I paying you for? I'll have to make Mr. Wilkes stop what he's

doing and run me off this lumber. Like as not, his crew won't be

working either. Great balls of fire! I never saw such a

nincompoop as Hugh Elsing! I'm going to get rid of him just as

soon as that Johnnie Gallegher finishes the stores he's building.

What do I care if Gallegher was in the Yankee Army? He'll work. I

never saw a lazy Irishman yet. And I'm through with free issue

darkies. You just can't depend on them. I'm going to get Johnnie

Gallegher and lease me some convicts. He'll get work out of them.

He'll--"

Archie turned to her, his eye malevolent, and when he spoke there

was cold anger in his rusty voice.

"The day you gits convicts is the day I quits you," he said.

Scarlett was startled. "Good heavens! Why?"

"I knows about convict leasin'. I calls it convict murderin'.

Buyin' men like they was mules. Treatin' them worse than mules

ever was treated. Beatin' them, starvin' them, killin' them. And

who cares? The State don't care. It's got the lease money. The

folks that gits the convicts, they don't care. All they want is to

feed them cheap and git all the work they can out of them. Hell,

Ma'm. I never thought much of women and I think less of them now."

"Is it any of your business?"

"I reckon," said Archie laconically and, after a pause, "I was a

convict for nigh on to forty years."

Scarlett gasped, and, for a moment, shrank back against the

cushions. This then was the answer to the riddle of Archie, his

unwillingness to tell his last name or the place of his birth or

any scrap of his past life, the answer to the difficulty with which

he spoke and his cold hatred of the world. Forty years! He must

have gone into prison a young man. Forty years! Why--he must have

been a life prisoner and lifers were--

"Was it--murder?"

"Yes," answered Archie briefly, as he flapped the reins. "M'

wife."

Scarlett's eyelids batted rapidly with fright.

The mouth beneath the beard seemed to move, as if he were smiling

grimly at her fear. "I ain't goin' to kill you, Ma'm, if that's

what's frettin' you. Thar ain't but one reason for killin' a

woman."

"You killed your wife!"

"She was layin' with my brother. He got away. I ain't sorry none

that I kilt her. Loose women ought to be kilt. The law ain't got

no right to put a man in jail for that but I was sont."

"But--how did you get out? Did you escape? Were you pardoned?"

"You might call it a pardon." His thick gray brows writhed

together as though the effort of stringing words together was

difficult.

"'Long in 'sixty-four when Sherman come through, I was at

Milledgeville jail, like I had been for forty years. And the

warden he called all us prisoners together and he says the Yankees

are a-comin' a-burnin' and a-killin'. Now if thar's one thing I

hates worse than a nigger or a woman, it's a Yankee."

"Why? Had you-- Did you ever know any Yankees?"

"No'm. But I'd hearn tell of them. I'd hearn tell they couldn't

never mind their own bizness. I hates folks who can't mind their

own bizness. What was they doin' in Georgia, freein' our niggers

and burnin' our houses and killin' our stock? Well, the warden he

said the army needed more soldiers bad, and any of us who'd jine up

would be free at the end of the war--if we come out alive. But us

lifers--us murderers, the warden he said the army didn't want us.

We was to be sont somewheres else to another jail. But I said to

the warden I ain't like most lifers. I'm just in for killin' my

wife and she needed killin'. And I wants to fight the Yankees.

And the warden he saw my side of it and he slipped me out with the

other prisoners."

He paused and grunted.

"Huh. That was right funny. They put me in jail for killin' and

they let me out with a gun in my hand and a free pardon to do more

killin'. It shore was good to be a free man with a rifle in my

hand again. Us men from Milledgeville did good fightin' and

killin'--and a lot of us was kilt. I never knowed one who

deserted. And when the surrender come, we was free. I lost this

here leg and this here eye. But I ain't sorry."

"Oh," said Scarlett, weakly.

