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The mother motioned Abbie to a chair.

“Sit down, child, and listen to me. I ain’t crazy; I ain’t out of my head–I’m only skeered.”

“But, Mother dear, I can get the money any day I want it. All I’ve got to do is to telephone them and a check comes the next day.”

“Yes, I know–I know.” She was still trembling, her voice hardly audible. “But that ain’t what skeers me; it’s Hiram. He done the same thing to me last December. Come in here and laid the bills on that table behind you and begged me to take ’em; he’d heard about the mortgage; he wanted to fix the house up, too. I put my hands behind my back and got close to the wall there. I couldn’t touch it, and he begged and begged, and then he went away. Next he went to the school-house, and you know what he did. That’s why you got the post-office.”

A light broke in upon the girl. “And you’ve known him before?”

“Yes, forty years ago. He loved me and I loved him. We had bad luck, and my father got into trouble. He and Hiram’s father were friend’s; been boys together, and Hiram’s father loaned him money. I don’t know how much–I never knew, but considerable money. My father couldn’t pay, and then come bad blood. The week before Hiram and I were to be called in church they struck each other, and when Hiram took my father’s part his father drove him out of his house, and Hiram hadn’t nothing, and went West; and I never heard from him nor saw him till the day he come in here last fall. Don’t you see, child, you got to take him back his money?”

Abbie squared her shoulders. The blood of the Puritan was in her eyes. This was a fight for home and freedom. Her flintlock was between the cracks of her log cabin. The old mother, with the other women and children, lay huddled together in the far corners. This was no time for surrender!

“No!” she cried in a firm voice. “I won’t give it back, not till I get good and ready. Mr. Taylor loaned me that two hundred dollars to make money with, and he won’t get it again till I do.” She wondered at her courage, but it seemed the only way to save her mother from herself. “What happened forty years ago has nothing to do with what’s happening to-day.”

The look in the girl’s eyes; her courage; the ring of independence in her voice, the sureness and confidence of her words, began to have their effect. The Genie of the Lamp was at work: the life-giving power of Gold was being pumped from her own into the poor old woman’s poverty-shrunken veins.

“And you don’t think, child, that it will bring you trouble?”

“Bring trouble!” No!

The cabin was saved; the enemy was in retreat. She could sing once more! “It will bring nothing but joy and freedom, you precious old Mother! Do you know what I’m going to do?”

“What, child?”

“I’m going to pay off the mortgage, every cent of it.”

She said “I” now; it had been “we” all the years before: Keep rubbing, dear old Genie. “Then I’ll fix up the house and paint it, and get you some nice clothes, and a new cook stove that isn’t all rusted out—-“

“You won’t resign, will you, Abbie–and leave me?” the mother exclaimed. The chill of possible desertion suddenly crept over her, (The Genie is often unmindful of others, especially the poor.)

“Leave you! What, now? You darling Mother. As to resigning, I may later. But I’m going to Boston when I get my vacation and stay a week with Maria, and go to the opera if I never do another thing. Oh! just you wait, Mother, you and I will lead a different life after this.”

“And you think, Abbie, you’ll make more than six hundred dollars?” Already the mother’s veins were expanding–wonderful elixir, this Extract of Gold.