whiteness of the collar made his brown skin look almost black. He
smiled boyishly and raised his hat awkwardly but did not speak.

Mary kept looking back along the street to be sure Duke Yetter had not
followed but in the dim light could see nothing of him. Her angry
excited mood went away.

She did not want to go home and decided it was too late to go to
church. From Upper Main Street there was a short street that ran
eastward and fell rather sharply down a hillside to a creek and a
bridge that marked the end of the town's growth in that direction. She
went down along the street to the bridge and stood in the failing light
watching two boys who were fishing in the creek.

A broad-shouldered man dressed in rough clothes came down along the
street and stopping on the bridge spoke to her. It was the first time
she had ever heard a citizen of her home town speak with feeling of her
father. "You are Doctor Cochran's daughter?" he asked hesitatingly. "I
guess you don't know who I am but your father does." He pointed toward
the two boys who sat with fishpoles in their hands on the weed-grown
bank of the creek. "Those are my boys and I have four other children,"
he explained. "There is another boy and I have three girls. One of my
daughters has a job in a store. She is as old as yourself." The man
explained his relations with Doctor Cochran. He had been a farm
laborer, he said, and had but recently moved to town to work in the
furniture factory. During the previous winter he had been ill for a
long time and had no money. While he lay in bed one of his boys fell
out of a barn loft and there was a terrible cut in his head.

"Your father came every day to see us and he sewed up my Tom's head."