“Wheez-chekk! nice young buck for a husband,” wheezed the Butterball as I shot down the hill from under Sam’s big hand reached out for my hair.

“Sam?” I gasped.

“Women critters always back and shy, but they git the wedding-bit from a steady hand—­and like it,” he chuckled, still further.  I felt as if I ought not to let Sam rest under such a suspicion, and that I ought to tell him about Peter.  But just then he launched forth on a case of a spavined horse he had beyond the cross-roads, which he wanted me to take him to see, and I didn’t do it.

I don’t much like to think about the long, hot July weeks that followed.  The whole of Harpeth Valley sweltered, and everybody did likewise.  That is, I suppose Peter did, for not one glimpse did I or anybody else get of him.  Sam says Mammy set his meals down in the doorway of the shack with one of her soft, soothing, “Dah, dah, chile,” which was answered with a growl from Peter.  That ended the events of his life at The Briers.

Sam worked early and late, and got tanned to the most awful deep mahogany.  All of him held out pretty well but his heels, which he came in three times to have me fix for him; and once mother and I had to dress a blister on his back that he got from wearing a torn shirt in the potato-field.

I was wild with anxiety about Peter and the play and the poor little heroine; I didn’t know whether she was being murdered or separated for life from the hero.  Still, it was good to have Sam to myself for long, quiet, hot evenings out on the front porch under the brooding doves in the eaves above us.  Sam never talks much but he listens to me, and sometimes he tells me things from way down inside himself.  And little by little I began to understand all about the things he had been too busy doing to tell me about.

“You see, it is this way, Bettykin,” he said, one evening when the young moon was attempting to silver the dark all around us as we sat on the front steps, with mother away rounding off the second pair of socks for Peter.  “There wasn’t one cent of money for me to take Byrd and Mammy and make a start in New York.  Even with the best sort of a backing, it is always a ten-year pull for a youngster before he counts in the world.  I could have sold The Briers, but I couldn’t make up my mind to do it, and then while I hesitated I—­I”—­he paused a minute and steadied his voice, while I took his hand and held on to it tight—­“I got a call—­a land call that I had to answer.  God just picked me up and planted me here on my bit of land, and I’ve got to root and grow or—­or dishonor Him.”

“Oh, Sam, you have, you have honored Him,” I said as I crept closer to his arm.

“I’ve been all uprooted and pruned, Betty, and I’ve lost—­lost—­you know!  But for Him I must go on just the same and bear fruit.”  At the pain in Sam’s low voice something in me throbbed.

“Lost?  Oh, Sam, what?” I exclaimed, as I hugged his arm against my breast.  “What’s happened to you, Sam?  Tell—­”