“I’m not,” said Red stoutly, “and,” catching her chin in his hand and turning her face up toward him—­“Nobody’d put your score much higher than that neither, if they trusted to their eyes this morning.”

The compliment hit so tender a place that Miss Mattie lacked the resolution to tear it out, besides, it was so honest that it sounded much less like a compliment than a plain statement of fact.  She bent hastily over the fire.  “I’m glad I look young, Will,” she said softly.

“So’m I!” he assented heartily.  “What’s the sense in being old, anyhow?  I’m as limber and good for myself as ever I was, in spite of my forty years.”

“You’re not forty years old!” exclaimed Miss Mattie.  “You’re joking!”

“Nary joke—­forty round trips from flying snow to roses since I hit land, Mattie—­why, you were only a little girl when I left here—­don’t you remember?  You and your folks came to see us the week before I left.  I got a thrashing for taking you and Joe to the millpond, and helping you to get good and wet.  The thrashing was one of the things that gave me a hankering for the West.  Very liberal man with the hickory, father.  Spare the clothes and spoil the skin was his motto.  He used to make me strip to the waist—­phee-hew!  Even a light breeze rested heavy on my back when dad got through with me—­say, Mattie, perhaps I oughtn’t to say so, now that he’s gone, but I don’t think that’s the proper way to use a boy, do you?”

“No, I don’t,” said Miss Mattie.  “Your father meant well, but his way was useless and cruel.”

“I’ve forgiven him the whole sweep,” said Red.  “But damn me!  If I had a boy I wouldn’t club the life out of him—­I’d try to reason with him first, anyhow.  Makes a boy as ugly as anybody else to get the hide whaled off his back for nothing—­once in a while he needs it.  Boy that’s got any life in him gets to be too much occasionally and then a warming is healthful and nourishing.  Lord!  You’d think I was the father of my country to hear me talk, wouldn’t you?  If somebody’d write a book, ’What Red Saunders don’t know about raising children’ it would be full of valuable information—­how’s that breakfast coming on?”

“All ready—­sit right down, Will.”

“Go you!” cried Red, and incautiously flung himself upon one of the kitchen chairs, which collapsed instantly and dropped him to the floor.

“Mercy on us!  Are you hurt?” cried Miss Mattie, rushing forward.

“Hurt?” said Red.  “Try it!—­Just jump up in the air and sit on the floor where you are now, and see if you get hurt!  Oh, no!  I’m not hurt, but I’m astonished beyond measure, like the man that tickled the mule.  I’ll take my breakfast right here—­shouldn’t wonder a bit if the floor went back on me and landed me in the cellar—­no sir!  I won’t get up!  Hand me the supplies, I know when I’m well off.  If you want to eat breakfast with me come sit on the floor.  I’m not going to have my spine pushed through the top of my head twice in the same day.”