‘Then up around Tick Creek I worked for a man named Pike. A good clever fellow, and I stayed there two year. An old man, he was, that knew a heap about signs and farmed by tokens. His wife was young, thirty I reckon, and we-all made a jolly set till I see she had a fancy to me. In fact she was set to me more’n I liked and even got me so I couldn’t seem to help, a big quick-eyed woman, a fine-looker. But I pulled loose and went off – good clever man, old Pike was, and I couldn’t see my way to do him no dirt, so I pulled outen the country. I learned a heap from him about tokens. Then next year, over on Master’s place, I went plumb a fool over a girl but she wouldn’t marry me after all because the man she knew first come back from up around Clark County, and I got mad and quit the country. I was bad cut up over that and throwed away all the money ever I had saved up, every durn cent, on drink and one thing and another. Then I come up here in the St Lucy country to work for old Mrs Wingate, sharen half and half. Are you tired of my long-winded yarn?’

Ellen said that she was not tired. She wanted to hear more of the old man, Pike, but she stilled the question on her lips because the thought of him filled her with pain, a pain borrowed from the greater pain that centred about the thought of the girl near Master’s place. But she ruled her lips suddenly and asked the question she most wanted answered, whether the girl from near Master’s place had married the man who came back from Clark, but the answer, ‘Yes, oh yes, they hitched up,’ held no stored regrets.