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“What are they a-goin’ to the factory for on Sunday evening?” Johnnie inquired.

“Night turn,” replied Buckheath briefly.  “Sunday’s over at sundown.”

“Oh, yes,” agreed Johnnie dutifully, but rather disheartened.  “Trade must be mighty good if they have to work all night.”

“Them that works don’t get any more for it,” retorted Shade harshly.

“What’s the little ones goin’ to the mill for?” Johnnie questioned, staring up at him with apprehensive eyes.

“Why, to play, I reckon,” returned the young fellow ironically.  “Folks mostly does go to the mill to play, don’t they?”

The girl ran forward and clasped his arm with eager fingers that shook.  “Shade!” she cried; “they can’t work those little babies.  That one over there ain’t to exceed four year old, and I know it.”

The man looked indifferently to where a tiny boy trotted at his mother’s heels, solemn, old-faced, unchildish.  He laughed a little.

“That thar chap is the oldest feller in the mills,” he said.  “That’s Benny Tarbox.  He’s too short to tend a frame, but his maw lets him help her at the loom—­every weaver has obliged to have helpers wait on ’em.  You’ll get used to it.”

Get used to it!  She pulled the sunbonnet about her face.  The gold was all gone from the earth, and from her mood as well.  She raised her eyes to where the last brightness lingered on the mountain-top.  Up there they were happy.  And even as her feet carried her forward to Pap Himes’s boarding-house, her soul went clamouring, questing back toward the heights, and the sunlight, the love and laughter, she had left behind.

“The power and the glory—­the power and the glory,” she whispered over and over to herself.  “Is it all back there?” Again she looked wistfully toward the heights.  “But maybe a body with two feet can climb.”

CHAPTER IV

OF THE USE OF FEET

The suburb of Cottonville bordered a creek, a starveling, wet-weather stream which offered the sole suggestion of sewerage.  The village was cut in two by this natural division.  It clung to the shelving sides of the shallow ravine; it was scattered like bits of refuse on the numerous railroad embankments, where building was unhandy and streets almost impossible, to be convenient to the mills.  Six big factories in all, some on one side of the state line and some on the other, daily breathed in their live current of operatives and exhaled them again to fill the litter of flimsy shanties.

The road which wound down from the heights ran through the middle of the village and formed its main street.  Across the ravine from it, reached by a wooden bridge, stood a pretentious frame edifice, a boarding-house built by the Gloriana mill for the use of its office force and mechanics.  Men were lounging on the wide porches of this structure in Sabbath-afternoon leisure, smoking and singing.  The young Southern male of any class is usually melodious.  Across the hollow came the sounds of a guitar and a harmonica.