“Mr. Ernest ain’t been over for a long time.  He ain’t mad about nothin’, is he?”

“Oh, no!  He’s awful busy this summer.  I saw him in town yesterday.  We went to the circus together.”

Mahailey smiled and nodded.  “That’s nice.  I’m glad for you two boys to have a good time.  Mr. Ernest’s a nice boy; I always liked him first rate.  He’s a little feller, though.  He ain’t big like you, is he?  I guess he ain’t as tall as Mr. Ralph, even.”

“Not quite,” said Claude between strokes.  “He’s strong, though, and gets through a lot of work.”

“Oh, I know!  I know he is.  I know he works hard.  All them foreigners works hard, don’t they, Mr. Claude?  I reckon he liked the circus.  Maybe they don’t have circuses like our’n, over where he come from.”

Claude began to tell her about the clown elephant and the trained dogs, and she sat listening to him with her pleased, foolish smile; there was something wise and far-seeing about her smile, too.

Mahailey had come to them long ago, when Claude was only a few months old.  She had been brought West by a shiftless Virginia family which went to pieces and scattered under the rigours of pioneer farm-life.  When the mother of the family died, there was nowhere for Mahailey to go, and Mrs. Wheeler took her in.  Mahailey had no one to take care of her, and Mrs. Wheeler had no one to help her with the work; it had turned out very well.

Mahailey had had a hard life in her young days, married to a savage mountaineer who often abused her and never provided for her.  She could remember times when she sat in the cabin, beside an empty meal-barrel and a cold iron pot, waiting for “him” to bring home a squirrel he had shot or a chicken he had stolen.  Too often he brought nothing but a jug of mountain whiskey and a pair of brutal fists.  She thought herself well off now, never to have to beg for food or go off into the woods to gather firing, to be sure of a warm bed and shoes and decent clothes.  Mahailey was one of eighteen children; most of them grew up lawless or half-witted, and two of her brothers, like her husband, ended their lives in jail.  She had never been sent to school, and could not read or write.  Claude, when he was a little boy, tried to teach her to read, but what she learned one night she had forgotten by the next.  She could count, and tell the time of day by the clock, and she was very proud of knowing the alphabet and of being able to spell out letters on the flour sacks and coffee packages.  “That’s a big A.” she would murmur, “and that there’s a little a.”