"Done? Why, she says she’s tired o’ footing almost the entire wheat-threshing bill for twenty measly little farmers. You know she’s been standing her part of the expenses to get the Empire Company to send their steam thresher here, and her contribution amounted to more than half. She’s decided, by hunky, to plant corn and cotton exclusively next year, and so notified the Empire Company. They can’t afford to come unless she sows wheat, and they sent a man clean from Atlanta to argue the matter with her, but she says she’s her own boss, an’ us farmers who has land fittin’ for nothing but wheat is going to get badly left in the lurch. Oh, Bazemore opened the battle agin her, and you-uns echoed the war-cry, an’ the battle is good on. I’ll go without flour biscuits and pie-crust, but the fight will be interesting. The Confed’ soldiers made a purty good out along about ’61, an’ they done it barefooted an’ on hard-tack an’ water. If you folks are bent on devilling the hide off of the most influential woman in our midst, just because her foot got caught in the hem of her skirt an’ tripped her up when she was a thoughtless young girl, I reckon us men will have to look on an’ say nothing." "She _did_ slip up, as you say," remarked the widow, "and she’s been a raging devil ever since." "Ay! an’ who made her one? Tell me that." Sam laughed. "You may not want to hear it, Jane, but some folks hint that you was at the bottom of it—some think lazy Joe Boyd would have stayed on in that comfortable boat, with a firm hand like hern at the rudder, if you hadn’t ding-donged at him and told tales to him till he had to pull out." "Huh! They say that, do they?" The widow frowned as she turned and looked straight at him. "Well, let ’em. What do I care? I didn’t want to see as good-hearted a man as he was hoodwinked." "I reckon not," Sam said, significantly, and he walked out of the passage down towards the barn. "Huh!" he mused, as he strode along crumbling leaf-tobacco of his own growing and filling his pipe. "I come as nigh as pease tellin’ the old woman some’n’ else folks say, an’ that is that she was purty nigh daft about Joe Boyd, once upon a time, and that dashing Ann cut her out as clean as a whistle. I’ll bet that ’ud make my sister-in-law so dern hot she’d blister from head to foot." V