“He thinks maybe Nanny will give him up this time?”

“Exact.”

The old woman smoked in silence a long while.  Then she said suddenly, “She must be a lovely woman.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Tip’s wife.”

“Who told you?” I demanded.

“Tip.”

This was strange in a fugitive husband, one who had fled across the mountains to escape a perpetual yammering.

“Tip!” I said.

“Yes, Tip,” she answered.  “Him and me was settin’ there in the kitchen last night, and you was sleepin’ away in here, and he told me all about Black Log.  It must be a lovely place—­Black Log—­so different from Happy Walley.  There’s no folks here, that’s the trouble.  There’s Harmonses a mile down the walley, and below him there’s the Spinks a mile, and up the walley across the run there’s my brother, Joe Smith, and his family—­but we don’t often have strangers here.  The tax collector, he was up last month, and then you come.  You have been a treat.  I ain’t enjoyed anything so much for a long time.  There’s nothin’ like company.”

“Even when it can’t talk?” I said.

“But I could powwow,” she answered cheerily.  “Between fixin’ up the buggy, and cookin’ and makin’ you and Tip comfortable and powwowin’ you, I ain’t had a minute’s time to think—­it’s lovely.”

“What has Tip been doing all this while?”

“Talkin’ about his wife.  She must be nice.  Did you ever hear her sing?”

“I should say I had,” I answered.

The whining strains of “Jordan’s Strand” came wandering out of the past, out of the kitchen, joining with the sizzle of the cooking and the clatter of the pans.

“I should say I had,” I said again.

“She must be a splendid singer,” John Shadrack’s widow exclaimed with much enthusiasm.  “Tip says she has one of the best tenor voices they is.  He says sometimes he can hear her clean from his clearin’ down to your barn.”

“Farther,” said I.  “All the way to the school-house.”

“Indeed!  Now that’s nice.  I allow she must be very handsome.”

“Handsome?” said I, a bit incredulous.

“Why, Tip says she’s the best-lookin’ woman in the walley, and that she’s a terrible tasty dresser.”

“Terrible,” I muttered.

“Indeed!  Now that’s nice.  And is she spare or fleshy?”

“Medium,” I said.  “Just right.”

“That’s nice.  But what’ll she run to?  It makes a heap of difference to a woman what she runs to.  Now I naterally take on.”

“I should say Nanny Pulsifer would naturally lose weight,” I answered.

“That’s nice.  It’s so much better to run to that—­it’s easier gittin’ around.  Tip says she has a be-yutiful figger.  There’s nothin’ like figger.  If there’s anythin’ I hate to see it’s a first-class gingham fittin’ a woman like it was hung there to air.  But about Tip’s wife agin—­she must have a lovely disposition?”