Ollie's heart leaped at the words; hot blood came into her face with a surge. She clasped her hands to her breast in new fervor, and lifted her face as one speeding a thankful prayer. She had heard Isom Chase threatened and defied in his own house, and the knowledge that one lived with the courage to do what she had longed to do, lifted her heart and made it glad. She heard Isom growl something in his throat, muffled and low, which she could not separate into words. "Well, then, I'll let it pass--this time," said Joe. "But don't you ever do it any more. I'm a heavy sleeper sometimes, and this is an hour or two earlier than I am used to getting up; but if you'll call me loud enough, and talk like you were calling a man and not a dog, you'll have no trouble with me. Now get out of here!" Ollie could have shouted in the triumph of that moment. She shared the bound boy's victory and exulted in his high independence. Isom had swallowed it like a coward; now he was coming down the stairs, snarling in his beard, but his knotted fist had not enforced discipline; his coarse, distorted foot had not been lifted against his new slave. She felt that the dawn was breaking over that house, that one had come into it who would ease her of its terrors. Joe came along after Isom in a little while, slipping his suspenders over his lank shoulders as he went out of the kitchen door. He did not turn to Ollie with the morning's greetings, but held his face from her and hurried on, she thought, as if ashamed. Ollie ran to the door on her nimble toes, the dawn of a smile on her face, now rosy with its new light, and looked after him as he hurried away in the brightening day. She stood with her hands clasped in attitude of pleasure, again lifting her face as if to speed a prayer. "Oh, thank God for a _man_!" said she. Isom was in a crabbed way at breakfast, sulky and silent. But his evil humor did not appear to weigh with any shadow of trouble on Joe, who ate what was set before him like a hungry horse and looked around for more. Ollie's interest in Joe was acutely sharpened by the incident of rising. There must be something uncommon, indeed, in a lad of Joe's years, she thought, to enable him to meet and pass off such a serious thing in that untroubled way. As she served the table, there being griddle-cakes of cornmeal that morning to flank the one egg and fragments of rusty bacon each, she studied the boy's face carefully. She noted the high, clear forehead, the large nose, the fineness of the heavy, black hair which lay shaggy upon his temples. She studied the long hands, the grave line of his mouth, and caught a quick glimpse now and then of his large, serious gray eyes. Here was an uncommon boy, with the man in him half showing; Isom was right about that. Let it be blood or what it might, she liked him. Hope of the cheer that he surely would bring into that dark house quickened her cheek to a color which had grown strange to it in those heavy months.