"Lord love you, Mr. Dunham! you're back ag'in, ain't you?" she said in her loud fashion of cordiality. "I'm sure glad to see you lookin' so hearty and pert"—one would have thought he had been gone at least a year—"after luggin' that heavy gripsack over to Pawnee Bend. Where are you bound for now?"
He made a short cut to the heart of the matter, at which she expressed her satisfaction.
"And I bet you must be as holler as a gourd, too," she said, sympathetically. "You come right in, Mr. Dunham, and set down at the table. I've got the nicest mess of greens I've picked this spring—they're powerful scarce in this country, I had to skirmish along the river a mile, I reckon, to gether a apurnful, but I got 'em."
Dunham thanked her, saying he thought he was supposed to eat with Zora and the boys. Mrs. Brassfield said she was sorry to miss his company, and she'd take him over a dish of greens if he wanted her to. Bill said they might take it as a reflection on their table, to which she agreed, saying some folks was techy about them things.
"I wouldn't want 'em to think I was bemeanin' their grub," she said quite seriously, "for you don't find two such good-hearted souls as Mizz Moore and Zora every day. That girl she hitched up to the buggy this morning and racked out after you as soon as she found you was gone, but I knowed she wouldn't overhaul you, 'cause I seen you cuttin' acrost when you went over the hill."
Bill inquired after Shad, to learn that he had been
