"It'll be the end o' you if you fool with me!" Henley retorted, and he turned back into the store and resumed his seat at his desk. He had not been there long when one of the women finished her purchases and, with some parcels under her arm, came back and stood timidly by his desk. It was Mrs. Cartwright, the old widow whose son Johnny was so devoted to Carrie Wade. She was short in stature, had iron-gray hair, was slight and stooped, and wore a plain gingham dress and a sunbonnet of the same material.
"It was powerful good of you, Alfred, to do what you did jest now," she said, timidly, as he looked up. "It was like the old-time way men had when I was a girl of takin' up for women. I always heard you was good and kind, and now I know it. A man kin do a lot o' things that women will appreciate, but I'll risk my all that every woman in that bunch down thar will go home wishin' that her husband or brother had done what you did an' in the same sperit. Women love, above all things, to be protected by manly men."
"Well," said Henley, his flush of anger giving way to one of genuine embarrassment, "he was upsetting business, Mrs. Cartwright. I hated to—to git mad that way, but he was running my trade away, and that's a thing I won't let no man do right under my eyes. Set down an' rest, Mrs. Cartwright; you don't look overly stout."
The woman took the chair near his desk, and he heard her sigh as she massed her parcels in her lap with her thin, quivering hands.
"I reckon I don't look well," she said, seeing that his kindly eyes were still on her. "They say worry will kill a body quicker 'n anything else, and, Alfred, I'm worried mighty nigh to death. I don't know which way to turn or what to do. It is all about my youngest child, Johnny. He's took a quar notion to marry Carrie Wade."
"I see, I see," Henley said, sympathetically; "and that's bad. Why, he's hardly out o' the spelling-book class, and hain't a sign of fuzz on his lip. The last time he was in here I know the crowd was teasing him because his voice was in the gosling stage. It had sech a funny way of wobbling about from bass to treble."
"But he thinks he's full grown," the woman sighed, "and won't listen to reason. He keeps declarin' he's older than the way it's recorded in the Bible. This last trouble begun at the Sunday-school Christmas-tree, when Carrie put on an embroidered handkerchief for him. That turned his head, and he hain't hardly let her out of his sight sence. He growed from child to man betwixt two suns."
"They'll do that sometimes," Henley said. "It is surely an odd sort of attachment. She is plenty old to have nursed him. I wouldn't be afraid to say that she was cutting her eyes at men when he was cutting his teeth. Thinking of that ud make some fellers ashamed to act that way, but as apt as not Johnny don't let himself study about it. Somehow I can excuse it better in the boy than in her, because she's old enough to know better."
The old woman nodded and sighed again. "Alfred, sometimes I think I've had more put on me than my share in this world. I've had three sons besides this un, and every last one of 'em give me trouble along at Johnny's age."
"And about women older 'n they was, too, I've heard," Henley said.