"Good-day, Deborah!" said he; "if you are going my way, I can give you a lift."
"He calls me 'Deborah,'" she muttered to herself; then aloud--"Ay, and thank ye, Mr. Gilbert."
Seizing the tail of the near horse with one hand, she sprang upon the wagon-tongue, and the next moment sat upon the board at his side. Then, rummaging in a deep pocket, she produced, one after the other, a short black pipe, an eel-skin tobacco-pouch, flint, tinder, and a clumsy knife. With a dexterity which could only have come from long habit, she prepared and kindled the weed, and was presently puffing forth rank streams, with an air of the deepest satisfaction.
"Your'n, as far as you go,--always providin' you takes me."
"Of course, Deborah, you're welcome. I have no load, you see."
"Mighty clever in you, Mr. Gilbert; but you always was one o' the clever ones. Them as thinks themselves better born"--
"Come, Deborah, none of that!" he exclaimed.
"Ax your pardon," she said, and smoked her pipe in silence. When she had finished and knocked the ashes out against the front panel of the wagon, she spoke again, in a hard, bitter voice,--
"'Tisn't much difference what _I_ am. I was raised on hard knocks, and now I must git my livin' by 'em. But I axes no'un's help, I'm _that_ proud, anyways. I go my own road, and a straighter one, too, damme, than I git credit for, but I let other people go their'n. You might have wuss company than me, though _I_ say it."
These words hinted at an inward experience in some respects so surprisingly like his own, that Gilbert was startled. He knew the reputation of the woman, though he would have found it difficult to tell whereupon it was based. Everybody said she was bad, and nobody knew particularly why. She lived alone, in a log-cabin in the woods; did washing and house-cleaning; worked in the harvest-fields; smoked, and took her gill of whiskey with the best of them,--but other vices, though inferred, were not proven. Involuntarily, he contrasted her position, in this respect, with his own. The world, he had recently learned, was wrong in his case; might it not also be doing her injustice? Her pride, in its coarse way, was his also, and his life, perhaps, had only unfolded into honorable success through a mother's ever-watchful care and never-wearied toil.