"Well, I don't care," the old man said, with a breath of relief. "This is the first time you ever have talked any sort of sense on the subject." "I know nothing else will suit you," Irene said, with a look of abstraction in her eyes, "and I have made up my mind to let you have your way." There was a tremulous movement to her breast, a quaver in her voice, of which she seemed slightly ashamed, for she turned suddenly and left the room. CHAPTER III At the gate in front of his farmhouse in the mountains Tom Drake received a letter from the rural mail-carrier, who was passing in a one-horse buggy. "That's all this morning, Tom," the carrier said, cheerfully. "You've got good corn and cotton in the bottom below here." "Purty good, I reckon, if the drouth don't kill 'em," the farmer answered. The carrier drove on, and Tom slowly opened his letter and turned toward the house. He was a typical Georgia mountaineer, strong, tall, broad-shouldered, middle-aged. He wore no beard, had mild brown eyes, heavy chestnut hair upon which rested a shapeless wool hat full of holes. His arms and legs were long, his gait slouching and deliberate. He was in his shirt-sleeves; his patched jean trousers were too large at the waist, and were supported by a single home-knitted suspender. He was chewing tobacco, and as he went along he moved his stained lips in the audible pronunciation of the words he was reading. His wife, Lucy, a slender woman, in a drab print dress with no sort of adornment to it or to her scant, tightly knotted hair, stood on the porch impatiently waiting for him. Behind her, leaning in the doorway, was her brother, John Webb, a red-haired, red-faced bachelor, fifty years of age, who also had his eyes on the approaching reader. "Another dun, I reckon," Mrs. Drake said, tentatively, when her husband had paused at the bottom step and glanced up from the sheet in his hand. "Not this time." Tom slowly spat on the ground, and looked first at his wife and then at his brother-in-law with a broadening smile. "You two are as good at guessin' as the general run, but if I gave you a hundred trials--yes, three hundred--and all day to do it in, you wouldn't then come in a mile o' what's in this letter." "I don't intend to try," Mrs. Drake said, eagerly, "anyways not with all that ironin' to do that's piled up like a haystack on the dinin'-room table, to say nothin' of the beds and bed-clothes to be sunned. You can keep your big secret as far as I'm concerned." "It's another Confederate Veteran excursion to some town whar whisky is sold," said the bachelor, with a dry cackle. "That's my guess. You fellows that was licked don't git no pensions from Uncle Sam, but you manage to have enough fun once a year to make up for it." Tom Drake swept the near-by mountain slope with his slow glance of amusement, folded the sheet tantalizingly, and spat again.