"You here, Callisty?" asked the boy, parting the branches, and finally coming shyly closer to seat himself on the bank below her. "I wanted to get shut of all the folks," she said, her brooding eyes on the ground at her feet. "Oh, not you, Sylvane--the rest of them talk so much." The boy smiled uncertainly. [227] "Well, I--reckon I was aimin' to sorter talk, too, Callisty," he began timidly. "I 'lowed to tell you about that place where Lance is a-workin'. Hit's been some time now, an' I ain't never said nothin' to ye--I didn't want to pester ye." Poor Sylvane was trying, in the mountain phrase, "to make fine weather, an' hit a-rainin'." She made no movement to hush him, and he even thought she listened with some eagerness. "They," he began with hesitation, watching her face, "they're a-gettin' out railroad ties now. That makes the work mighty heavy. It takes Lance and Bob and Andy to run the mill--and sometimes they have to have help. They've got generally as many as eight or ten loggers and woodsmen. They just get the logs up any way they can. Last week Lance got his foot hurt in a log bunk that he fixed up on the running gears of two wagons. They wanted me to come and drive. They do a lot of snaking out the logs without any wagon at all. Reelfoot Dawson is the best teamster they've got. That yoke of steers he has can snake logs out of places where a team of mules or horses couldn't so much as get in." Callista sighed and turned impatiently towards her young brother-in-law. "Where do the men live?" she asked finally, very low, as though half-unwilling to do so. "Well, Daggett ain't makin' what he expected to, and first they had to camp and cook and do for [228] theirselves. Now they've built shacks--out'n the flawed boards, you know--and all of 'em fetched a quilt or a blanket or such from home, so they can roll up at night on the floor. Fletch Daggett's wife is cooking for 'em. The day I was there they had white beans and corn bread--and a little coffee. She's a mighty pore cook, and she's got three mighty small chaps under foot." Callista's mind went to the new, clean, well-arranged little home on Lance's Laurel. Did old Fletch Daggett's slovenly, overworked young wife cook any worse than she, Callista, had been able to? "It's hot in them board shacks," Sylvane went on reflectively; "the hottest place I ever was in. Somebody stole Lance's comb. There ain't but one wash pan--he goes down to the branch--and he hid his comb. It's a rough place. They fight a good deal." And this was what Lance had preferred to her and to the home he had built for her. She fell into such a study over it that Sylvane's voice quite startled her when he said, "I--I aimed to ask ye, Callisty--did you want me to take word for Lance to come home?" "No," she answered him very low. "It ain't my business to bid Lance Cleaverage come to his own home. Don't name it to me again, Sylvane, please."