The others had arrived at the potato cakes. They could talk.
They were talking of Cooney’s domestic affairs. He was a widower, with two married daughters, to each of whom, on the day of her marriage, he had given a house. “Why should I be keepin’ thim waitin’ fer my fun’ral,” he said, “to get their bit o’ prope’ty? They need it more now.” It was all he had—those two houses. They represented the savings of a lifetime of trucking. He had sold his teams and his trucks to pay off the last instalment of mortgage when he retired.
He had a ruddy old face—the ruddier by contrast with the whiteness of his hair. It was a face of kindly philosophy growing senile. He had always had the name of being “kind o’ simple”; and there was this simplicity in his confessing to Mrs. Cook, at her supper table, that he was worried out of his sleep because his youngest daughter, with whom he was living, had made up her mind to give up renting rooms, to sell her house, and
