"If I don't keep an eye on that slick scamp, Johnson, he'll steal my lumber and sell it and put the money in his pocket.
When I can get a good man to run the mill for me, then I won't have to go out there so often. Then I can spend my time in town selling lumber."
Selling lumber in town!
That was worst of all.
She frequently did take a day off from the mill and peddle lumber and, on those days, Frank wished he could hide in the dark back room of his store and see no one.
His wife selling lumber!
And people were talking terrible about her.
Probably about him too, for permitting her to behave in so unwomanly a fashion.
It embarrassed him to face his customers over the counter and hear them say:
"I saw Mrs. Kennedy a few minutes ago over at . . ." Everyone took pains to tell him what she did.
Everyone was talking about what happened over where the new hotel was being built.
Scarlett had driven up just as Tommy Wellburn was buying some lumber from another man and she climbed down out of the buggy among the rough Irish masons who were laying the foundations, and told Tommy briefly that he was being cheated.
She said her lumber was better and cheaper too, and to prove it she ran up a long column of figures in her head and gave him an estimate then and there.
It was bad enough that she had intruded herself among strange rough workmen, but it was still worse for a woman to show publicly that she could do mathematics like that.
When Tommy accepted her estimate and gave her the order, Scarlett had not taken her departure speedily and meekly but had idled about, talking to Johnnie Gallegher, the foreman of the Irish workers, a hard-bitten little gnome of a man who had a very bad reputation.
The town talked about it for weeks.
On top of everything else, she was actually making money out of the mill, and no man could feel right about a wife who succeeded in so unwomanly an activity.
Nor did she turn over the money or any part of it to him to use in the store.
Most of it went to Tara and she wrote interminable letters to Will Benteen telling him just how it should be spent.
Furthermore, she told Frank that if the repairs at Tara could ever be completed, she intended to lend out her money on mortgages.
"My!
My!" moaned Frank whenever he thought of this.
A woman had no business even knowing what a mortgage was.
Scarlett was full of plans these days and each one of them seemed worse to Frank than the previous one.
She even talked of building a saloon on the property where her warehouse had been until Sherman burned it.
Frank was no teetotaler but he feverishly protested against the idea.
Owning saloon property was a bad business, an unlucky business, almost as bad as renting to a house of prostitution.
Just why it was bad, he could not explain to her and to his lame arguments she said
"Fiddle-dee-dee!"
"Saloons are always good tenants.
Uncle Henry said so," she told him.
"They always pay their rent and, look here, Frank, I could put up a cheap salon out of poor-grade lumber I can't sell and get good rent for it, and with the rent money and the money from the mill and what I could get from mortgages, I could buy some more sawmills."
"Sugar, you don't need any more sawmills!" cried Frank, appalled.
"What you ought to do is sell the one you've got.
It's wearing you out and you know what trouble you have keeping free darkies at work there--"
"Free darkies are certainly worthless," Scarlett agreed, completely ignoring his hint that she should sell.
"Mr. Johnson says he never knows when he comes to work in the morning whether he'll have a full crew or not.
You just can't depend on the darkies any more.
They work a day or two and then lay off till they've spent their wages, and the whole crew is like as not to quit overnight.
The more I see of emancipation the more criminal I think it is.
It's just ruined the darkies.
Thousands of them aren't working at all and the ones we can get to work at the mill are so lazy and shiftless they aren't worth having.
And if you so much as swear at them, much less hit them a few licks for the good of their souls, the Freedmen's Bureau is down on you like a duck on a June bug."
"Sugar, you aren't letting Mr. Johnson beat those--"
"Of course not," she returned impatiently.
"Didn't I just say the Yankees would put me in jail if I did?"
"I'll bet your pa never hit a darky a lick in his life," said Frank.
"Well, only one. A stable boy who didn't rub down his horse after a day's hunt.
But, Frank; it was different then.
Free issue niggers are something else, and a good whipping would do some of them a lot of good."