Indie promised solemnly. Her thoughts went back to one still, tranquil night years before, when the doors of that same home had been closed against the wayward son by the father who vowed never to look upon his boy’s face again. The mother—a frail, submissive, toil-worn woman—had mourned in secret, but her prayers had been unanswered.
“You’ve been dreadful good to us,” the dying voice murmured; “I hope the Lord will make it up to you somehow, Indie. Do you reckon the girls will git here ’fore I die?”
“Yes, Aunt Viney, I really b’lieve they will. But you go to sleep if you can. I’ll wake you as soon as they git here.”
By and by the sick woman fell into a gentle doze that deepened into the sleep that knows no earthly waking. The married daughters came too late, but if they were greatly grieved over their mother’s death they made little outward sign. They stayed at the home place for two days, during which the will was read. It deeded all that remained of the Pasely farm, that had been divided and subdivided to supply marriage portions for four, to Indie, in consideration of her faithful services for the old folks.
“Maybe you can ketch Lem Powers with this bait,” was Louise’s spiteful comment, after the reading was over. “Everyone knows you always wanted him bad enough.”
Mary, the eldest cousin, laughed dryly. “Indie can’t complain of the way our folks treated her,” she said with ill-concealed bitterness. “This farm is worth a thousand dollars above the mortgage money. It ain’t many poor relations that has property like this left to ’em.”
“I guess Indie knows that she didn’t come by it plum honest,” the third cousin remarked. “She knowed how to work around the old folks so’s to git ’em to leave her what they had. Well, we ain’t the kind to make trouble even if we have been wronged.”
When they had gone, Indie abandoned herself to a passion of helpless, piteous grief. She recalled one cruel hour long ago when her cousin Louise had accused her of caring, unasked, for friendly, pleasant Lem Powers, whose off-hand calls on the family stood out in Indie’s memory as the brightest events of her lonely, toilful life. Indie was twenty-three and plain, for the flower-like prettiness of her early childhood had long since succumbed to the triple blight of care and drudgery and loneliness. It had been known among her neighbors and acquaintances that Indie, at the age of eighteen, had never been “spoke for,” wherefore she had meekly accepted the stigma of spinsterhood that comes very early to the Southern country girl and had withdrawn from the mild frivolities of youth to become a household drudge in her uncle’s family in order that her cousins might have more leisure and freedom. After the death of her hard-working uncle, she had stayed with her ailing aunt while the girls married and left her.
“I wisht I’d died instid of Aunt Viney,” Indie sobbed in utter loneliness.
For two years Indie lived quietly and comfortably in the old home, paying her simple expenses by raising garden truck for the town hotel. Then a letter came from Tom’s widow imploring his people to send her enough money to defray Tom’s funeral expenses to avert his threatened burial in the potter’s field. It was a pathetic appeal, involving the brief story of Tom’s struggles, how he had worked his way with his little family from Texas to the old home state, where he had obtained employment in a factory. He had met his death through a boiler explosion the day before the letter was written. Tom had always hoped for a reconciliation in spite of his father’s unyielding hardness, the widow wrote. In conclusion, she begged his people not to allow his body to be consigned to a nameless grave.