minutes earlier, beheld their train go relentlessly on down the valley
to Hillsboro and the wedding celebration. I hadn't placed the kiddie,
but I might have known, from her own description of her family, to whom
she belonged.

First came Sallie Carruthers, sailing along in the serene way that I
remembered to have always thought like a swan in no hurry, and in her
hands was a wet box from which rose sterns protruded.

Next in the procession came Aunt Dilsie, huge and black and wheezing,
fanning herself with a genteel turkey-tail fan, and carrying a large
covered basket.

But the tail-piece of the procession paralyzed all the home-coming
emotions that I had expected to be feeling, save that of pure hilarity.
James Hardin was carrying two bubbly, squirmy, tousle-headed babies, on
one arm, and a huge suitcase in the other hand, and his gray felt hat
set on the back of his shock of black hair at an angle of deep
desperation, though patience shone from every line of his strong, gaunt
body, and I could see in the half light that there were no lines of
irritation about his mouth, which Richard had said looked to him like
that of the prophet Hosea, when I had shown him the picture that Father
had had snapped of himself and the Crag, with their great string of
quail, on one of their hunting-trips, just before Father died.

"Eve!" he exclaimed, when he suddenly caught sight of me, standing in
the middle of the dusty road, with my impedimenta around me, and as he
spoke he dropped both babies on the platform in a bunch, and the small
trunk on the other side. Then he just stood and looked, and I had to
straighten the roar that was arising in me at the sight of him into a