"Now, see here, you Mary," the voice was that of Lovina Nixon as, something over three-quarters of an hour later, she sat, feet in oven and tea-cup and saucer in lap, in the centre of the reassembled family group of the Nixon farmhouse; "I don't mind you helpin' yourself to Nixon's socks, when people is in need—but why don't you give 'em something to put on over the top of them, so's they won't walk the heels through," the reference was to Ware who, after an unconscious habit, developed by the usage of almost a lifetime, was pacing thoughtfully up and down the creaky floor overhead, where the spare bed was; "I got to darn them socks, not you."
"Jim," said John Nixon, as he propped a piece of pine board on the stove-pan and commenced to whittle kindlings for the morning fire, "don't forget to remind me, tomorrow, that we got to sharpen up the corks (caulks) of all them horses' shoes. I noticed yon Prince-horse kind of gruntin' as I led him into the stable, there, to-night. You ain't been loadin' them team too heavy while I been away?"
Jim Burns paused in the winding of a heavy nickel watch and glanced at his employer.
"Aw, now, Jack," he remonstrated, "don't you know no better than for to ask me a question like that? You'd think I was some green Englishman, or somethin'."
Ware, to whom this dialogue came up freely through the cracks between the warped floor-boards, smiled to himself as he sat down on the edge of the spare bed and slipped off the enormous gray socks borrowed from the wardrobe of his host.
"We do so like to be each other's critics," he murmured, with a half-sad cadence; "but I suppose it's the same, the world over.... If we could only get away from that, we children of this planet might win back what we lost at Bab-el."
CHAPTER XXIII. Daisy's Home Coming.
"Well, Jim," Daisy, neatly hatted and furred, came down the steps of the passenger coach to Toddburn's icy station platform, set down what Ware called her "kit-bag", reached over a matter-of-fact way and, arresting the hesitating hand of Jim Burns, first shook it, and then, with a recrudescence of her old "free-actin'" self, punched him lightly in the ribs with a gloved knuckle; "how's everything? Come in by yourself?"