“Oh, yes,” cried Mrs. Berridge, “that comical galoot what bided here las’ night, an’ this evenin’ hired our dugout an’ paddled out to the steamboat. He ain’t back yit.” She paused at the door and peered into the gathering gloom. “Jessy Jane,” cried her husband with an accession of interest, “tell ’em all what you heard him say las’ night. Every other word was ‘Duciehurst.’” The younger Berridge was a stalwart fellow, in attire and features resembling his father, save that his straw-tinted beard and shock of hair were not yet bleached by the river-damp and the damage of time to the dull drab hue of the elder’s locks. The woman had evidently intended to reserve such values as she had discovered for the benefit of her own, her husband and his father. But Dan Berridge, all improvident and undiscerning, was gobbling a second great supply of the cat-fish, and did not even note the expanding interest that began to illumine Binnhart’s sharp eyes as they followed her around the table while she again set on the platter. She sought to gain time and perchance to effect a diversion by inviting him to partake of the meal, but he replied that he had eaten his supper already, “and a better one,” he added as he cast a disparaging glance at the cloth. The rude jeer would have served to balk his curiosity, one might have thought,--that in resentment she would have withheld the disclosure he coveted. But the jeer tamed her. She realized and contemned their poverty, and despised themselves because they were so poor. The dignity of labor, the blessedness of content, the joy of health and strength, the relative values of the gifts of life, the law of compensation, no homilies had ever been preached here on these texts. She could not controvert nor contend. It was indeed a coarse, cheap meal brought to the door by the river, a poverty-cursed home on its fantastic stilts, where they might live only so long as the waters willed, and she was all at once ashamed of it, and of her own compact of rude comfort and quiescence with it. She had a certain spirit, however, and when the other visitors chuckled their enjoyment of her discomfiture she included them in the invitation after this wise, “Mebbe you-all ain’t too proud to take a snack with us.” The shanty-boater, who permitted nothing good to pass him, compromised on a slice of pork, eaten sandwich-wise, in a split pone of corn-bread held in his hands as he crouched over the monkey-stove at the other end of the room. Nevertheless, she was submissive and in some sort constrained to respond when Binnhart said with a suave intonation: “Yes, ma’am, we would like to hear from you about that talk of Duciehurst.” “I dunno what you mean,” she said, still with an effort to fence: “oh, yes, the man jus’ talks in his sleep, that’s all.”