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While Nelson spoke, Tim was hunching his shoulders forward in the darkness, listening with the whole of two sharp ears. His face worked in spite of him, and he gave an inarticulate snort.

“Well,” the woman said, “I think that speaks well for Tim. Why should you be worried about him?”

“I am afraid he is getting to love money and worldly success too well, and that is what I fear for the girl, too. You see, she is so pretty, and the idols of the tribe and the market, as Bacon calls them, are strong with the young.”

“Yes, that’s so,” the woman assented vaguely, not at all sure what either Bacon or his idols might be. “Are the children relations of yours?”

“No, ma’am; it was like this: When I was up in Henry County there came a photographic artist to the village near us, and pitched his tent and took tintypes in his wagon. He had his wife and his two children with him. The poor woman fell ill and died; so we took the two children. My wife was willing; she was a wonderfully good woman, member of the Methodist church till she died. I–I am not a church member myself, ma’am; I passed through that stage of spiritual development a long while ago.” He gave a wistful glance at his companion’s dimly outlined profile. “But I never tried to disturb her faith; it made HER happy.”

“Oh, I don’t think it is any good fooling with other people’s religions,” said the woman, easily. “It is just like trying to talk folks out of drinking; nobody knows what is right for anybody else’s soul any more than they do what is good for anybody else’s stomach!”

“Yes, ma’am. You put things very clearly.”

“I guess it is because you understand so quickly. But you were saying——“

“That’s all the story. We took the children, and their father was killed by the cars the next year, poor man; and so we have done the best we could ever since by them.”

“I should say you had done very well by them.”

“No, ma’am; I haven’t done very well somehow by anyone, myself included, though God knows I’ve tried hard enough!”

Then followed the silence natural after such a confession when the listener does not know the speaker well enough to parry abasement by denial.

“I am impressed,” said Nelson, simply, “to talk with you frankly. It isn’t polite to bother strangers with your troubles, but I am impressed that you won’t mind.”

“Oh, no, I won’t mind.”

It was not extravagant sympathy; but Nelson thought how kind her voice sounded, and what a musical voice it was. Most people would have called it rather sharp.

He told her–with surprisingly little egotism, as the keen listener noted–the story of his life; the struggle of his boyhood; his random self-education; his years in the army (he had criticised his superior officers, thereby losing the promotion that was coming for bravery in the field); his marriage (apparently he had married his wife because another man had jilted her); his wrestle with nature (whose pranks included a cyclone) on a frontier farm that he eventually lost, having put all his savings into a “Greenback” newspaper, and being thus swamped with debt; his final slow success in paying for his Iowa farm; and his purchase of the new farm, with its resulting disaster. “I’ve farmed in Kansas,” he said, “in Nebraska, in Dakota, in Iowa. I was willing to go wherever the land promised. It always seemed like I was going to succeed, but somehow I never did. The world ain’t fixed right for the workers, I take it. A man who has spent thirty years in hard, honest toil oughtn’t to be staring ruin in the face like I am to-day. They won’t let it be so when we have the single tax and when we farmers send our own men instead of city lawyers, to the Legislature and halls of Congress. Sometimes I think it’s the world that’s wrong and sometimes I think it’s me!”