“I was always afraid he might make me kill him. He tried hard enough, and sometimes I thought he might. But blessed be the Lord, he's dead. They're holding a funeral for him in the Temple. The news is all through the Creek. I suppose you know how Jane has fixed it up with James Redfield. I feel to be sorry for Hughey Blake; but he never could have mastered her. She's got an awful will, Jane has. But James has got an awful will too, as strong as Jane--” Nancy cut him short: “David, I don't care anything about Jane--now.” “No,” he assented. “Where's Joey?” he asked, leaning inward with his hands resting on either jamb of the door. “Gone for Laban.” “Well,” David said, with something like grudge. “You hain't lost much time. But I don't know as I blame you,” he relented. “I wouldn't care if you did, David,” she answered. XXIII Late in the long twilight of the early spring day a stranger who was traveling in the old fashion on horseback, with his legs swathed in green baize against the mud of the streaming roads, and with his spattered saddle-bags hung over the pommel before him, was riding into Leatherwood. He paused in a puddle of the lane that left the turnpike not far off, and curved between the new-plowed fields in front of a double log cabin, which had the air of being one of the best habitations of its time though its time was long past; the logs it was built of were squared; the chimneys at either end were of stone masonry instead of notched sticks laid in clay. Against the wall of the porch between the two rooms of the cabin an old man sat tilted back in his chair, smoking a pipe which he took from his mouth at sight of the stranger's arrest. “Can you tell me, please, which is my way to the tavern, or some place where I can find a night's lodging?” The old man dropped his chair forward, and got somewhat painfully out of it to toddle to the edge of his porch. “Why, there isn't a tavern, rightly speaking, in Leatherwood, now, though for the backwoods we had a very passable one, once. I wish,” he said after a moment, “that we could offer you a lodging here; but if you'll light and throw your horse's rein over the peg in this post, I would be pleased to have you stay to supper with us. My wife is just getting it.” “Why, thank you, thank you,” the stranger said. “I mustn't think of troubling you. I dare say I can get something to eat at your tavern. I've often been over night in worse places, no doubt. I've been traveling through your State, and I've turned a little out of my way to stop at Leatherwood, because I've been interested in a peculiar incident of your local history.” The two men perceived from something in each other's parlance, though one spoke with the neat accent of the countries beyond the Alleghanies, and the other with the soft slurring Ohio River utterance, that they were in the presence of men different by thinking if not by learning from most men in the belated region of a new country.