“It’ll be awful gettin’ him clothes,” she told the cook; “except shoes.  Thank God, his feet ain’t as big as the rest of him!  Say, remind me to make a coconut cake in the morning in the big pan.  He likes ’em better when they’re two three days old so the icin’s kind of spread into the cake.  I’d of sent a cake on with his papa, but Mr. Egg always drops things so much.  It does seem——­” The doorbell rang.  Mrs. Egg wiped her mouth and complained, “Prob’ly that gentleman from Ashland to look at that bull calf.  It does seem a shame folks drop in at mealtimes.  Well, go let him in Sadie.”

The cook went out through the sitting room and down the hall.  Mrs. Egg patted her black hair, sighed at her third chop and got up.  The cook’s voice mingled with a drawling man’s tone.  Mrs. Egg drank some milk and waited an announcement.  The cook came back into the dining room and Mrs. Egg set down the milk glass swiftly, saying, “Why, Sadie!”

“He—­he says he’s your father, Mis’ Egg.”

After a moment Mrs. Egg said, “Stuff and rubbidge!  My father ain’t been seen since 1882.  What’s the fool look like?”

“Awful tall—­kinda skinny—­bald——­”

A tremor went down Mrs. Egg’s back.  She walked through the sitting room and into the sunny hall.  The front door was open.  Against the apple boughs appeared a black length, topped by a gleam.  The sun sparkled on the old man’s baldness.  A shivering memory recalled that her father’s hair had been thin.  His dark face slid into a mass of twisting furrows as Mrs. Egg approached him.

He whispered, “I asked for Myrtle Packer down round the station.  An old feller said she was married to John Egg.  You ain’t Myrtle?”

“I’m her,” said Mrs. Egg.

Terrible cold invaded her bulk.  She laced her fingers across her breast and gazed at the twisting face.

The whisper continued:  “They tell me your mamma’s in the cem’tery, Myrtle.  I’ve come home to lay alongside of her.  I’m grain for the grim reaper’s sickle.  In death we sha’n’t be divided; and I’ve walked half the way from Texas.  Don’t expect you’d want to kiss me.  You look awful like her, Myrtle.”

Tears rolled out of his eyes down his hollowed cheeks, which seemed almost black between the high bones.  His pointed chin quivered.  He made a wavering gesture of both hands and sat down on the floor.  Behind Mrs. Egg the cook sobbed aloud.  A farmhand stood on the grass by the outer steps, looking in.  Mrs. Egg shivered.  The old man was sobbing gently.  His head oscillated and its polish repelled her.  He had abandoned her mother in 1882.

“Mamma died back in 1910,” she said.  “I dunno—­well——­”

The sobbing was thin and weak, like an ailing baby’s murmur.  It pounded her breast.

She stared at the ancient dusty suitcase on the porch and said, “Come up from Texas, have you?”

“There’s no jobs lef for a man seventy-six years of age, Myrtle, except dyin.’  I run a saloon in San Antonio by the Plaza.  Walked from Greenville, Mississippi, to Little Rock.  An old lady give me carfare, there, when I told her I was goin’ home to my wife that I’d treated so bad.  There’s plenty Christians in Arkansaw.  And they’ve pulled down the old Presbyterian church your mamma and I was married in.”