From the open door of the bar on this particular October day, there
streamed the ruddy blaze of a fire newly kindled from knots of resinous
pine. Against this pleasant background might be discerned now and then
the shapeless silhouette of Betsey Bottom, the innkeeper, a soft and
capable soul, who, in attaching William Ming some ten years before, had
successfully extinguished his identity without materially impairing her
own. Bottom's Ordinary had always been ruled by a woman, and it would
continue to be so, please God, however loudly a mere Ming might protest
to the contrary. In the eyes of her neighbours, a female, right or
wrong, was always a female, and this obvious fact, beyond and above any
natural two-sided jars of wedlock, sufficed in itself to establish Mrs.
Ming as a conjugal martyr. Being an amiable body--peaceably disposed to
every living creature, with the exception of William--she had hastened
to the door to reprimand him for some trivial neglect of the grey mule,
when her glance lighted upon the stranger, who had come a few minutes
earlier by the Applegate road. As he was a fine looking man of full
habit and some thirty years, her eyes lingered an instant on his face
before she turned with the news to her slatternly negro maid who was
sousing the floor with a bucket of soapsuds.
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