“Who are you?” Brimstead asked.

“I’m one o’ the Traylors o’ Vergennes.”

“My father used to buy cattle of Henry Traylor.”

“Henry was my father.  Haven’t you let ’em know about your bad luck?”

The man resumed his tone of confidence.  “Say, I’ll tell ye,” he answered.  “A man that’s as big a fool as I am ought not to advertise it.  A brain that has treated its owner as shameful as mine has treated me should be compelled to do its own thinkin’ er die.  I’ve invented some things that may sell.  I’ve been hopin’ my luck would turn.”

“It’ll turn when you turn it,” Samson assured him.

Brimstead thoughtfully scuffed the sand with his bare foot.  In half a moment he stepped to the wheel and imparted this secret:  “Say, mister, if you’ve any more doubt o’ my mental condition, I’m goin’ to tell ye that they’ve discovered valuable ore in my land two miles back o’ this road, an’ I’m hopin’ to make a fortune.  Don’t that prove my case?”

“Any man that puts his faith in the bowels of the earth can have my vote,” said Samson.

Brimstead leaned close to Samson’s ear and said in a tone scarcely audible: 

“My brother Robert has his own idiot asylum.  It’s a real handsome one an’ he has made it pay, but I wouldn’t swap with him.”

Samson smiled, remembering that Robert had a liquor store.  “Look here, Henry Brimstead, we’re hungry,” he said.  “If ye furnish the water, we’ll skirmish around for bread and give ye as good a dinner as ye ever had in yer life.”

Henry took the horses to his barn and watered and fed them.  Then he brought two pails of water from the spring.  Meanwhile Samson started a fire in a grove of small poplars by the roadside and began broiling venison, and Sarah got out the bread board and the flour and the rolling-pin and the teapot.  As she waited for the water she called the three strange children to her side.  The oldest was a girl of thirteen, with a face uncommonly refined and attractive.  In spite of her threadbare clothes, she had a neat and cleanly look and gentle manners.  The youngest was a boy of four.  They were a pathetic trio.

Joe had been telling them about Santa Claus and showing them a jack-knife which had come down the chimney in his pack at Christmas time and describing a dress of his mother’s that had gold and silver buttons on it.  The little six-year-old girl had asked him many questions about his mother and had stood for some moments looking up into Sarah’s face.  The girl timidly felt the dress and hair of the woman and touched her wedding ring.

“Come and wash your faces and hands,” Joe demanded as soon as the water came.

This they did while he poured from a dipper.

“Nice people always wash before they eat,” he reminded them.

Then he showed them his bear stick, with the assurance that it had killed a hedge hog, omitting the unimportant fact that his father had wielded it.  The ferocity of hedge hogs was a subject on which he had large information.  He told how one of their party had come near getting his skin sewed on a barn door.  A hedge hog had come and asked Sambo if he would have some needles.  Sambo had never seen a hedge hog, so he said that he guessed he would.