“She died,” he repeated, “but it wasn’t that that broke my heart so; any man might lose his wife by death.” He was silent a long minute; then he began on a louder note, as though resolved to go through with a painful thing: “You see, Pettie, she was a girl that I knew back where I was raised, in the Tennessee mountains. It’s what happened to her that I want to tell you, so’s you get my meaning.” He sat silent for a moment. Hilda waited breathlessly. Then he went on: “Mattie’s folks was well to do. They sent her down to the valley school—sorta like our sending you over to the Alamositas; see, Pettie? She ran away with a feller, from the school. It was a boy we all knowed—Judge Moseley’s son. He was in school himself at the time. She was just a little thing, younger than you are now. I had my mother, and the farm and the raising of my younger brothers and sisters on my hands; hadn’t aimed to name marriage to Mattie at that time; but I never thought of any one else; and when she ran off with that Moseley boy, seemed to me my heart was broke smack in two. I got things settled for Ma and the young ’uns and lit out to Texas—that’s where a Tennessee boy goes usually to better himself. I done well. My part of it ain’t what I want you to notice, Pettie. It’s Mattie’s part that means something to a girl. It was seven years from that time I left Tennessee till I saw her again. And how do you think I saw her next time?” He glanced up. Hilda was all eyes, all attention. “Her and Alf came through my ranch—movers. You know what that means, Pettie. We don’t get so many of them on the Sorrows, being off the main line of travel, but you’ve seen ’em—a ramshackle old wagon, a ga’nted team, a man on the driver’s seat, looking out ahead of him, clear into the nevertheless, never noticing that the woman and children he’s dragging around with him from place to place—no home, no comforts, no nothing—are just about perishing on his hands. Yes, that’s what Alf Moseley had come to be—a mover. He had the itchy foot. You can’t do nothing for one of them fellers. And Mattie—at twenty-four or five—Mattie was an old, broke-down woman.