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There was the soft sound of a footstep on the padded stairs, and Percy Woodyard glanced into the room. "Hello, Tom!" he said briskly, and crossed to Conny, whose smooth brow he touched softly with the tips of his fingers. "How goes it, Tom?" "You are home early," Conny complained in her treble drawl. "Must go to Albany to-night," Percy explained, a weary note in his voice.
"There is Gossom, the little moth-eaten, fat man at the door. He is the mouthpiece of the People's, but he doesn't dislike to feast with the classes. He is probably telling Woodyard at this moment what the President said to him last week about Princhard's articles on the distillery trust!"
Besides, the possession of so much money was apt to arouse fears that might never have occurred to him otherwise. So he had readily assented to the proposition of his chum. Mr. Stallings was pleased to meet the second lad; and Thad quite took to the Southern storekeeper and woodyard proprietor at sight.
Well, when it 'uz a little pas' midnight, as I reckoned, en I had come fifteen or twenty mile, I see de lights o' a steamboat layin' at de bank, whah dey warn't no town en no woodyard, en putty soon I ketched de shape o' de chimbly tops ag'in' de stars, en den good gracious me, I 'most jumped out o' my skin for joy!
She had fished that up with the aid of the amiable Senator, who had spoken a word here and a word there in behalf of young Woodyard. Conny was very well pleased with herself as a wife, and she knew that her husband was pleased with her. Moreover, she had not the slightest intention of permitting anything to interfere with her wifely duties as she saw them....
Which did not mean that Cornelia Woodyard had sold her husband to the Senator, nothing as crude as that, but merely that she "knew the values" of this life. The Senator and Conny often talked of Percy, the promise he had shown, his ability and popularity among all kinds of men.
The solitude was awful; so was the darkness of the shade; so was the stifling heat; and right glad we were when we saw an opening in the trees, and the little man quickened his pace, and stopped with an air of triumph not unmixed with awe on the edge of a circular pool of mud and water some two or three acres in extent. 'Dere de debbil's woodyard, said he, with somewhat bated breath.
That, as Cornelia Woodyard felt, was the note of the day. "You must be talked about by the right people, if you want to be heard, if you want your show!" she had said to Cairy. Thanks to Lane's rapid rise in the railroad corporation, Isabelle had come legitimately within the zone of interest.
Douglass, and maple-sugar, and Philetus, and an unfilled woodyard, and an empty flour-barrel, and revelled in the pure ether.
The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line that was the woods on t'other side; you couldn't make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness spreading around; then the river softened up away off, and warn't black any more, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along ever so far away trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by and by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there's a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log-cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t'other side of the river, being a woodyard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh and sweet to smell on account of the woods and the flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they've left dead fish laying around, gars and such, and they do get pretty rank; and next you've got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it!
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