and then Ethelyn knew that the “savage” was no other than brother to Abigail Jones, deceased.  The discovery was not a pleasant one, and did not tend to smooth her ruffled spirits or lessen the feeling of contempt for Western people in general, and Richard’s friends in particular, which had been growing in her heart ever since the Eastern world was left behind and she had been fairly launched upon the great prairies of the Mississippi Valley.  Richard was a prince compared with the specimens she had seen, though she did wonder that he should be so familiar with them, calling them by their first names, and even bandying jokes with the terrible Tim Jones spitting his tobacco juice all over the car floor and laughing so loudly at all the “Squire” said.  It was almost too dreadful to endure, and Ethelyn’s head was beginning to ache frightfully when the long train came to a pause, and the conductor, who also knew Judge Markham, and called him “Dick,” screamed through the open door “O-l-ney!”

Ethelyn was at home at last.

CHAPTER VI

MRS. MARKHAM’S WAYS

They were very peculiar, and no one knew this better than Mrs. Jones and her daughter Melinda, sister and mother to the deceased Abigail and the redoubtable Tim.  Naturally bright and quick-witted, Melinda caught readily at any new improvement, and the consequence was that the Jones house bore unmistakable signs of having in it a grown-up daughter whose new ideas of things kept the old ideas from rusting.  After Melinda came home from boarding-school the Joneses did not set the table in the kitchen close to the hissing cook stove, but in the pleasant dining room, where there gradually came to be crocheted tidies on the backs of the rocking-chairs, and crayon sketches on the wall, and a pot of geraniums in the window, with a canary bird singing in his cage near by.  At first, Mrs. Markham, who felt a greater interest in the Joneses than in any other family—­Mrs. Jones being the only woman in the circle of her acquaintance to whom she would lend her copper boiler—­looked a little askance at these “new-fangled notions,” wondering how “Miss Jones expected to keep the flies out of her house if she had all the doors a-flyin’ three times a day,” and fearing lest Melinda was getting “stuck-up notions in her head, which would make her fit for nothing.”

But when she found there were no more flies buzzing in Farmer Jones’ kitchen than in her own, and that Melinda worked as much as ever, and was just as willing to lend a helping hand when there was need of haste at the Markham house, her anxiety subsided, and the Joneses were welcome to eat wherever they chose, or even to have to wait upon the table, when there was company, the little black boy Pete, whom Tim had bought at a slave auction in New Orleans, whither he had gone on a flatboat expedition two or three years before.  But she never thought of introducing any of Melinda’s notions into her