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He took a quill pen and drew a half sheet of paper toward him, poised his pen a moment and then wrote quickly. "What a pity I can't sign for him," he said, passing his paper over to the clerk. "Look at that; now even you, Timmins, though you have seen Mr. Mills's handwriting ten thousand times, would be ready to swear that the signature was his, would you not?"
Fortunately, Darby's illness took a better turn next day, and by sunset he was free from delirium. Things had not fared well over at Cove Mills's during these days any more than at Mrs. Stanley's. Vashti was in a state of mind which made her mother wonder if she were not going crazy. She set it down to the storm she had been out in that evening, for Vashti had not mentioned Darby's name.
He was, of course, anxious to try his hand at marble, and procuring a block of native Carolina stone, hewed out, with infinite labor, a bust of that South Carolina idol, John C. Calhoun. It was the best bust ever made of that celebrated statesman, and was the beginning of Mills's good fortune, and of the sequence of events which resulted in his statue of the hero of New Orleans.
"I wish, darling," wailed Miss Radford, "that you could tell me something I don't know." The clock on the mantelpiece struck the half-hour, and Mrs. Mills's niece, suddenly alarmed, said she would not be absent for more than ten minutes, an announcement the visitor received with an incredulous shake of the head.
An' it was Blenham as gave me both barrels of Johnny Mills's shot-gun? It was Blenham for sure, wasn't it, Steve?" "Yes, Bill. It was Blenham." "An' an' Blenham's right across there now? It's him I can hear breathin', Steve?" "Yes, Bill." "An' an' what for did you sen' for me, Steve? What are you goin' to do to him?" Packard beckoned to Barbee.
His mother is from a thinking familyhood of people, many of whom are well known in Eastern Ohio as pioneers in social and moral progress the MILLS'S. WILLIAM learned to love his country about as early as he learned to love his own mother; for his first lessons were loyalty and liberty, syllabled by a mother's lips.
But, without being a prophet, his prigship managed on the present occasion to make a pretty near prediction, for Sir Digby Oakshott did burn his fingers. He was summoned one evening to Mills's study to draw his horse. The twenty-one names were shaken up in a hat, and those present each drew out one. To Dig's disgust, he drew Blazer a horse whom everybody jeered at as a rank outsider.
The black women were all seated on a long bench or in an inclosed pew labelled "B.W.," and the negro men in one labelled "B.M." One William Mills, a jesting soul, being asked by a pompous stranger where he could sit in meeting, told the visitor that he was welcome to sit in Bill Mills's pew, and that it was marked "B.M." The man, who chanced to be ignorant of the local custom of marking the negro seats, accepted the kind invitation, and seated himself in the black men's pew, to the delight of Bill Mills, the amusement of the boys, the scandal of the elders, and his own disgust.
Mills," he cried exultantly, "I think I've got it!" "Got what?" asked the coach. "The play we want," answered Sydney, "the play that'll stop Robinson!" Mills's face lighted up, and he stretched forth an eager hand. "Good for you, Burr! Let's see it. Hold on, though; sit down here first and give me those sticks. There we are. Now fire ahead."
At last, arrayed for the purpose at a vast expense, I went to Miss Mills's, fraught with a declaration. How many times I went up and down the street, and round the square painfully aware of being a much better answer to the old riddle than the original one before I could persuade myself to go up the steps and knock, is no matter now.
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