"And we live together," the old man loquaciously drawled on, eying her closely with a smile that might have been either good-natured or satirical. "Batch it--with a nigger who saves us work by stealing things we'd otherwise have to take care of. We scrap most of the time. I make fun of him, and he gets sore. The trouble with the editor of the _Express_ is, he had a doting ma. He should have had an almighty lot of thrashing when a boy, and instead he never tasted beech limb once. He's suffering from the spared rod." Katherine had a shrinking from this old man; an aversion which in her mature years she had had no occasion to examine, but which she had inherited unanalyzed from her childhood, when old Hosie Hollingsworth had been the chief scandal of the town--an infidel, who had dared challenge the creation of the earth in seven days, and yet was not stricken down by a fiery bolt from heaven! She did not pursue the subject of Bruce, but went directly to her business. "I understand that you have an office to rent." "So I have. Like to see it?" "That is what I called for." "Just come along with me." He rose, and Katherine followed him to the floor above and into a room furnished much as the one she had just left. "This office was last used," commented old Hosie, "by a young fellow who taught school down in Buck Creek Township and got money to study law with. He tried law for a while." The old man's thin prehensile lips shifted his cigar to the other side of his mouth. "He's down in Buck Creek Township teaching school to get money to pay his back office rent." "How about the furniture?" asked Katherine. "That was his. He left it in part payment. You can use it if you want to." "But I don't want those things about"--pointing gingerly to a pair of cuspidors. "All right. Though I don't see how you expect to run a law office in Westville without 'em." He bent over and took them in his hands. "I'll take 'em along. I need a few more, for my business is picking up." "I suppose I can have possession at once." "Whenever you please." Standing with the cuspidors in his two hands the old lawyer looked her over. He slowly grinned, and a dry cackle came out of his lean throat. "I was born out there in Buck Creek Township myself," he said. "Folks all Quakers, same as your ma's and your Aunt Rachel's. I was brought up on plowing, husking corn and going to meeting. Never smiled till after I was twenty; wore a halo, size too large, that slipped down and made my ears stick out. My grandfather's name was Elijah, my father's Elisha. My father had twelve sons, and beginning with me, Hosea, he named 'em all in order after the minor prophets. Being brought up in a houseful of prophets, naturally a lot of the gift of prophecy sort of got rubbed off on me." "Well?" said Katherine impatiently, not seeing the pertinence of this autobiography.