Sylvane, riding to the door with the rejected cow, received with something of Lance's stoic grace the despised money. A thankfulness that his "Buddy" was rehabilitated in his eyes made him say, as he stuffed the small wad down in his pocket: "An' I don't take back my word. Sis' Callie. You wouldn't have these; but whatever I can do is ready and waitin', you know that." And somehow, in the hour of her victory, Callista tasted defeat. [293] CHAPTER XX. DRAWN BLANK. FOR a region of dwellers so scattered as those of the Turkey Tracks, the word neighborhood is a misnomer. Where the distances are so great from house to house, where there is no telephone, no milkman on regular rounds, no gossiping servants, one would have said that Callista might go home to her grandfather's and live a month without anyone suggesting that there had been a serious rupture between herself and Lance. But news of this sort travels in a mysterious way through the singularly intimate life of these thinly settled, isolated highlands. The first comers who saw Callista and her baby at the Gentry place knew in some curious fashion that she had forsaken Lance. Perhaps it was her air of permanence in the new home which was her old one; perhaps it was the fact that she had established her little household of two in that outside cabin. However it may be, Buck Fuson rode straight from the Gentry place to Derf's with the information--and found it there before him. "Iley's man seen her jest at the aidge o' the evenin', streakin' through the woods 'crost the holler with the chap on her hip, and a bundle over [294] her shoulder," Garrett Derf explained. "Them Injuns is smart about some things. He said to Iley when he come home that Lance's squaw had done shook him. Well!" Gossip is generally personified as an old woman, but the men of a region like the Turkey Tracks are much thrown back upon it for an interest. "Looks like Callisty never had been greatly petted on Lance," Fuson put forward, flinging a leg around the pommel of his saddle and sitting at ease. Derf shook his head. "I reckon she's like any other womern," he deprecated, with a sort of passive scorn. "You can spile the best of 'em. When Lance come over here the day after him and Callisty was wed and sot up housekeepin', and he showed hisse'f plumb crazy to spend money on her, I says to myse'f, says I, 'Yes, an' there'll be trouble in that fambly befo' snow flies.'" He nodded with an air of one who utters the final wisdom, and Fuson could but agree. "That's a fact," assented Buck, as one who knew something of the matter himself. "Man can pay out all he's worth, and still not satisfy a woman."