Neither she nor her husband became any more cordial as they knew me better. To them I was only the boarder whose weekly stipend helped to decrease the farm debt, and who had to be fed three times a day and given a bed at night. It was Jim who made me feel at home. He was the fellow I had longed for; the round peg of a chance acquaintance that exactly fitted into the round hole of my holiday life, and he fulfilled my every expectation. He would fish or hunt or carry a sketch-trap or wash brushes, or loaf, or go to sleep beside me--or get up at daylight--whatever the one half of me wanted to do, Jim, the other half, agreed to with instant cheerfulness. And yet, in spite of this constant companionship, I never crossed a certain line of reserve which he had set up between us. He would ramble on by the hour about the things around us; about the trees, the birds, and squirrels; of the way the muskrats lived by the sawmill dam, and their cleverness in avoiding his traps; about the deer that "yarded" back of Taft's Knob last winter, and their leanness in the spring. Sometimes he would speak of Mother Marvin, saying she "thought a heap of Ruby, and ought to," and now and then he would speak of Ruby with a certain tender tone in his voice, telling me of the prizes she had won at school, and how nobody could touch her in "'rithmetic and readin'." But, to my surprise, he never discussed any of his private affairs with me. I say "surprise," for until I met Jim I had found that men of his class talked of little else, especially when over campfires smouldering far into the night. This reticence also extended to Marvin's affairs. The relations between them, I saw, were greatly strained, although Jim always discharged his duties conscientiously, never failing to render a strict account of the time he spent with me, which Marvin always itemized in the weekly bill. I used often to wonder if he were not under some obligation to his employer which he could not requite; it might be for food and shelter in his earlier days, or perhaps that he was weighted by a money debt he was unable to pay. One morning, after a particularly ugly outbreak in which Jim had been denounced for some supposed neglect of his duties, I asked him, then lying beside me, his head cupped upon his saucer of a slouch hat, why he stayed on with a man like Marvin, so different from himself in every way. I had often wondered why Jim stood it, and wished that he had the spirit to try his fortunes elsewhere. In my sympathy for him I had even gone so far as to hint once or twice at my finding him other employment. Indeed, I must confess that the only cloud between us dimming my confidence in him was this very lack of independence.