“Then you’ll stay with us until it’s safe for you to go North and I won’t have to worry about you any more?” exclaimed Rose Mary, delighted, as she beamed up over Pete’s tow-head that had dropped with repletion on her breast.  Shoofly, who, true to her appellation, had been making funny little dabs of delight at a fly or two which had buzzed in her direction, had crawled nearer and burrowed her head under Rose Mary’s knee, rolled over on her little stomach and gone instantaneously and exhaustedly to sleep.  Rose Mary adjusted a smothering fold of her dress and continued in her rejoicing over Everett’s surrender to circumstance inevitable.

“And do you think you can dig some more in the fields?  Don’t happiness and hoe mean the same thing to most men?” she questioned with a laugh.

“Yes, hoe to the death and the devil take the last man at the end of the row, fortune to the first!” answered Everett with a return of his cynical look and tone.

“Oh, but in the world some men just go along and chop down ugly weeds, stir up the good, smelly earth for things to grow in, reach over to help the man in the next furrow if he needs it, and all come home at sundown together—­and the women have the supper ready.  That’s the kind of hoeing I want you to do—­please dig me up those teeth for Aunt Viney and I’ll have johnny-cake and fried chicken waiting for you every night.  Please, sir, promise!” And Rose Mary’s voice sounded its coaxing, comforting note, while her deep eyes brooded over him.

“I promise,” answered Everett with a laugh.  “I tell you what I think I will do.  As I understand it, the Briars has about three hundred acres, all told.  I have been all over it for the oil and there is none in any paying quantities.  But in this kind of formation any number of other things may crop up or out.  I am going to go over every acre of it carefully and find exactly what can be expected of it.  There may be nothing of any value in a mineral way, but as I go I am going to make soil tests, and then put it all down on a complete map and figure out just what your Uncle Tucker ought to plant in each place for years to come.  It will kill a lot of time, and then it might be doing something for you dear people, who have taken a miserable, cross invalid of a stranger man in out of the wet and made a well chap of him again.

“Do you know what you have done for me?  That day when I had tramped over from Boliver just to get away from the Citizens’ Hotel and myself and perched upon Mr. Alloway’s north lot fence like a miserable funeral crow, I had reached my limit, and my spirit had turned its face to the wall.  I had been down South six weeks and couldn’t see that I felt one bit stronger.  I had just heard of this copper expedition from one of the chaps, who had written me a heedlessly exultant letter about it, and I was down and out and no strength left to fight.  I was too weak to take it like a man, and couldn’t make up my mind to cry like a woman,