“Oh, you must help me make her take what would have been a fair price for those lands, Major.  I’m determined—­I—­I—­” Caroline’s voice faltered but her head was well up.  “I’m determined; but we’ll talk of that later.  He bought the Cantrell land and divided it up into the first improved city addition.  Was it, was it ’carpetbagging’?” She flushed as she said the word—­“Was it pressure?  Were the Cantrells in need?”

“Not for long, my dear, not for long!  Mrs. Tom took that money and bought cows for the east farm, ran a dairy in opposition to Matilda’s and then got her into a combine to ship gilt-edge to Cincinnati.  I expected them to skim the milky way any night and put a star brand of butter on the market.  They made a great deal of money and were proportionately hard to manage.  Young Tom inherits from his mother and makes paying combines in stocks.  Old Tom hasn’t a thing to do but sit in the sun and spin tales about battles he was and was not in.  It wouldn’t do to drag up that pinched period of his life; he is too expansive now to be made to recall it.”  The major smiled invitingly as if he had hopes of an interested question that would turn the trend of the conversation, but Caroline Darrah held herself sternly to the matter in hand.

“And you, I see a sale of half of your land at—­”

“Caroline Darrah Brown, look me straight in the eyes,” interrupted the major in a commanding voice.  He sat up and bent his keen black eyes that sparkled under his heavy white brows with absolute luminosity upon the girl at his side.  When aroused the major was a live wire and he was buckling on his sword to do battle with a woman-trouble, and a dire one.

“Now,” he continued, “I’m going to say things to you that you are to understand and remember, young woman.  Your father did come down among us with what you have heard called a ‘carpetbag’ in his hands, but it wasn’t an empty one:  and while the sums he handed out to each of us might be considered inadequate, still they were a purchasing power at a time when things were congested for the lack of any circulating medium whatever.  True, I sold him half my thousand acres for a song; but the song fenced the other half, bought implements and stock, and made Matilda possible.  She was eighteen and I was twenty-eight when we joined forces and it was decidedly to the tune of your father’s ‘song’.  It was the same with the rest of his—­friends.  You must see that in the painful processes of reconstructing us the carpetbag had its uses.  If it went away plethoric with coal and iron and lumber, it left a little gold in its wake.  And Peters Brown—­”

“Major,” said Caroline in a brave voice, “it killed him, the memory of it and not being able to bring me back to her people.  He was changed and he realized that he left me very much alone in the world.  If there had been any of her immediate family alive we might have felt differently—­but her friends—­I didn’t know that I would be welcomed.  Now—­now—­I begin to hope.  I want to give some of it back!  I have so much—­”