“They’re part of his manhood,” said Pole philosophically. “Show me a feller without faults and I’ll show you one that’s too weak to have ’em. Nelson’s got some o’ the dust o’ the broad road on his coat, an’ yet I’d take his place in the general bust-up when old Gabe blows his trumpet at the millennium a sight quicker than I’d stand in the shoes o’ some o’ these jack-leg preachers. I tell you, Captain Duncan, ef the Lord’s goin’ to make favorites o’ some o’ the long-face hypocrites I know, that is robbin’ widows an’ orphans in the week an’ prayin’ an’ shoutin’ on Sunday to pull the wool over folkses’ eyes, me an’ Him won’t gee in the hereafter. You know some’n about that boy’s start in life, don’t you, Captain?” “Not much, I must own,” answered the planter. “Thar it is!” said Pole, with a condemning sneer; “ef the pore boy had belonged to one o’ the big families in yore ring out in Murray—the high an’ mighty sort, that owned niggers, you’d ’a’ heard all about him. Captain, nobody on earth knows how that feller has suffered. All his life he’s wanted to make some’n of hisself an’ has absolutely to my certain knowledge had more to contend with than any man alive today. He don’t even know the exact date of his birth, an’ ain’t plumb sure that his name really is Floyd. You see, jest at the close of the war a woman—so sick she could hardly walk—come through the Union lines in East Tennessee with a baby in her arms. The report is that she claimed that her name was Floyd, an’ that she called the baby ‘Nelson.’ She put up at a mountain cabin for the night, a shack where some pore razor-back whites lived by the name o’ Perdue. Old man Perdue was a lyin’, treacherous scamp, a bushwhacker and a mountain outlaw, an’ his wife was a good mate to him. Nelson’s mammy, as I say, was tuck in, but thar wasn’t no doctor nigh, an’ very little to eat, an’ the next mornin’ she was ravin’ out of her head, and late that day she died. I’m tellin’ you now all that Nelson Floyd ever was able to find out, as it came down to him from one person’s recollection to another’s. Well, the woman was buried som’ers, nobody knows whar, an’ old Mrs. Perdue kept the baby more beca’se she was afeared to put it out o’ the way than fer any pity fer it. She had a whole litter of brats of her own goin’ about winter an’ summer in the’r shirt-tails, an’ so they left Nelson to scratch fer hisself. Then the authorities made it hot fer Perdue on some charges agin ’im, and he left the child with another pore mountain family by name o’ Scott and moved clean out o’ the country. The Scotts couldn’t remember much more than hearsay about how Nelson got thar an’ they didn’t care, though they tried to raise the boy along with three of their own. He had a tough time of it, for he was a plucky little devil and had a fight mighty nigh every day with somebody. And as he growed up he naturally fell into bad company, or it fell into him, like everything else did, an’ he tuck to