“Well, what’s all this ruckus?” he demanded as he peered at them across the light of his candle.  “Have any kind of cyclone blowed you from New York clean across here to Harpeth Valley, boy?”

“He has come back with the mercy of our Lord in his hands to save our home; and you go put on your pants before your pipes get chilled, Tucker Alloway,” answered Aunt Viney in her most militant tone of voice.  “And, Rose Mary, you can take that young man on out of here now so Amandy can take that shame-faced head of hers out of that feather pillow.  It’s all on account of that tored place in her night-cap I told her to mend.  You needn’t neither of you come back no more, because we must get to sleep, so as to be ready to unpack before sun-up and get settled back for the day.  And don’t you go to bed, neither one of you, without reading Jeremiah twelfth, first to last verse, and me and Amandy will do the same.”  With which Everett found himself dismissed with a seeming curtness which he could plainly see was an heroic control of emotion in the feeble old stoic who was trembling with exhaustion.

Uncle Tucker, called to account for the lack of warmth and also propriety in his attire, had hastened back to his own apartment and Everett found him sitting up in his bed, lighting the old cob with trembling fingers but with his excitement well under control.  He listened intently to Everett’s hurried but succinct account of the situation and crisis in his own and the Alloway business affairs, as he puffed away, and his old eyes lighted with excitement at the rush of the tale of high finance.

And when at last Everett paused for lack of breath, after his dramatic climax, the old philosopher lay back on his high-piled feather pillows and blinked out into the candle-light, puffed in silence for a few minutes, then made answer in his own quizzical way with a radiant smile from out under his beetling white brows: 

“Well,” he said between puffs, “looks like fortune is, after all, a curious bird without even tail feathers to steer by nor for a man to ketch by putting salt on.  Gid failed both with a knife in the back and a salt shaker to ketch it, but you were depending on nothing but a ringdove coo, as far as I can see, when it hopped in your hand.  I reckon you’ll get your answer.”

“Are you willing—­to have me ask for it, Mr. Alloway?” asked Everett with a radiant though slightly embarrassed smile.

“Yes,” answered Uncle Tucker as he knocked the ashes out of his pipe against the table and looked straight into Everett’s eyes.  “After a man has plowed a honest, straight-furrowed field in life it’s no more’n fair for Providence to send a-loving, trusting woman to meet him at the bars.  Good night, and don’t forget to latch the front door when you have finally torn yourself away from that moonlight!”