant bloom on leafless shrubs. How dazzlingly gay!