“So,” went on Thomas McBirney, “I don’t know as I ought to leave. But I tell you what I can do, Mr. Carson, and what I’d be proud to do. Times when I wasn’t busy here at the farm, I could drive back into the mountains to visit men I know, and men I don’t exactly know but that I’ve heard tell of, and I could get them to working on chairs for you. Then they’d haul them down to your place; and maybe some of them who ain’t as hard to pry loose from the rocks as I be, will move down beside your factory.” “Thomas makes the best chairs I ever set in,” declared Mary McBirney with pride. “Talk about getting other men to make chairs! There ain’t none of them can come up to him.” “I engage your whole output then,” declared Mr. Carson, apparently not at all vexed that his fine plan had been disarranged. “Get to work, Mr. McBirney, and get your boy to work. I’ll sell the chairs for you at better rates than you ever dreamed of.” “And if you do that,” declared Thomas McBirney, “you’ll take your commission. This has got to be on a business basis, sir.” “Of course, of course,” answered Mr. Carson hastily. He saw that it would be very easy to hurt the pride of this independent man. “We’ll agree on the commission, and I’ll take it. Of course I shall need money to build my cottages and to run the business.” Hi had been wriggling like a worm on the bench where he sat beside Carin, and now, with much blinking and twisting, he managed to say, addressing himself to Mr. Carson: “Please, sir!” “Yes, Hi.” “My ma, you know,” but his cogs stopped again. “Well, I don’t exactly know her, Hi, but I’d like to.” “She can weave, sir, better than anybody. She can weave the Tudor Rose, and the Andrew Jackson Cabin, and the Diamond and Cat Track—Oh, most anything. You ought to see her weaving. And she can make her own dyes, just beautiful. But what’s the use? Where she lives nobody cares about her weaving. If you’d just ask her to come on, sir, since Mrs. McBirney don’t want to, she’d run the place for you, fine, and teach the women all the old patterns.” His little black eyes seemed to hold flames in them as he turned his face, twitching with his excitement, toward Mr. Carson. “Why, Hi, could she really? Where does she live? I can go and see her.” “She lives away over on the far side of Steamboat Mountain, sir. Pa’s dead, you know, and there’s three children for ma to care for. She drives the horse to town and gets washing, and she farms a little. But it ain’t much. I had to leave home so’s I’d not be making her feed me. That’s why I went away with my uncle Sisson.” His face flushed scarlet through all the brown as he thought of his connection with this man whom he hated, and whom he knew all these people with him held in contempt. “You shall go with me, Hi, and show me the way. We go by train, of course?”