confused, poor old soul. His mother said well she should think so, poor old lady. She asked, carefully, if she was taken good care of. Oh, yes, they said. That she was. Sadie’s practically giving her life to her. That was Grandpa Follet’s oldest sister and young Sadie was named for her. Lived right with her tending to her wants, day and night. Well, isn’t that just wonderful, his mother said. Wasn’t anybody else could do it, they agreed with each other. All married and gone, and she wouldn’t come live with any of them, they all offered, over and over, but she wouldn’t leave her home. I raised my family here, she said, I lived here all my life from fourteen years on and I aim to die here, that must be a good thirty-five, most, a good near forty year ago, Grampaw died. Goodness sake, his mother said, and she was an old old woman then! His father said soberly, “She’s a hundred and three years old. Hundred and three or hundred and four. She never could remember for sure which. But she knows she wasn’t born later than eighteen-twelve. And she always reckoned it might of been eighteen-eleven.”
“Great heavens, Jay! Do you mean that?” He just nodded, and kept his eyes on the road. “Just imagine that, Rufus, she said.”Just think of that!"
“She’s an old, old lady,” his father said gravely; and Ralph gravely and proudly concurred.
“The things she must have seen!” Mary said, quietly. “Indians. Wild animals.” Jay laughed. “I mean man-eaters, Jay. Bears, and wildcats-terrible things.”
“There were cats back in these mountains, Mary-we called em painters, that’s the same as a panther-they were around here still when I was a boy. And there is still bear, they claim.”
“Gracious Jay, did you ever see one? A panther?”
“Saw one’d been shot.”
“Goodness,” Mary said.
