"It's about the hardest thing to talk about that I ever tried to approach," Boyd said, with lowered glance, "but I reckon I'll have to get it out and be done with it, one way or another. You see, Ann, when the law gave me the custody of the child I was a younger man, with more outlook and health and management, in the judgment of the court, than I've got now, and I thought that what I couldn't do for my own flesh and blood nobody else could, and so I took her off."
"Yes, you took her off!" Ann straightened up, and a sneer touched her set features; there was a sarcastic, almost triumphant cry of vindictiveness in her tone.
"Yes, I thought all that," Boyd continued. "And I meant well, but miscalculated my own capacity and endurance. Instead of making money hand over hand as folks said almost any man could do out West, I sunk all I put in. We come back this way then, and I located in Gilmer, thinking I'd do better on soil I understood, and among the kind o' folks and religion I was used to, but it's been down-hill work ever since then. When Nettie was little it didn't seem like so much was demanded, but now, Ann, she's like all the balance o' young women of her age. She wants things like the rest around her, an' she pines for them, an' sulks, and—and makes me feel awful. It's a powerful hard matter for me to dress her like some o' the rest about us, and she's the proudest thing that ever wore shoe-leather."
"Oh, I see!" said Ann. "She's going about, too, with—she's bein' courted by some feller or other."
"Yes, Sam Lawson, over there, a likely young chap, has taken a big fancy to her, and he's good enough, too, but I reckon a little under the influence of his daddy, who is a hard-shell Baptist, a man that believes in sanctification and talks it all the time. Well, to come down to it, things between Nettie and Sam is sorter hanging fire, and Nettie's nearly crazy for fear it will fall through. And that's why, right now, I screwed up to the point of coming to see you."
"You thought I could help her out in her courting?" Ann sneered, and yet beneath her sneer lay an almost eager curiosity.
"Well, not that exactly"—Joe Boyd spread out his rough fingers very wide to embrace as much of his dust-coated beard as possible; he pulled downward on a rope of it, and let his shifting glance rest on the fire—"not that exactly, Ann."
"Well, then, I don't understand, Joe Boyd," Ann said; "and let me tell you that no matter what sort of young thing I was when we lived together, I'm now a business woman, and a successful one, and I have a habit of not beating about the bush. I talk straight and make others do the same. Business is business, and life is short."
"Well, I'll talk as straight as I can," Boyd swallowed. "You see, as I say, old Lawson is a narrow, grasping kind of a man, and he can't bear the idea of his only boy not coming into something, even if it's very little, and I happen to know that he's been expecting my little farm over there to fall to Nettie."
"Well, won't it?" Ann demanded.