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 the day before the doings. He was surrounded by tugs and collars, sitting in the midst of the confusion on a low bench in the center of the kitchen floor. Mollie sat off to one side, smoking her pipe with the placid enjoyment of a hen in a dust bath beside the road. There was radiant kindness in her hollow, homely face; she nodded as Dunham darkened the door.

"Lord love you, Mr. Dunham, you ain't been around to see a body in a coon's age," she chided him. "Come in out of the hot sun and set down and rest your hands and face."

"Pickin' up, ain't you?" Shad remarked, putting out a feeler, not certain how he was going to square himself for his humorous break at the border camp that day.

"If I pick up any more I'll be so fat I'll waddle like a goose," Bill replied.

This eased the situation for Shad. He saw he wasn't going to be hauled over the coals for that mistaken piece of pleasantry. The cramped feeling went out of his legs; he breathed freely, and took a chew. He mumbled around the plug with a nosey sound, so full of gab he couldn't waste a second, trying to talk as he twisted off the big hunk of tobacco and worked it back against his jaw.

"Um-m-m-m, plenty goin' on while you've been laid up, Bill."

"Yes, I've got over the notion things'd stop if I was to die."

"Some folks thinks the grease'll burn offen the