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“Nice pigs, eh, Mr. Hauchawout?” commented my relative.

“Yes,” he answered, with a marked accent, at the same time turning a quizzical and none too kindly eye upon us.”It’s about time they go now. What they eat from now on makes me no money.”

I glanced amusedly at my relative, but he was gazing politely at his host.

“Any hay for sale, Mr. Hauchawout?”

“How much you t’ink you pay?” he asked cannily.

“Oh, whatever the market price is. Seventeen dollars, I hear.”

“Not py me. What I got I keep at dat price. Hay vill pe vorth yussed five tollars more if dis vedder keeps up.” He surveyed the dry green-blue landscape, untouched by rain for these several weeks past.

My relative smiled.

“Very well. You’re quite right, if you think it’s going to stay dry. You wouldn’t take eighteen a ton, I suppose?”

“No; nor twenty. I t’ink hay goes to twenty-two pefore July. Anyhow, vot I got I can use next vinter if I can’t sell him.”

I stared at this crude, vigorous, self-protective soul. His house and barn seemed to confirm all I had heard. The house was small, yellow, porchless, inhospitable, the walks at the front and side worn and flowerless, the grass, such as it was, nearly treeless. A thin dog and some chickens were in the shade of one fair-sized tree that graced a corner. Several horses were browsing in the barn lot, for it was Sunday, and the sectarian atmosphere of this region rather enforced a strict observance of the day. They were as thin as even moderate health would permit. But Hauchawout, standing vigorous and ruddy before his large newly painted barn, showed where his heart was. There was no flaw in that structure. It was a fine big barn and held all the other things he so much treasured.

But it was about his daughter that my relative chose to speak as we drove away.

“There’s a woman whose life has been ruined by that old razorback,” he reflected after volunteering various other details.”She’s no beauty, and her chances were never very good, but he would never let any one come near her, and now it’s too late, I suppose. I often wonder why she hasn’t ru
n away, like her sister, also how she passes her time there with him. Just working all the time, I suppose. I doubt if he ever buys a newspaper. There was a story going the rounds here a few years ago about her and a farm-hand who worked for Hauchawout. Hauchawout caught him tapping at her shutter at two in the morning and beat him up with a hoe-handle. Whether there was anything between them or not no one knows. Anyway, she’s been here ever since, and I doubt if anybody ever courts her now.”

II

I neither saw nor heard of this family for a period of five years, during which time I worked in other places. Then one summer-time, returning for a vacation, I learned that “the old man” had died, and the property had been divided by law, no will having been left. The lorn Ida, after a service of thirty-two or-three years in her father’s behalf, cooking, sweeping, washing, ironing, feeding the chickens and pigs, and helping her father to reap and pitch hay, had secured an equal fifth with the others, no more, a total of fifteen acres of land and two thousand dollars in cash. The land had already been leased on shares to her prosperous brother, the one with the automobile, and the cash placed out at interest. To eke out an existence, which was still apparently not much improved, Ida had gone to work, first as a laundress in a South Bixley (the county seat) laundry, at a later date as a canner of tomatoes in the summer canning season, and then as housekeeper in a well-to-do canner’s family. She was reported by my host’s wife as still husbandless, even loverless, though there was a rumor to the effect that now that she had property and money in the bank, she was being “set up to” by Arlo Wilkens, a garrulous ne’er-do-well barber of Shrivertown, a drunken, roystering, but now rather exploded and passé, person of fifty; and one Henry Widdle, another ne’er-do-well of a somewhat more savory character, since he was one who was credited with having neither the strength nor courage to be drunken or roystering. He was the son of a local farmer who himself owned no land and worked that of others. With no education of any description, this son had wandered off some years before, trying here and there to sell trees for a nursery and failing utterly, as he himself told me; and then going to work in a furniture factory in Chicago, which was too hard for him; and later wandering as far West as Colorado, where necessity compelled him to become a railroad hand for a time. (“I served my time on the Denver & Rio Grande,” he used to say. ) But finding this too hard also, he had quit, and returned to the comparative ease of his former life here, which had no doubt brightened by contrast. Once here again, he found life none too easy, but at the time I knew him he was making a living by driving for a local contractor, that being “the easiest thing he could find,” as a son of the relative aforementioned most uncharitably remarked.