She laughed. "Barbara! that's a good soundin' name on your tongue, Happy," sez she. Then she sobered. "I don't care nothing for what you say or what he says; the' 's things I'm goin' to find out; an' I have a right to. I never told him why it was that I whopped those two girls over at school last winter, an' I never told even you. I whopped 'em 'cause they said I never had a mother. Everything has to have a mother, even a snake, an' I had one too. Why don't he tell me about her? Why does he allus turn me off when I ask about her? I don't intend to just let him tell me that she was the most beautiful woman in the world an' too good to stay here, an' such things. I am going to find out who she was, an' if you wasn't a coward you'd help me. Now." It was true what she said, an' I might have known she was studyin' about it. I might, if I'd had the sense of a hoss, have known that this was what made her old-like--studyin' about things she never ought to have been forced to study about. "Does that letter tell about her, Barbie?" I asked. "That's what I want to know; but you ain't got the sand to read it, an' I can't make it out. Here, read it." I took it an' read it. The writin' was fine an' like what was in Barbie's writin' book along the top. It sounded like as if a young girl had written it partly against her will, although it was purty lovesome too. It told about how lonely she was, an' that she hadn't never been able to tell whether it was Jack or him she was most in love with until Jack had asked her, an' then after Jack had deceived her an' he had been so kind, she found out 'at he was the one she had loved the most all the time. She reminded him 'at she had written to him before acceptin' Jack, an' that now if he was still sure he wanted her, she would accept him; but she could never live near the Creole Belle. She closed with love, an' signed herself Barbara. I kept on lookin' at the page a long time after I had read it. I remembered what Monody had said when I thought he was out of his head--about George Jordan an' Jack Whitman, an' the Creole Belle. I knew 'at Barbie was studyin' my face, an' I pertended to spell out the words a letter at a time until I could get full control o' myself. "What kind of a bell is a Creole Bell?" sez I. "She ain't got it spelled right neither." "A Creole Belle is a beautiful woman of French an' Spanish blood who lives in New Orleans," sez Barbie. "What do you make out about it?" I was thinkin' fast as I could, but I still pertended to read the letter. So Jabez had been in a scrape with some cross-breed woman, an' he an' this Jack Whitman had loved the same girl, an' the' was a bad mix-up somewhere. "Little girl," I sez, "the' 's a lot o' wickedness in this world you don't know about--"