With a great clatter of heavy shoes and tilted chairs falling back into place, they rose and gathered about him, leaving their benefactor submerged in their combined shadow. Each took the paper, examined it in reverent silence, and then slowly fell back, leaving the document on the table. Mark Bruce started aimlessly towards the next room, but finally turned to the front door, where he stood irresolute, staring out at the night-wrapped mountain road. Mrs. Bruce looked at Luke helplessly and went into the next room, and, exchanging glances of dumb wonder with each other, the girls followed. Jake noticed that the wind was blowing the document from the table, and he rescued it and silently offered it to his step-brother.
King motioned it from him. "Give it to mother," he said. "She'll take care of it; besides, it's been recorded at the court-house. By-the-way, Dickerson will get out at once; the transfer includes all the furniture, and the crops, which are in a good condition."
King had Jake's bed to himself again that night. For hours he lay awake listening to the insistent drone of conversation from the family, which had gathered under the apple-trees in front of the cabin. About eleven o'clock some one came softly into his room. The moon had risen, and its beams fell in at the open door and through a window with a sliding wooden shutter. It was Mrs. Bruce, and she was moving with catlike caution.
"Is that you, mother?" he asked.
For an instant she was so much startled at finding him awake that she made no reply. Then she stammered: "Oh, I was tryin' so hard not to wake you! I jest wanted to make shore yore bed was comfortable. We put new straw in the tick to-day, and sometimes new beds lie lumpy and uneven."
"It's all right," he assured her. "I wasn't asleep, anyway."
He could feel her still trembling in excitement as she sat down on the edge of the bed. "I reckon you couldn't sleep, nuther," she said. "Thar hain't a shut eye in this cabin. They've all laid down, an' laid down, an' got up over an' over." She laughed softly and twisted her hands nervously in her lap. "We are all that excited we don't know which end of us is up. Why, Luke, boy, it will be the talk of the whole county, and it'll be a big feather in old Ann Boyd's cap—you goin' off an' makin' money so fast after she give you your schoolin', an' they all predicted it ud come to no good end. Sech luck hain't fell to any family as pore as we are sence I kin remember. I don't know as I ever heard o' such a thing in my life. La me, it ud make you split your sides laughin' to set out thar an' listen to all the plans them children are a-makin'. But Mark, he has the least to say of all, an', Luke, as happy as I am, I'm sorter sorry fer that pore old fellow. He feels bad about the way he's always treated you, an' run down yore kind o' work. He's too back'ard an' shamefaced to ax yore pardon, an' in a sheepish sort of a way, jest now, he hinted he'd like fer me to plaster it over fer 'im. He's a good man, Luke, but he's gittin' old an' childish, an' has been hounded to death by debt an' circumstances."
"He's all right," King said, strangely moved. "Tell him I have not the slightest ill-will against him, an' I hope he'll get along well on the new place."
"Somehow you keep talkin' like you don't intend to stay long," she said, tentatively.
"I know, but I sha'n't be far away," he replied. "I can run up from my work in Atlanta every now and then, and it would be great to rest up on a farm among home folks, here in the mountains."