When Windy proposed to the young school teacher she had accepted him eagerly, thinking it unbelievably romantic that so dashing a man should have chosen so obscure a figure among all the women of the town. “And even now I am not sorry although it has meant nothing but labour and unhappiness for me,” the sick woman had told her son. After marriage to the young dandy, Jane had come with him to Caxton where he bought a store and where, within three years, he had put the store into the sheriff’s hands and his wife into the position of town laundress. In the darkness a grim smile, half scorn, half amusement, had flitted across the face of the dying woman as she told of a winter when Windy and another young fellow went, from schoolhouse to schoolhouse, over the state giving a show. The ex-soldier had become a singer of comic songs and had written letter after letter to the young wife telling of the applause that greeted his efforts. Sam could picture the performances, the little dimly-lighted schoolhouses with the weatherbeaten faces shining in the light of the leaky magic lantern, and the delighted Windy running here and there, talking the jargon of stageland, arraying himself in his motley and strutting upon the little stage. “And all winter he did not send me a penny,” the sick woman had said, interrupting his thoughts. Aroused at last to expression, and filled with the memory of her youth, the silent woman had talked of her own people. Her father had been killed in the woods by a falling tree. Of her mother she told an anecdote, touching it briefly and with a grim humour that surprised her son. The young school teacher had gone to call upon her mother once and for an hour had sat in the parlour of an Ohio farmhouse while a fierce old woman looked at her with bold questioning eyes that made the daughter feel she had been a fool to come. At the railroad station she had heard an anecdote of her mother. The story ran, that once a burly tramp came to the farmhouse, and finding the woman alone tried to bully her, and that the tramp, and the woman, then in her prime, fought for an hour in the back yard of the house. The railroad agent, who told Jane the story, threw back his head and laughed. “She knocked him out, too,” he said, “knocked him cold upon the ground and then filled him up with hard cider so that he came reeling into town declaring her the finest woman in the state.”