“Huh! Thar’s most always two or three men in ary womern’s life,” responded Granny Williams calmly. “Thar was two or three in mine. Like enough I’d of merried one of ‘em if I hadn’t of merried Henry like I done. I been too busy to think about sich matters sence. But, just so long as a woman is foot-loose like, chances air she mought merry two or three men, or even sever’l, like I said.” Marcia Haddon made no response to this matter-of-fact reasoning, but her ancient companion continued in her monologue. “Yes,” she chuckled, “that’s so. An’ yit, if ever a man admits to his wife that he has ever saw more’n one womern in all his borned life, she’ll raise hell with him! Now, Davy——” Marcia Haddon suddenly pulled up her mule an’ hastened on, but relentlessly the old woman resumed when she had come alongside. “I was sayin’ about Davy—he were merried onlucky. It jest happened that way. An’ now she’s got her a divorce from him. That’s a awful thing.” “We’ll talk of something else, Granny,” said Marcia Haddon. The old dame looked at her keenly, curiosity in her unseen glance. “An’ why not talk of Davy?” she insisted after a time. “I don’t wish to do so, Granny. It’s nothing to me how he has married or what he does.” “I reckon that’s so,” sighed Granny Williams. “He’s only a mounting boy at that, though powerful smart. Some said he hadn’t orter of ever left the mountings, because he war the leader of his fam’ly—Chan Bullock, he’s too young. Well, maybe they’re right, an’ maybe they hain’t. They say the old quarls is about all fixed up in here now—the whole country’s changed come these last two year, now the railroad’s comin’.” “An’ Davy’s changed, too,” she went on. “He’s sadder’n what he used to be. I don’t know as I ever seed a man any sadder’n he is, especial right now. In the old times he used to be the fightin’est, whisky-drinkin’est young man in this here hull valley, an’ now he’s got to be the workin’est man in all these parts. I reckon it’s the _di_vorce that shames him. Not that I suppose he’s a-seekin’ around anywhars for any more merryin’—he like enough had his satisfy of gettin’ merried.” Marcia Haddon did her best to change the conversation. “You were telling me about a place where they used to teach school long ago—right out of doors, in the open,” said she. “That’s furtherer on up the creek, beyant the old ford whar the bufferlo come down to the salt lick in my granddad’s time. That’s a purty place, right in the bank of the creek. I’ll show it to ye some day. “But now,” she resumed, as, turning the bend of the road, they saw before them the blackened roof of a deep cavern in the sidehill—“thar’s whar them wanderin’ wimmern lives I was tellin’ ye about, Ma’am. Looks like thar wasn’t no one to home.”