is, I suppose Peter did, for not one glimpse did I or anybody else get
of him. Sam says Mammy set his meals down in the doorway of the shack
with one of her soft, soothing, "Dah, dah, chile," which was answered
with a growl from Peter. That ended the events of his life at The
Briers.

Sam worked early and late, and got tanned to the most awful deep
mahogany. All of him held out pretty well but his heels, which he came
in three times to have me fix for him; and once mother and I had to
dress a blister on his back that he got from wearing a torn shirt in the
potato-field.

I was wild with anxiety about Peter and the play and the poor little
heroine; I didn't know whether she was being murdered or separated for
life from the hero. Still, it was good to have Sam to myself for long,
quiet, hot evenings out on the front porch under the brooding doves in
the eaves above us. Sam never talks much but he listens to me, and
sometimes he tells me things from way down inside himself. And little by
little I began to understand all about the things he had been too busy
doing to tell me about.

"You see, it is this way, Bettykin," he said, one evening when the young
moon was attempting to silver the dark all around us as we sat on the
front steps, with mother away rounding off the second pair of socks for
Peter. "There wasn't one cent of money for me to take Byrd and Mammy and
make a start in New York. Even with the best sort of a backing, it is
always a ten-year pull for a youngster before he counts in the world. I
could have sold The Briers, but I couldn't make up my mind to do it, and
then while I hesitated I--I"--he paused a minute and steadied his voice,
while I took his hand and held on to it tight--"I got a call--a land