“She looks like she’d been licked,” observed Rat Hyatt. “She don’t seem to have no pep any more. I met ’er on the bridge the other day, an’ when I spoke to ’er she answered as nice an’ polite as anybody, instead o’ lookin’ at me like I was a skunk, an’ pass’n on the way she used to do.” During the latter part of August Sophy chanced to see a copy of a weekly paper that was published in a small town about fifty miles away. In it was an announcement of a “grand raffle,” to be held the following week, “for a wonderful white turkey imported from Siberia at great expense, the like of which has never been seen or heard of in this country.” The article went on to say that “this is a great event that is about to take place in our midst, and ye editor blushingly owns to the soft impeachment of having taken ten chances with his hard earned pelf. We hope to win the splendid prize, but if we fail we respectfully ask anybody who is in arrears on their subscription to please call at our holy editorial sanctum with some mazuma, for though ye ed. toys with the trailing skirts of fickle fortune, yet must he eat.” Sophy kept her own counsel and prevailed on Pop Wilkins to lend her his horse and two seated buggy for a few days to enable her to visit a sick relative who lived some distance away. She was gone a week, and when she returned Hyder Ali was in the buggy. His beautiful head protruded inquiringly from the top of a gunny sack in which he was carefully secured. Sophy drove home with her prize, returned the rig to the obliging Pop, and walked loftily into the store, on her way back, to make some purchases. She was a changed woman, and victory was on her brow. She greeted the loiterers about the store, but, as Posey expressed it, “she spoke from above.” Naturally the neighborhood was in a ferment of curiosity. “How’d you git ’im?” asked Bill pleasantly. “I caught ’im on a fish line,” she replied grimly. Beyond this she refused any explanations and her attitude was regarded as the height of cruelty. She said it was nobody’s business but her own, and no further light was thrown on the subject. Early in the fall a band of gipsies came and camped on a grassy glade in the woods not far from where Sophy lived. They remained several weeks. The men traded horses with the nearby farmers, and the women went about the neighborhood in their picturesque costumes, begged small articles, and told fortunes.