“I never have had a home,” she said.  “I never had no idee how folk that have got things lived—­till I went over—­over to that—­that hell-hole there!” And she waved her hand over toward Blue-grass Manor.  I was startled at her fierce manner and words.

“Your folks come along here the other day,” I said, to turn the subject, I guess.

“Did they?” she asked, with a little gasp.  “What did they say?”

“They said they were headed for Pike’s Peak.”

“The old story,” she said.  “Huntin’ f’r the place where the hawgs run around ready baked, with knives an’ forks stuck in ’em.  I wish to God I was with ’em!”

Here she stopped for a while and sat with her hands twisted together in her lap.  Finally, “Did they say anything about me, Jacob?”

“I thought,” said I, “that they talked as if you’d had a fuss.”

“Yes,” she said.  “They’re all I’ve got.  They hain’t much, I reckon, but they’re as good as I be, I s’pose.  Yes, a lot better.  They’re my father an’ my mother, an’ my brothers.  In their way—­in our way—­they was always, as good to me as they knowed how.  I remember when ma used to kiss me, and pa held me on his lap.  Do you remember he’s got one finger off?  I used to play with his fingers, an’ try to build ’em up into a house, while he set an’ told about new places he was goin’ to to git rich.  I wonder if the time’ll ever come ag’in when I can set on any one’s lap an’ be kissed without any harm in it!”

There was no false gaiety in her face now, as she sat and looked off over the marsh from the brow of the hill-slope.  A feeling of coming evil swept over me as I looked at her, like that which goes through the nerves of the cattle when a tornado is coming.  I remembered now the silence of her brothers when her father and mother had said that she was no longer a member of their family, and was not going with them to “the Speak.”

The comical threat of the old man that he would will his property away from her did not sound so funny now; for there must have been something more than an ordinary family disagreement to have made them feel thus.  I recalled the pained look in Ma Fewkes’s face, as she sat with her shoulder-blades drawn together and cast Rowena out from the strange family circle.  What could it be?  I turned my back to her as I sat on the ground; and she took me by the shoulders, pulled me down so that my head was lying in her lap, and began smoothing my hair back from my forehead with a very caressing touch.

“Well,” said she, “we wun’t spoil our day by talkin’ of my troubles.  This place here is heaven, to me, so quiet, so clean, so good!  Le’s not spoil it.”