Chapter 28

To Tom himself it seemed that it was the old, easy-going mountain life which had receded. The days when he had sat upon the stone porch and watched the sun rise from behind one mountain and set behind another seemed to belong to a life lived centuries ago. But that he knew little of occult beliefs and mysteries, he would have said to himself that all these things must have happened in a long past incarnation.

The matter of the De Willoughby claim was brought before the House. Judge Rutherford opened the subject one day with a good deal of nervous excitement. He had supplied himself with many notes, and found some little difficulty in managing them, being new to the work, and he grew hot and uncertain because he could not secure an audience. Claims had already become old and tiresome stories, and members who were unoccupied pursued their conversation unmovedly, giving the speaker only an occasional detached glance. The two representatives of their country sitting nearest to him were, not at all furtively, eating apples and casting their cores and parings into their particular waste-paper baskets. This was discouraging and baffling. To quote the Judge himself, no one knew anything about Hamlin County, and certainly no one was disturbed by any desire to be told about it.

That night Rutherford went to the house near Dupont Circle. Big Tom was sitting in the porch with Rupert and Sheba. Uncle Matt was digging about the roots of a rose-bush, and the Judge caught a glimpse of Miss Burford looking out from behind the parlour curtains.

The Judge wore a wearied and vaguely bewildered look as he sat down and wiped his forehead with a large, clean white handkerchief.

"It's all different from what I thought--it's all different," he said.

"Things often are," remarked Tom, "oftener than not."

Rupert and Sheba glanced at each other questioningly and listened with anxious eyes.

"And it's different in a different way from what I expected," the Judge went on. "They might have said and done a dozen things I should have been sort of ready for, but they didn't. Somehow it seemed as if--as if the whole thing didn't matter."

Tom got up and began to walk about.

"That's not the way things begin that are going to rush through," he said.

Sheba followed him and slipped her hand through his arm.

"Do you think," she faltered, "that perhaps we shall not get the money at all, Uncle Tom?"

Tom folded her hand in his--which was easily done.

"I'm afraid that if we do get it," he answered, "it will not come to us before we want it pretty badly--the Lord knows how badly."

For every day counts in the expenditure of a limited sum, and on days of discouragement Tom's calculation of their resources left him a troubled man.

When