Now, when I stalked into the room and asked about the Crittenden home, daddy reared his head from his evening paper and immediately took notice of whatever it was in my voice that sounded as if something had hurt me.

“Daddy,” I asked him, with a little gulp, “did Sam—­Sam sell his ancestral home even to the third and fourth generation and go to farming just for sheer wickedness?”

“No, madam, he did not,” he answered, looking at me over his glasses, and I could see a pain straighten out the corners of his mouth under his fierce white mustache.  “The judge’s debts made a mortgage that nicely blanketed the place, and Sam had only to turn it over to the creditors and walk out to that little two-hundred-acre brier-patch the judge had forgot to mortgage.”

“Then Sam can sell it for enough to go out and take his place in the world,” I said, with the greatest relief in my voice.

“He could, but he won’t,” answered daddy, looking at me with keen sympathy.  “I tried that out on him.  Just because that brier-patch has never had a deed against it since the grant from Virginia to old Samuel Foster Crittenden of 1793 he thinks it is his sacred duty to go out and dig a hole in a hollow log for Byrd and himself and get in it to sentimentalize and starve.”

“Oh, I think that is a beautiful thought about the land, and I wish I had known it earlier!  But could they be really hungry—­hungry, daddy?” I said, with a sudden vacant feeling just under my own ribs in the region between my heart and my stomach.

“Oh no,” answered daddy, comfortably.  “They both looked fat enough the last time I saw Sam coming to town in a wagon with Byrd, leading a remarkably fine Jersey calf.  We’ll go out in that new flying-machine you brought home with you and pull them out of their burrow some day when you get the time.  Fine boy, that; and, mother, when is that two-hundred-pound black beauty in your kitchen going to have supper?”

I didn’t tell daddy I had gone to the ends of the earth to hunt for Sam in less than thirty-six hours after I had landed in Hayesboro, but I went up to my room to slip into something clean and springy, walking behind a thin mist of tears of pure sentiment.  That was the third time in about seven hours I had been crying over Sam Crittenden, and then I had to eat a supper of fried chicken and waffles that would have been delicious if it hadn’t been flavored by restrained sobs in my throat.  I was so mad at my disloyal thoughts about a beautiful character, which Sam’s reverence for his ancestral land proves his to be, and so afraid of what I had done to him about the calf, and so hungry to see him, that by the time the apple-float came on the table I thought it would have to be fed to me by old Eph.  Mother made it worse by remarking, as she put a lovely dab of thick cream right on top of my saucer: 

“Did you hear, father, that all of Sam’s cows had been sick and that he has lost his two finest calves?”