“Yo’ ‘re a case,” she said, nodding her consent to his request. “You are different frum ‘most anybody else. Somehow I can’t think about you ever havin’ been jailed fer hoss-stealin’.” “It all depends on a body’s feelin’s,” the convict returned. “Down thar in the penitentiary we had a little gang of us that knowed we wuz innocent of wrong intentions, an’ we kinder flocked together. All the rest sorter looked up to us an’ believed we wuz all right. It was a comfort. I ’ll step in an’ git it over.” He walked as erectly as an Indian up the steps and into the sitting-room. To his surprise Mrs. Wakeman started to enter the room from the adjoining kitchen, and seeing him, turned and began to beat a hasty retreat. “Hold on thar, Marty,” he called out, in the old tone which had formerly made strangers suppose that the farm and all pertaining to it had been his when he married her. She paused in the doorway, white and sullen. “Ain’t you a-goin’ to tell a feller howdy an’ shake hands?” he asked, with considerable self-possession. “What ’ud I do that fur?” “Beca’se I’m home ag’in,” he said. “Huh, nobody hain’t missed you.” The words followed a forced shrug. “I know a sight better ’n that, Marty,” he said. “I know a woman that ‘ud take a duck fit jest when I was gone to drive the cows home an’ got delayed a little, would fret consider’ble durin’ four years of sech a--a trip as I’ve had. Set down here an’ let’s have a talk.” “I’ve got my work to do,” she returned, after half a minute of speechlessness, her helpless anger standing between her and satisfactory expression. “Oh, all right!” he exclaimed. “I ain’t no hand to waste time durin’ work hours with dillydallyin’. Any other time ’ll do me jest as well. I ‘lowed maybe it would suit you better to have it over with. I must git out the hoss an’ wagon an’ haul that hog-meat up to the smokehouse. Whar’s Cato? I ’ll bet that triflin’ nigger has give you the slip ag’in this hog-killin’, like he always did.” Mrs. Wakeman stared at the speaker in a sort of thwarted, defiant way without deigning to reply; her sneer was the only thing about her bearing which seemed at all expressive of the vast contempt for him that she really did not feel. She felt that her silence was cowardly, her failure to assert her rights as a divorced woman an admission that she was glad of his return. At this critical juncture Lucinda Dykes sauntered into the room and leaned against the dingy, once sky-blue wall. Her air of interested amusement over the matrimonial predicament had left her. It had dawned upon her, now that her sister had taken refuge in obstinate silence, that a vast responsibility rested on her as intermediary. “Cato went with some more niggers to a shindig over at Squire Camp’s yesterday an’ hain’t showed up sence,” she explained. “Ef I was you-uns--ef I was Marty, I mean--I’d turn ’im off fer good an’ all. Dick, sence you went off me nur Marty hain’t been able to do a thing with ‘im.”