"Yes, Aunt Ann"—he had always addressed her in that way—"here I am, like a bad coin, always turning up."
The yellow bunches of wool fell to the floor as she rose up and held out her hand.
"You know I'm glad to see you, my boy," she said, "but I wasn't expecting you; I don't know as I ever looked for you to come back here again, where you've had such a hard time of it. When you wrote me you was the chief editor of a paying paper out there, I said to myself that you'd never care to work here in the mountains, where there is so little to be made by a brainy man."
"If I were to tell you the main thing that brought me back you'd certainly scold me," he laughed; "but I never hid a fault from you, Aunt Ann. The truth is, good, old-fashioned home-sickness is at the bottom of it."
"Homesickness, for this?" Ann sneered contemptuously, as she waved her hand broadly—"homesick for the hard bed you had at your step-father's, in a pine-pole cabin, with a mud chimney and windows without glass, when you've been the equal, out there, of the highest and best in the land, and among folks that could and would appreciate your talents and energy and were able to pay cash for it at the highest market-price?"
"You don't understand, Aunt Ann." He flushed sensitively under her stare of disapproval as he sat down in a chair near her wheel. "Maybe you never did understand me thoroughly. I always had a big stock of sentiment that I couldn't entirely kill. Aunt Ann, all my life away has only made me love these old mountains, hills, and valleys more than ever, and, finally, when a good opportunity presented itself, as—"
"Oh, you are just like the rest, after all. I'd hoped to the contrary," Ann sighed. "But don't think I'm not glad to see you, Luke." Her voice shook slightly. "God knows I've prayed for a sight of the one face among all these here in the mountains that seemed to respect me, but there was another side to the matter. I wanted to feel, Luke, that I had done you some actual good in the world—that the education I helped you to get was going to lift you high above the average man. When you wrote about all your good-luck out there, the big salary, the interest the stockholders had given you in the paper that bid fair to make a pile of money, and stood so high in political influence, I was delighted; but, Luke, if a sentimental longing for these heartless red hills and their narrow, hide-bound inhabitants has caused you actually to throw up—"
"Oh, it's really not so bad as that," King hastened to say. "The truth is—though I really was trying to keep from bragging about my good-fortune before I'd had a chance to ask after your health—the truth is, Aunt Ann, it's business that really brings me back, though I confess it was partly for sentimental reasons that I decided on the change. It's this way: A company has been formed in Atlanta to run a daily paper on somewhat similar lines to the one we had in the West, and the promoters of it, it seems, have been watching my work, and that sort of thing, and so, only a few days ago, they wrote offering me a good salary to assume chief charge and management of the new paper. At first I declined, in a deliberate letter, but they wouldn't have it that way—they telegraphed me that they would not listen to a refusal, and offered me the same financial interest as the one I held."
"Ah, they did, eh?" Ann's eye for business was gleaming. "They offered you as good as you had?"
"Better, as it has turned out, Aunt Ann," said King, modestly, "for when my associates out there read the proposition, they said it was my duty to myself to accept, and with that they took my stock off my hands. They paid me ten thousand dollars in cash, Aunt Ann. I've got that much ready money and a position that is likely to be even better than the one I had. So, you see, all my home-sickness—"