"Virginia, what are you talking about?" cried Mrs. Hemingway. "The idea of your standing up for that woman, when—"
"Well, Luke King used to defend her," Virginia broke in, impulsively, "and before he went away you used to admit he was the finest young man in the county. I've seen him almost shed tears when he'd tell about what she'd done for him, and how tender-hearted and kind she was."
"Tender-hearted nothing!" snapped Mrs. Hemingway, under a deep frown. "Luke King was the only person that went about her, and she tried to work on his sympathies for some purpose or other. Besides, nobody knows what ever become of him; he may have gone to the dogs by this time; it looks like somebody would have heard of him if he had come to any good in the five years he's been away."
"Somehow, I think she knows where he is," Virginia said, thoughtfully, as she rose to put her berries away.
When she had gone, Sam laughed softly. "It's a wonder to me that Virgie don't know whar Luke is, herself," he said. "I 'lowed once that the fellow liked her powerful; but I reckon he thought she was too young, or didn't want to take the matter further when he was as poor as Job's turkey and had no sort of outlook ahead."
"I sort o' thought that, too," the widow admitted, "but I didn't want Virginia to encourage him when he was accepting so much from that woman."
Sam laughed again as he knocked the ashes from his pipe and cleaned the bowl with the tip of his finger. "Well, 'that woman,' as you call her, is a power in the land that hates her," he said. "She knows how to hit back from her fortress in that old farm-house. George Wilson knows what it means not to stand by her in public, so does Abe Longley, that has to drive his cattle to grass two miles over the mountains. Jim Johnston, who was dead sure of renting her northeast field again next year, has been served with a notice to vacate, and now, if the latest news can be depended on, she's hit a broad lick at half the farmers in the valley, and, while I'm a sufferer with the balance, I don't blame her one bit. I'd 'a' done the same pine-blank thing years ago if I'd stood in her shoes."
"What's she done now?" asked the woman at the churn, leaning forward eagerly.
"Done? Why, she says she's tired o' footing almost the entire wheat-threshing bill for twenty measly little farmers. You know she's been standing her part of the expenses to get the Empire Company to send their steam thresher here, and her contribution amounted to more than half. She's decided, by hunky, to plant corn and cotton exclusively next year, and so notified the Empire Company. They can't afford to come unless she sows wheat, and they sent a man clean from Atlanta to argue the matter with her, but she says she's her own boss, an' us farmers who has land fittin' for nothing but wheat is going to get badly left in the lurch. Oh, Bazemore opened the battle agin her, and you-uns echoed the war-cry, an' the battle is good on. I'll go without flour biscuits and pie-crust, but the fight will be interesting. The Confed' soldiers made a purty good out along about '61, an' they done it barefooted an' on hard-tack an' water. If you folks are bent on devilling the hide off of the most influential woman in our midst, just because her foot got caught in the hem of her skirt an' tripped her up when she was a thoughtless young girl, I reckon us men will have to look on an' say nothing."
"She did slip up, as you say," remarked the widow, "and she's been a raging devil ever since."