"That's right, Gran'dad," he said: "ef Miss Lucy's beau wants to raise hisse'f in the estimation o' her family, by conductin' a cow-burnin' fer 'em, less don't bother him none; less jest let him have his cow-burnin', and all the pleasure and honor there is in hit to hisse'f!" And every tobacco-setter agreed. On his way to the tobacco field next morning, Dock made it convenient to go by the way of the Jameses and the funeral pyre, and from him, Miss Lucy learned that Mr. Lindsay had passed the night at the Doggetts. Because of this information, she drove even more slowly than usual on her way to town. "Perhaps," she thought hopefully, "he'll remember hit's my marketin' day, and maybe he'll walk to town and overtake me, and ride 'long to town with me. Hit surely wouldn't be no harm." She looked from the glass in the back curtain of her buggy. Nobody was coming along the road toward her, but if her eyes and ears could have pierced three miles, they would have seen a slender, brown-eyed man, with a heart sore and full of rancor toward the world, going rapidly in the opposite direction, and would have heard him saying,--his voice wistful with the tears his pride would not allow his eyes to shed: "They've set her ag'in me, I reckon, and hit looks like she's got to preferrin' Brock to me. Ef she has, she can have him; I won't stand in her way! But I wouldn't have thought hit of her, no I wouldn't, and hit's--O Lucy, hit's--hit's good bye to the home I laid out to have!" CHAPTER XIII MR. DOGGETT'S ACQUISITION "I am now in fortune's power, He that is down can fall no lower." "Fifty cents! I'm offered a half a dollar! Who'll make it three quarters?" The eyes of the sheriff twinkled, despite his efforts toward solemnity. It was the third Monday morning in August: he stood in front of the Court-house door, facing a "court-day" crowd and conducted the sale of Napper Dunaway, a gentleman afflicted with what the Court had diagnosed to be a case of chronic leisure. Under the vagrancy law of the State, the remedy for this disease is the enforced sale of the patient's services for a given time,--the purchaser binding himself to furnish food, lodging, and medical attention to his bondman during the term of his compelled servitude. The crowd pressed up for a nearer view of the young man, who, with a soft white thumb caught in the button-hole of a pale blue negligee shirt, worn in shirt-waist style, with a crimson silk tie, a tan belt, and a pair of blue serge pantaloons, stood in nonchalant contemplation of the church steeple across the street. "Who'll give me three quarters of a dollar?" repeated the sheriff. "I will: yes, sir, I'll make the bid seventy-five cents!" drawled a new-comer, slightly out of breath from his hurry to reach the scene of the sale.