Alanson was not uncomfortable while he waited. His aunt kept house for him at his homestead, where he had several barns, a milk-house, a smoke-house and all modern conveniences around him. He felt his value with everybody but Wilda. The youngest girls showed him no discouragement. There was a sonorous pomp about his singing in meeting which affected every rural nature, while his Adam’s apple, like a sensitive lump of mercury, trembled up and down its inclosure. Some folks thought Alanson Bundle ought to have been a preacher. He would look so nice standing in a pulpit, with his hair sleeked up in a straight roach, saying, “Hence we discover, my brethren.” But Wilda Coon never had made any fuss over him. And for that reason he followed her with abject service. In that early year of the fifties a great many people about the Rocky Fork had locks on their doors. But a tow latch-string hung out for Wilda Coon, and with it she lifted the wooden latch of her dwelling. At night, for security, she would draw the string inside, and slip a wooden bar into staples across the thick board portal. The tight-chinked cabin had the strangest interior on the Rocky Fork. There was only one room, and the hollow of the roof rose up in a cavernous arch without joists. Two wooden bars were, indeed, set high across one corner, but they served as roosts for chickens who had already taken to them for the night, and who stirred quavering as Wilda shut the door and emptied a gourd. Before the fire, yet not too near it, was a trundle-bed which could be pushed anywhere on wheels. She dropped her hood and shawl upon a chair and slipped toward the trundle-bed, motioning back a great mastiff who kept guard at the hearth. He sat down again and licked his lips; the glory of burning logs in the fireplace was enough to content any dog, for that cabin seemed to have the sunset imprisoned within it. Calico curtains on the four-paned windows hid darkening woods outside. “O Sweetness!” whispered Wilda, bending over the trundle-bed and scarcely daring to touch the patchwork quilt. Her eyes were full of kisses and fondling for her only baby, the helpless being who reversed for her the maternal relations. It was a little old woman, whose apple face had shriveled into puckers only around the corners of the eyes and mouth. A dimity nightcap tied it in, almost covering white silk threads of hair. This helpless mother, lying in the dead alive state we now call paralysis, and the Rocky Forkers then called palsy, was the secret delight of Wilda’s heart, and Alanson Bundle’s only rival. But she concealed her fondness like a crime. The name of Sweetness was sacred to that hollow cabin. Bounce could make no remark about it, and he was the only safe auditor in an age when excess of loving was considered weakness.