The widow's hopeful was now a lank, pale-faced youth of eighteen, whose most imposing features were his big hands and a long nose that ended in a sharp point.

The shop had ruined him for manual labor, for he sat hunched up by the stove in winter, and in summer hung around Cotting's store and listened to the gossip of the loungers.

He was a boy of small conversational powers, but his mother declared that Skim "done a heap o' thinkin' that nobody suspected." The widow was a good gossip herself, and knew all the happenings in the little town.

She had a habit of reading all her stock of paper-covered novels before she sold them, and her mind was stocked with the mass of romance and adventure she had thus absorbed.

"What I loves more'n eat'n' or sleep'n'," she often said, "is a rattlin' good love story.