"Hold on!" Drumright admonished her. "I ain't through with you yet. This here mammy o' yourn sp'iled you till them that ort to give you good advice is scared to come within reach. But I ain't scared. I've got a word to say. This man Cleaverage has got property--and a right smart. Hit's been told all around that he's sold out to the coal company and is goin' West with--well, [313] they say he's goin' West. Now, havin' a livin' wife and a infant child, he cain't make no good deed without you sign; and what I want to know is, has he axed you to sign sech? Ef he has, I hope you had the sense to refuse. Ef he comes to you with any sech, I want you to send for me to deal with him--you hear? Send for me." The rasping voice paused. Drumright was by no means through with his harangue, but he stopped a moment to arrange his ideas. He dwelt with genuine comfort on the thought of being called in to have it out once for all with Lance Cleaverage. Then Callista's voice sounded, clear and quiet. "Mr. Drumright," she said, "if you're never sent for till I do the sending, you'll stay away from this house the rest of yo' days. I'm a servant here, a-workin' for my livin' and the livin' of my child. Them that my grandfather and my mother bids to this house, I cook for and wait on; but speak to you again I never will. Mammy, the dinner's ready; if you don't mind putting it on the table, I'll go out and see is the baby waked up." With this she stepped lightly down and walked across to her own cabin. Drumright turned furiously upon Octavia. She, at least, was a member of his church, and bound to take his tongue-lashings meekly. What he found to say was not new to her, and she accepted [314] it with tears of humiliation; but when he wound up with declaring that she had brought all this about by giving her daughter to an abandoned character, even she plucked up spirit to reply. "You may be adzactly right in all you say," she told the harsh, meddlesome old man; "but I've got the first thing to see about Lance Cleaverage that I couldn't forgive. What him and Sis fell out about I don't know, and she won't tell me; but as to blamin' it all on Lance, that I'll never do." Then she dished up and set before her irate guest a dinner which might have soothed a more perverse temper. Ajax Gentry came in from his fence mending, and, with the advent of the man, Drumright's tone and manner softened. He made no further reference to Callista's personal affairs, nor to the castigation she ought to receive. The two old men sat eating and talking--the slow grave talk of the mountaineer--about crops and elections and religion. Callista did not come back from the little cabin, whence presently the sound of her loom made itself heard. At this point Drumright ventured a guarded suggestion to his host, in the matter of her affairs. He was met with a civil but comprehensive negative.