He turned to the right, followed down the muddy river bank, and within a quarter of a mile turned yet again to the right at a decrepit gate serving in part to stop the way as adjutant of a broken rail fence which marked a scanty field. Before him now lay a cleared space of some twenty acres or more, occupied at one corner by spare, gnarled apple trees, no man might say how old, appurtenances of acres which David Joslin had “heired” from the husband of the same grandam, whom but now he had left. Behind the apple trees rose a low roof, the broken cover of a scant gallery, a chimney, ragged-topped, at each end of the cabin. Here and there stood a China tree, yonder grew a vine, softening somewhat and beautifying even in the beauty of decay those rude surroundings. Back of the house were other small log buildings, cribs scantily filled with corn. In the barnyard stood two tall poles, behind which, running up into the darkness of the mountain side, stretched the long rusted wires which in the harvesting of the autumn sometimes carried down from the side of the mountains, too steep for the use of horse or mule, the sacks of corn perilously gathered above and sent down in the easiest way to the farmyard. Apparently the harvest that fall had been but scant. The place had an air of poverty, or meagerness—rather perhaps should one use the latter than the former word. It was not the home of a drunkard, or a ne’er-do-well, or a poverty-smitten man, which David Joslin now approached—his own home, one like to many others all about him in these hills. It was an old, old, out-worn land, a decrepit land, which lay all about him. He was like his neighbors, his home like theirs. David Joslin walked past the China tree and up to his own door. He stood for a moment scraping the mud from his feet at the end of the broken board on the little gallery before he pushed open the door. A woman rose to meet him. She was a woman yet young, but seemed no longer young. Perhaps she was twenty-two, perhaps twenty-five years of age. She was tall and strong, after the fashion of the mountain woman, angular, spare. The thin dark hair, swept smoothly back from her bony forehead, seemed to come from a scalp tight-grown upon the skull. She appeared to carry about her the look of a certain raw, rugged strength, though there was little of the soft and feminine about her figure, about her attitude, about her voice as she now spoke to him. “Why didn’t ye come home long ago?” she demanded with no preliminary. Joslin made no answer, but sat down sullenly in a chair which he pushed up to the fireplace. The flames were dying down into a mass of coals which likewise seemed sullen. He reached out to the scant pile of firewood at the corner of the hearth, and cast on a stick or so.