“Glen, you get to bed fast as you make it! Nice time of night for you—” he fumed as he always did, but halfway upstairs he gave her a commendatory pat. “Good girl. Nerve. Kept your mouth shut and minded me. ’Night.”
Help was summoned in the morning to move the young mountaineer to an upper chamber where he spent three days in feverish pain, and when he was able to sit up in a high-backed rocker he made his position plain. The old woman had carried her point in death as she had not done in life. He had come down, and he would stay down, and permit himself to be “fotched on,” to the fulfilling of the old crone’s dream for him.
“But I am not aiming to be beholden,” he stated with his scant civility. “If yo’all will get me work in the mill and a place to live, and tote me, just once, to the night school, I will make out to do fo’ myself.”
“All right, son.” Dr. Darrow was carefully casual about it. “Guess I can fix you up. Tollivers—know ’em?—come from up your way—they’ll feed and sleep you for next to nothing, and there’ll be no trouble about getting into the mill. But about school—I believe the best thing’d be for Glen, here,” he nodded toward his daughter, waiting silently for the patient’s tray, “to find out how much you know, and maybe coach you a little. It’ll save you time.”
Young Manders turned his hawklike gaze upon her. He looked at her rather often, but always with an impersonal scrutiny.
“Is she fotched on?” Patent disapproval in look and tone. “I was not aiming to get me wimmin larning.”
His diction was curious, richly colored with accent and interlarded with crudities, and yet giving an effect of dignity. Glen thought the fact that he never slighted a final g had something to do with it.
Dr. Darrow grinned. “You’ll find it’s all of a piece, down here, Luke.” But he ceased to urge his daughter as a tutor and undertook the examination himself, fitting it in between calls.
The lad had learned to read and write, in limited fashion, at the moonlight school when he was several years younger, before he had dedicated himself to a career of violence, and had retained a good deal, but it was his figuring which amazed the physician.
“By George!” He sat back, beaming. “Quick as greased lightning! Got me beat, boy! Have, for a fact!”