"More than I do about farming," he answered. "The show I was with carried its own shop, and now and then I used to work in it as an assistant. If you will let me, the first rainy day that comes I'll sharpen all the tools."
"Oh, can you—will you?" she cried. "That would be splendid. But if it gets out the neighbors will bore you to death with requests for this or that. You couldn't shoe a horse, could you?"
"Oh yes. That is simple enough," he replied, indifferently. "The big draft-horses we used had to be double shod, and I learned how to do it."
At the door of the shop they parted. Charles went back to the cotton-field and resumed his work there. All the afternoon he toiled. Digging the mellow soil and cutting down the succulent weeds and crab-grass was a fascinating pastime rather than a disagreeable task. The sun sank behind the hills. The dusk fell over the land. Presently he looked up and saw Mary at the end of the row which he was finishing.
"This won't do," she chided him. "In a little while it will be too dark. Didn't you hear the bell?"
He had not, and he stared at her, abashed.
"Well, come on," she said, sweetly. "Aunt Zilla is not angry. It is such an odd thing to see a man willing to work that she was laughing over it. I think she likes you already, and it is queer, for she does not take to strangers readily. She is a close observer and she says that you have a sad, lonely look about the eyes. I didn't agree with her, for you seem very cheerful to me. You are not—not homesick, or—or anything of that sort, are you, Mr. Brown?"
"I think not at all," he answered. "How could I be homesick, for I have no home?"
"Then Aunt Zilla may be right," Mary observed, quietly. "You may be sad because you have no home; perhaps that is what she reads in your face. Now that I come to think of it, you do seem to look lonely and isolated. Somehow I can't imagine your being contented here with us. You are so different, somehow, from our young men. I don't know in what way, particularly, but you are different, and so I am actually afraid that you will decide to—to go somewhere else. If you do, Mr. Brown, don't let anything I have said about—about needing your help stop you."
They were on the path approaching the house; he paused suddenly, and they faced each other. "I wish I could remove those ideas from your mind for good and all, Miss Rowland," he said, almost huskily, in his earnestness. "It is the second time you have mentioned the subject and I want you to understand the truth. My life for the last year has been one of restless torment. I gave up traveling with the circus to settle down on a farm. Something told me I would like it, but nothing told me that I would find work with such kind persons as you and your father. The truth is, I am so contented here that I am afraid"—he was laughing now—"that I shall wake up and find myself in that rumbling freight-train again, with canvas to unload, ropes to stretch, and stakes to drive."