------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER IV “THERE was a man here. For weeks he lay sick to the point of death, in our house, and all the time I did not dare sleep. Night and day I was on the watch. How often at night I have crept down across this very field, in the middle of the night, in the darkness looking for the black, trying to discover if he was still on the trail.” It was early summer and May sat talking with Maud Welliver by a tree in the field back of the Edgley’s kitchen door—building steadily her tower of romance. Two or three times each week, since that first talk by the blacksmith shop, Maud had managed to get to the Edgley house unobserved by her aunt. In her passionate devotion to the little dark-skinned woman, who had lived through so many and such romantic adventures in life, she was ready to risk anything, even to the wrath of her father’s iron-jawed housekeeper. To the Edgley house she came always at night, and the necessity of that was understood by May and perhaps better understood by Lillian Edgley. On the next day, after the meeting by the blacksmith shop, Maud’s father had spoken his mind concerning the Edgleys. The Welliver family sat at supper in the evening. “Maud,” John Welliver began, looking sternly at his daughter, “I don’t want you should have anything to do with that Edgley family that lives on this street.” The railroad man cursed the ill luck that had led him to take a house on the same street where such cattle lived. One of his brother employees on the road, he said, had told him the story of the Edgleys. “They are such an outfit,” he declared wrathfully. “God only knows why they are allowed to stay here. They should be tarred and feathered and run out of town. Why, to live on the same street with them is like living in the midst of cattle.”