"The price of what, Aunt Ann?" he asked, wonderingly.
"Why, the price of the Dickerson farm. It's up for sale. Jerry Dickerson has been wanting to leave here for the last three years, and every year he's been putting a lower and lower price on his big farm and comfortable house and every improvement. His brother's gone in the wholesale grocery business in Chattanooga, and he wants to join him. The property is worth double the money. I wouldn't like to advise you, Luke, but I'd rather see your money in that place than anything else. It would be a guarantee of an income to you as long as you lived."
"I know the place, and it's a beauty," King said, "and I'll run over there and look at it to-morrow, and if it's still to be had I may rake it in. Think of me owning one of the best plantations in the valley—me, Aunt Ann, your barefoot, adopted son."
Ann's head was hanging low as she walked back to the cottage door.
"'Adopted son,'" she repeated, tenderly. "As God is my Judge, I—I believe he's the only creature alive on this broad earth that I love. Yes, I love that boy. What strange, sweet ideas he has picked up! Well, I hope he'll always be able to keep them. I had plenty of them away back at his age. My unsullied faith in mankind was the tool that dug the grave of my happiness. Poor, blind boy! he may be on the same road. He may see the day that all he believes in now will crumble into bitter powder at his touch. I wonder if God can really be all-powerful. It seems strange that what is said to be the highest good in this life is doing exactly what He, Himself, has failed to do—to keep His own creatures from suffering. That really is odd."
[XIV]
Luke King was hot, damp with perspiration, and covered with the red dust of the mountain road when he reached the four-roomed cabin of his step-father among the stunted pines and gnarled wild cedars.
Old Mark Bruce sat out in front of the door. He wore no shoes nor coat, and his hickory shirt and trousers had been patched many times. His gray hair was long, sunburned, and dyed with the soil, and the corrugated skin of his cheeks and neck was covered with long hairs. As his step-son came into view from behind the pine-pole pig-pen, the old man uttered a grunt of surprise that brought to the doorway two young women in unadorned home-spun dresses, and a tall, lank young man in his shirt-sleeves. It was growing dark, and they all failed to recognize the new-comer.
"I suppose you have forgotten me," King said, as he put his valise on a wash-bench by a tub of suds and a piggin of lye-soap.
"By Jacks, it's Luke King!" After that ejaculation of the old man he and the others stared speechlessly.