Page:Micheaux - The Conquest, The Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913).djvu/240

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The Conquest
CHAPTER XXXIV
EAST OF STATE STREET

I had in due time heard from Orlean saying she and Mrs. Ewis had arrived safely home. She wrote: "When I came into the house mama grabbed me and held me for a long time as though she was afraid I was not real. She had been so worried while I was away and was so glad I had returned before father came." They had received a telegram from her father saying that he had again been appointed presiding elder of the Cairo district and would be home within a few days.

I judged from what Mrs. Ewis had told me that the Reverend was not much of a business man and a hard one to make understand a business proposition or to reason with. He had only two children, and Orlean, as Mrs. Ewis informed me, was his favorite. She had always been an obedient girl, was graduated from the Chicago high school and spent two years at a colored boarding school in Ohio that was kept up by the African M. E. Church, had taught two years, but had not secured a school that year.

She had saved a hundred dollars out of the money she had earned teaching school. The young man who married her sister worked for a trading-stamp corporation and received thirteen dollars a week, while the Reverend was supposed to receive about a thousand dollars a year as presiding elder. There were some twelve or fifteen churches on his circuit,