"Oh no, they've never met," said Wilson, as he took a sample pair of men's suspenders from the case and tested the elastic by stretching it between his hands. "I know that for certain. She was in here one morning waiting for one of her teams to pass to take her to Darley, when a peddler opened his pack of tin-ware and tried to sell her some pieces I was out of. He heard me call her by name, and, to be agreeable, he asked her if she was any kin to Joe Boyd and his daughter, over in Gilmer. I could have choked the fool for his stupidity. I tried to catch his eye to warn him, but he was intent on selling her a bill, and took no notice of anything else. I saw her stare at him steady for a second or two, then she seemed to swallow something, and said, 'No, they are no kin of mine.' And then what did the skunk do but try to make capital out of that. 'Well, you may be glad,' he said, 'that they are no kin, for they are as near the ragged edge as any folks I ever ran across.' He went on to say he stayed overnight at Boyd's cabin and that they had hardly anything but streak-o'-lean-streak-o'-fat meat and corn-bread to offer him, and that the girl had the worst temper he'd ever seen. Mrs. Boyd, I reckon, to hide her face, was looking at some of the fellow's pans, and he seemed to think he was on the right line, and so he kept talking. Old Joe, he said, had struck him as a good-natured, lazy sort of come-easy-go-easy mountaineer, but the girl looked stuck up, like she thought she was some better than appearances would indicate. He said she was a tall, gawky sort of girl, with no good looks to brag of, and he couldn't for the life of him see what she had to make her so proud.
"I wondered what Mrs. Boyd was going to do, but she was equal to that emergency, as she always has been in everything. She held one of his pans up in the light and tilted her bonnet back on her head, I thought, to let me see she wasn't hiding anything, and said, as unconcerned as if he'd never mentioned a delicate subject. 'Look here,' she said, thumping the bottom of the pan with her finger, 'if you expect to do any business with me you'll have to bring copper-bottom ware to me. I don't buy shoddy stuff from any one. These pans will rust through in two months. I'll take half a dozen, but I'm only doing it to pay you for the time spent on me. It is a bad investment for any one to buy cheap, stamped ware.'"
[IV]
Mrs. Jane Hemingway, Ann Boyd's long and persistent enemy, sat in the passage which connected the two parts of her house, a big, earthernware churn between her sharp knees, firmly raising and lowering the bespattered dasher with her bony hands. She was a woman past fifty; her neck was long and slender, and the cords under the parchment-like skin had a way of tightening, like ropes in the seams of a tent, when she swallowed or spoke. Her dark, smoothly brushed hair was done up in the tightest of balls behind her head, and her brown eyes were easily kindled to suspicion, fear, or anger.
Her brother-in-law, Sam Hemingway, called "Hem" by his intimates, slouched in from the broad glare of the mid-day sun and threw his coat on a chair. Then he went to the shelf behind the widow, and, pouring some water into a tin pan from a pail, he noisily bathed his perspiring face and big, red hands. As he was drying himself on the towel which hung on a wooden roller on the weather-boarding of the wall, Virginia Hemingway, his niece, came in from the field bringing a pail of freshly gathered dewberries. In appearance she was all that George Wilson had claimed for her. Slightly past eighteen, she had a wonderful complexion, a fine, graceful figure, big, dreamy, hazel eyes, and golden-brown hair, and, which was rare in one of her station, she was tastily dressed. She smiled as she showed her uncle the berries and playfully "tickled" him under the chin.
"See there!" she chuckled.
"Pies?" he said, with an unctuous grin, as he peered down into her pail.
"I thought of you while I was gathering them," she nodded. "I'm going to try to make them just as you like them, with red, candied bars criss-crossing."
"Nothing in the pie-line can hold a candle to the dewberry unless it's the cherry," he chuckled. "The stones of the cherries sorter hold a fellow back, but I manage to make out. I et a pie once over at Darley without a stone in it, and you bet your life it was a daisy."
He went into his room for his tobacco, and Virginia sat down to stem her berries. He returned in a moment, leaning in the doorway, drawing lazily at his pipe. The widow glanced up at him, and rested her dasher on the bottom of the churn.