"Well, it is, Joe."

"Have they any children?"

"Four--a boy of seven and three little girls."

"Are they well off?"

"What, with such a father? No, they are very poor. She used to go out
washing, but now she has to stay at home to take care of the baby. Sam
was a brute to strike her. I don't wonder the relatives took a hand."

"Perhaps the relatives can help her."

"They can't do much, for they are all as poor as she is, and one of them
is just getting over an operation at the hospital."

"Where do the Cullums live?"

"Down on Railroad Alley, not far from the water tower. It's a mite of a
cottage."

Joe said no more, but what he had been told him set him to thinking, and
that evening, after his work was over, he took a walk through the town
and in the direction of Railroad Alley.

Not far from the water station he found the Cullum homestead, a mite of
a cottage, as the man had said, with a tumbled-down chimney and several
broken-out windows. He looked in at one of the windows and by the light
of a smoking kerosene lamp beheld a woman in a rocking-chair, rocking a