It was Sue Dawson. She wore the same black cotton bonnet and gown, now faded and soiled, that she had worn at her daughter's funeral.
"Howdy' do?" she said, giving him the ends of her fingers, and resting her carpet-bag on her hip. "I 'lowed you'd be glad to see me." There was a malicious gleam in her little blue eyes, and her withered face was hard and pale and full of desperate purpose.
"How do you do?" he replied.
She smiled as she slowly scrutinized him.
"Well, you don't look as if you wus livin' on a bed of ease exactly," she said, in a tone of satisfaction; "you've been handled purty rough, I reckon, fer a dandified feller like you, but—" She stopped suddenly and glanced at Washburn, who was staring at her in surprise, then went on: "Budd Ridly couldn't change a five-dollar bill, an' he 'lowed I might settle my fare with the proprietor uv the shebang. Don't blame Budd; I tol' 'im I wus well acquainted with the new stableman; an' I am, I reckon, ef anybody is. I had business over heer," she went on, as she got out her old-fashioned pocket-book and fumbled it with trembling fingers. "I couldn't attend to it by writin'; some'n's gone wrong with the mails; it looks like I cayn't git no answers to the letters I write."
Washburn took the money and went into the office for the change.
"I didn't see what good it would do to write, Mrs. Dawson," said Westerfelt; "maybe it was wrong for me not to, but I've had a lot to bear; and you—"
"That you have," she interrupted, her face hardening, as she looked across the ploughed fields, bordered by strips of yellow broom-sedge, towards the pine forests in the west. "You wus cut bad, I heer, an' laid up fer a week ur so, an' then the skeer them Whitecaps give you on top of it must a' been awful to a proud sperit like yore'n; but even sech as that will wear off in time. But nothin' human, John Westerfelt—nothin' human kin fetch back the dead. Sally's place is unoccupied. I'm doin' her work every day, an' her dressin' an' pore little Sunday fixin's is all still a-hangin' on the wall. She wus the only gal—"
Washburn came back with the change. The old woman's thin hands quivered as she took the coin and slowly counted the pieces into her pocket-book, Washburn suspected from the expression of Westerfelt's face that the conversation was of a private nature, so he went out to the hack to help Budd unharness the horses.
"No," went on the old woman, sternly, "you've brought about a pile o' misery in yore life, John Westerfelt, an' you hain't a-gwine to throw it off like a ol' coat, an' dance an' make merry. You may try that game; but yore day is over; you already bear the mark of it in yore face an' sunk cheeks. You've got another gal on yore string by this time, too."