"And when the gardener puts us away for our winter's sleep?" Ward asked.
She turned her big frank blue eyes upon him as she took the words from his mouth, "'And the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.'" Then she smiled sadly and said, "But it is the old Adam himself that I seem to be wrestling with just now."
"In the children—at school?" asked the Wards, one after the other. She sighed and looked at the little troopers straggling along the highway, and replied, "Yes, partly that, too," and throwing her unnecessary hood back, turned her face into the wind and walked quickly away. The Wards watched her as she strode down the hill, and finally as he bent to his work the general asked:—
"Lucy, what does she think of John?"
Mrs. Ward, who was busy with a geranium, did not reply at once. But in a moment she rose and, putting the plant with some others that were to go to the cellar, replied: "Oh, Phil—you know a mother tries to hope against hope. She teaches her school every day, and keeps her mind busy. But sometimes, when she stops in here after school or for lunch, she can't help dropping things that let me know. I think her heart is breaking, Phil."
"Does she know about the wheat deal—I mean about the way he has made the farmers sign that mortgage by cutting them off from borrowing money at the bank?"
"Not all of it—but I think she suspects," replied the wife.
"Did you know, dear," said the general, as he put the plants in the barrow to wheel them to the cellar, "that I ran across something to-day—it may be all suspicion, and I don't want to wrong John—but Mart Culpepper, God bless his big innocent heart, let something slip—well, it was John, I think, who arranged for that loan of ten thousand from Brownwell to Mart. Though why he didn't get it at the bank, I don't know. But John had some reason. Things look mighty crooked there at the bank. I know this—Mart says that Brownwell lent him the money, and Mart lent it to the bank for a month there in August, while he was holding the Chicago fellow in the air."
Mrs. Ward sat down on the front steps of the porch, and exclaimed:—
"Well, Phil Ward—that's why the Culpeppers are so nice to Brownwell. Honestly, Phil, the last time I was over Mrs. Culpepper nearly talked her head off to me and at Molly about what a fine man he is, and told all about his family, and connections—he's related to the angel Gabriel on his mother's side," she laughed, "and he's own cousin to St. Peter through the Brownwells."