“Ten thousand dollars!” Laramore’s heart bounded suddenly. It was exactly the amount he had in a Boston bank—all that he had ever been able to save. He had calculated on investing it with some literary friends in a magazine of which he was to be the editor.
“Do you think they could manage the place successfully, mother?” he asked, after a moment.
“Why, you know they could,” she returned. “A body could make a livin’ on that land and never half try. ‘Squire Loften spent his money like water, an’ let a gang o’ triflin’ darkies eat ’im up alive.”
“I remember the farm and the old house very well,” he said, reflectively.
“They turned that into a barn,” she ran on, enthusiastically. “The new house is jest splendid—green blinds to the winders, an’ cyarpets on the floors, a spring-house, an’ a windmill to keep the house an’ barn in water.”
“We’d better go in,” he said, abruptly; “you ’ll catch cold out here in the dew.”
She laughed childishly as she walked back to the cabin by his side. A thick smoke and an unpleasant odor met them at the door.
“It’s Sam a-burnin’ rags to oust the mosquitoes, so he kin sleep,” she explained; “they are wuss this yeer’an I ever seed ‘em. Jake an’ the gals grease the’r faces with lamp-oil when they have any, but I jest kiver up my head with a rag an’ never know they are about. I reckon we’d better go to bed. Jake has fixed him a bed up in the loft, so you kin sleep by yorese’f. He’s been jowerin? at his paw ever sence supper fer treatin’ you so bad.”
The next morning, after breakfast, Jake threw a bag of shelled corn on the bare back of his old bay mare and started to mill down the valley, and his father shouldered an ax and went up on the hill to cut wood.
“Whar are you gwine?” asked Mrs. King, following Laramore to the door.