“We can't starve, Big Abel,” he said coolly, “but we are not beggars yet by a long way.” “Go 'way, Marse Dan,” protested the negro in disgust. “Gimme dat ar axe en set right down and wait twel supper. You're des es white es a sheet dis minute.” “I've got to begin some day,” returned Dan, as the axe swung back across his shoulder. “I'll pay for my supper and you'll pay for yours, that's fair, isn't it?--for you're a free man now.” Then he went feverishly to work, while Big Abel sat grumbling on the doorstep, and the farmer, leaning against the lintel behind him, watched the lessening pile with sluggish eyes. “You be real careful of this wood, Sally, an' it ought to last twel summer,” he observed, as he glanced to where his wife stood wringing out the clothes. “If you warn't so wasteful that last pile would ha' held out twice as long.” Dan chopped steadily for an hour, and then giving the axe to Big Abel, went into the little kitchen to eat his supper. The woman served him sullenly, placing some sobby biscuits and a piece of cold bacon on his plate, and pouring out a glass of buttermilk with a vicious thrust of the pitcher. When he asked if there was a shelter close at hand where he might sleep, she replied sourly that she reckoned the barn was good enough if he chose to spend the night there. Then as Big Abel finished his job and took his supper in his hand, they left the house and went across the darkening cattle pen, to a rotting structure which they took to be the barn. Inside the straw was warm and dry, and as Dan flung himself down upon it, he gasped out something like a prayer of thanks. His first day's labour with his hands had left him trembling like a nervous woman. An hour longer, he told himself, and he should have gone down upon the roadside. For a time he slept profoundly, and then awaking in the night, he lay until dawn listening to Big Abel's snores, and staring straight above where a solitary star shone through a crack in the shingled roof. From the other side of a thin partition came the soft breathing and the fresh smell of cows, and, now and then, he heard the low bleating of a new-born calf.