any rate he listened unofficially, and helped Bud out with the
legal part of it, so that Bud walked out of the judge's office
financially free, even though he had a suspicion that his freedom
would not bear the test of prosperity, and that Marie's mother
would let him alone only so long as he and prosperity were
strangers.



CHAPTER THREE. TEN DOLLARS AND A JOB FOB BUD

To withhold for his own start in life only one ten-dollar bill
from fifteen hundred dollars was spectacular enough to soothe
even so bruised an ego as Bud Moore carried into the judge's
office. There is an anger which carries a person to the extreme
of self-sacrifice, in the subconscious hope of exciting pity for
one so hardly used. Bud was boiling with such an anger, and it
demanded that he should all but give Marie the shirt off his
back, since she had demanded so much--and for so slight a
cause.

Bud could not see for the life of him why Marie should have
quit for that little ruction. It was not their first quarrel, nor
their worst; certainly he had not expected it to be their last.
Why, he asked the high heavens, had she told him to bring home a
roll of cotton, if she was going to leave him? Why had she turned
her back on that little home, that had seemed to mean as much to
her as it had to him?

Being kin to primitive man, Bud could only bellow rage when he