Before this speech was ended, Bob Walker entered the door.

Bob was tall, stooped, good-natured, and desperately poor.  With ton children under twelve years of age, with an incorrigible fondness for loafing and telling funny stories, Bob saw no chance to improve his condition.  A man may be either honest or lazy and got rich; but a man who Is both honest and indolent is doomed.  Bob lived in a cabin on the Anderson farm, and when not hired by Samuel Anderson he did days’ work here and there, riding to and from his labor on a raw-boned mare, that was the laughing-stock of the county.  Bob pathetically called her Splinter-shin, and he always rode bareback, for the very good reason that he had neither saddle nor sheepskin.

[Illustration:  “I WANT TO BUY YOUR PLACE.”]

“Mr. Anderson,” said Bob, standing in the door and trying to straighten the chronic stoop out of his shoulders, “I want to buy your place.”

If Bob had said that he wanted to be elected president Samuel Anderson could not have been more surprised.

“You look astonished; but folks don’t know everything.  I ’low I know how to lay by a little.  But I never could git enough to buy a decent kind of a tater-patch.  So I says to my ole woman this mornin’, ‘Jane,’ says I, ’let’s git some ground.  Let’s buy out Mr. Anderson, and see how it’ll feel to be rich fer a few days.  If she all burns up, let her burn, I say.  We’ve had a plaguey hard time of it, let’s see how it goes to own two farms fer awhile.’  And so we thought we’d ruther hev the farms fer two weeks than a little money in a ole stocking.  What d’ye say?”

Jonas here put in that he didn’t see why they mightn’t sell to him as well as to Bob Walker.  Cynthy Ann had worked fer Mrs. Anderson fer years, and him and Cynthy was a-goin’ to be one man soon.  Why not sell to them?

“Because selling to you is selling to Andrew,” said Mrs. Abigail, in a conclusive way.

And so Bob got the farms, possession to be given after the fourteenth of August, thus giving the day of doom three days of grace.  And Bob rode round the county boasting that he was as rich a man as there was in Clark Township.  And Jonas declared that ef the eend did come in the month of August, Abigail would find some onsettled bills agin her fer cheatin’ the brother outen the inheritance.  And Clark Township agreed with him.

August was secretly pleased that one obstacle to his marriage was gone.  If Andrew should prove right, and the world should outlast the middle of August, there would be nothing dishonorable in his marrying a girl that would have nothing to sacrifice.

Andrew, for his part, gave vent to his feelings, as usual, by two or three bitter remarks leveled at the whole human race, though nowadays he was inclined to make exceptions in favor of several people, of whom Julia stood first.  She was a woman of the old-fashioned kind, he said, fit to go alongside Heloise or Chaucer’s Grisilde.