He came out to see me, and we drank his health and fortune.  It was on this occasion that Douglas talked to me with the greatest freedom about my own affairs.  His frankness and sincerity, his friendship for me, relieved this broaching of my intimate interests of intrusiveness.  I felt no inclination to resent it.  He had glanced at Zoe who had come into the room once or twice, remarking that she was an unusual young woman.  Then he said:  “Your father must have been much of a man.  I think his marriage worked upon his feelings ... and Zoe.  Don’t let this get on your imagination.  You are handling it in the right way ... just go on.  Let me warn you.  The McCall gang is a desperate one.  Do not on any account come to an issue with them.  There are too many of them.  They will sneak up upon you.  They carry grudges ... and another thing, there’s Lamborn ... as bad as the McCalls.  He’s been talking too, making threats against you.  I tell you this for your own good.  He has been boasting of Zoe’s interest in him ... to speak euphemistically of the matter ... but just be careful.”  Whatever else he had in his mind he communicated it to me by the look of his speaking eyes, keen and blue.  Then he arose and went.

Dorothy had returned to Nashville for the winter.  She expected to take her place again in Reverdy’s household in the spring.  And we were writing.  I had thought of proposing marriage to her the night before she left.  But I could not bring myself to do so.  I needed some one in my life.  But I was just twenty, and Dorothy seemed so much more mature and wise than I. Then always there was this matter of Zoe.  I lived in the expectation that something would come out of Zoe’s misfortune; and if it did my name was bound to be connected with it.  What would Dorothy say if in the midst of our engagement, if she engaged herself to me, the word should be brought to her that I was the father of Zoe’s aborted child and that by some one, perhaps Mrs. Brown, Zoe had been saved the open shame of giving birth to the child and while an inmate of my house?  I could see the probative force of these facts against me.  This is what kept me from speaking to Dorothy on the subject of becoming my wife and having it settled before she went to Nashville.  And then something happened that made my situation infinitely worse before it was any better.

The spring had come on early and I had much to do.  I was buying machinery.  The mowers that I had ordered were soon to be delivered and I had need to be in town almost daily.  There were always loafers about the streets; and among them, not infrequently, the McCall boys or Lamborn.  Reverdy had told me that Lamborn had been talking in the barber shop, saying that I was living in a state of adultery with my nigger sister.  At the same time I knew, and Reverdy knew, that Lamborn was trying to get Zoe to meet him.  He had sent her a note to that effect, which Zoe had turned over to me.  Once he had accosted Zoe as she was coming from Reverdy’s to join me at the courthouse preparatory to starting home.  Reverdy thought that the fellow was eaten up with insane jealousy and had brought himself to the belief that I had taken Zoe from him, if he could be said ever to have had a right to her.