She tried to remember what she had heard about the releasing of the

Milledgeville convicts in that last desperate effort to stem the

tide of Sherman's army. Frank had mentioned it that Christmas of

1864. What had he said? But her memories of that time were too

chaotic. Again she felt the wild terror of those days, heard the

siege guns, saw the line of wagons dripping blood into the red

roads, saw the Home Guard marching off, the little cadets and the

children like Phil Meade and the old men like Uncle Henry and

Grandpa Merriwether. And the convicts had marched out too, to die

in the twilight of the Confederacy, to freeze in the snow and sleet

of that last campaign in Tennessee.

For a brief moment she thought what a fool this old man was, to

fight for a state which had taken forty years from his life.

Georgia had taken his youth and his middle years for a crime that

was no crime to him, yet he had freely given a leg and an eye to

Georgia. The bitter words Rhett had spoken in the early days of

the war came back to her, and she remembered him saying he would

never fight for a society that had made him an outcast. But when

the emergency had arisen he had gone off to fight for that same

society, even as Archie had done. It seemed to her that all

Southern men, high or low, were sentimental fools and cared less

for their hides than for words which had no meaning.

She looked at Archie's gnarled old hands, his two pistols and his

knife, and fear pricked her again. Were there other ex-convicts at

large, like Archie, murderers, desperadoes, thieves, pardoned for

their crimes, in the name of the Confederacy? Why, any stranger on

the street might be a murderer! If Frank ever learned the truth

about Archie, there would be the devil to pay. Or if Aunt Pitty--

but the shock would kill Pitty. And as for Melanie--Scarlett

almost wished she could tell Melanie the truth about Archie. It

would serve her right for picking up trash and foisting it off on

her friends and relatives.

"I'm--I'm glad you told me, Archie. I--I won't tell anyone. It

would be a great shock to Mrs. Wilkes and the other ladies if they

knew."

"Huh. Miz Wilkes knows. I told her the night she fuss let me

sleep in her cellar. You don't think I'd let a nice lady like her

take me into her house not knowin'?"

"Saints preserve us!" cried Scarlet, aghast.

Melanie knew this man was a murderer and a woman murderer at that

and she hadn't ejected him from her house. She had trusted her son

with him and her aunt and sister-in-law and all her friends. And

she, the most timid of females, had not been frightened to be alone

with him in her house.

"Miz Wilkes is right sensible, for a woman. She 'lowed that I was

all right. She 'lowed that a liar allus kept on lyin' and a thief

kept on stealin' but folks don't do more'n one murder in a

lifetime. And she reckoned as how anybody who'd fought for the

Confederacy had wiped out anything bad they'd done. Though I don't

hold that I done nothin' bad, killin' my wife. . . . Yes, Miz

Wilkes is right sensible, for a woman. . . . And I'm tellin' you,

the day you leases convicts is the day I quits you."

Scarlett made no reply but she thought,

"The sooner you quit me the better it will suit me. A murderer!"

How could Melly have been so--so-- Well, there was no word for

Melanie's action in taking in this old ruffian and not telling her

friends he was a jailbird. So service in the army wiped out past

sins! Melanie had that mixed up with baptism! But then Melly was

utterly silly about the Confederacy, its veterans, and anything

pertaining to them. Scarlett silently damned the Yankees and added

another mark on her score against them. They were responsible for

a situation that forced a woman to keep a murderer at her side to

protect her.

Driving home with Archie in the chill twilight, Scarlett saw a

clutter of saddle horses, buggies and wagons outside the Girl of

the Period Saloon. Ashley was sitting on his horse, a strained

alert look on his face; the Simmons boys were leaning from their

buggy, making emphatic gestures; Hugh Elsing, his lock of brown

hair falling in his eyes, was waving his hands. Grandpa

Merriwether's pie wagon was in the center of the tangle and, as she

came closer, Scarlett saw that Tommy Wellburn and Uncle Henry

Hamilton were crowded on the seat with him.

"I wish," thought Scarlett irritably, "that Uncle Henry wouldn't

ride home in that contraption. He ought to be ashamed to be seen