Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III IDLE TONGUES AND SHARP ONES DABNEY TODD'S blooded Holsteins were tinkling their way back to town from the pasturage, under the leadership of little Davy Quigg, before Nance had been able to get her father washed and to bed, an inert, senseless lump of sodden stupidity. When sober, Joe Pelot was harmless and good-natured, even though inefficient beyond all hope of regeneration; when drunk his besotted inertia would have made angels weep. Nance was nearing the age of twenty-one, and oft-repeated occurrences of the kind had hardened her against the physical revulsion drunkenness brings to most women, but the hurt that would not heal was in her heart. Though her teeth gritted and the tears that came to her eyes were only tiny ones that clung to the lids, still her proud head was bowed. A great fear of happiness at times seized her. This day had been only a day similar to many that had gone before. Always this thing thatwas eating her heart out found some fresh form of insult and shame, and to-day it had evidenced itself before the minister. Dabney's Holsteins recalled fleetingly to her the fact that he and his sons were making the money that brought blooded cattle and many other forms of prosperity to them, in the same little shop that her father, and father's father, had owned. Some of the older people even to-day called it Pelot's Forge. The forge had gone, and with it the big farm it had paid for; and to-day, dollars — dollars as precious now as acres had been years ago — had gone the same way. Anger, too, flared in the girl's heart against one who either maliciously or unwittingly had brought forth this fresh relapse on her father's part. Old Joe Pelot was a drunkard, but he had his virtues. In his sober moments some remnants of a lost respectability ... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.