She brooded a moment on the thought, and the girls said nothing, watching her breathlessly.
“Do you reckon hit’d do me any good?” she questioned then, half-heartedly. “Why, dumb suppers always seemed to me jest happy foolishness for light-hearted gals that had sweethearts.”
“Oh, no!” disclaimed Pendrilla, joining her sister on the floor at Judith’s feet. “They ain’t nothin’ like foolishness about a shore-enough dumb supper. Why, Judith, Granny Peavey, our maw’s mother, told us oncet about a dumb supper that her and two other gals made when she was but sixteen year old, and her sweetheart away from her in Virginny, and she didn’t know whar he was at, an’ they brought her tales agin him.”
“Well?” prompted Judith feverishly. “Did it do any good? Did she find out anything?”
“Her and two others went to a desarted house at midnight—you know that’s the way, Jude.”
Judith nodded impatiently.
“They tuck ’em each some bread an’ salt, an’ a candle to put the pins in and name. They done everything backwards—ye have to do everything backwards at a dumb supper. I don’t know what happened when the candle burned down to the other girls’ pins—I forget somehow—but when the pin Granny had stuck in the candle an’ named for her lover was melted out and fell, the do’ opened and in he walked and set down beside her. They wasn’t a word said betwixt ’em. He tasted her salt, an’ he et her bread; and then he was gone like a flash! And at that very same identical time that thar young man was a-crossin’ the mountains of Virginny. It drawed him—don’t you see, Judith?—it drawed him to Granny. He came back to her, shore enough, three months after, and they was wedded. He was our grandpap, Adoniram Peavey—and every word of that’s true.”
Judith sank lower in her splint-bottomed chair, looking fixedly above the flaxen heads at her knees, out through the open door, across the chip pile, and away to the bannered splendours of the autumn slopes.
Cliantha laid her head in Judith’s lap and began to whimper.
“They’s awful things chanced at them thar dumb suppers,” she shivered. “I hearn tell of one gal that never had no true-love come, but jest a big black coffin hopped in at the do’ and bumped around to her place and stopped ’side of her. My law, I believe I’d die ef sech as that should chance whar I was at!”