"A body cain't be too careful about all these here things," she 21 said with a solemn sniff. "Hit's easy at a time like this for something to be did that crosses the luck."
Women came and went through the open doors, silent almost as the little breeze that played between. Everybody wore the same expression of mournful acquiescence in the natural order of things. Greetings were exchanged in low tones. Callista, carrying a basket of garden asters, came up the front walk, looking openly for her mother, guarding a little warily against Flenton Hands's approach. Some girls hurrying out to seek ferns in the low places of the wood met her, and she turned back with them, joining her activities to theirs and making a wreath of the flowers she had brought.
Flenton Hands was thirty years old. To have arrived at this age unmarried is, in the mountains, in some measure a reproach. True, he aligned himself sharply with the religious element of the community, and this, when youthful masculinity is ever apt to choose the broad way where there is more company, bespoke for him a certain indulgence or toleration that would have been denied a typical old bachelor.
He was cantankerous old Preacher Drumright's right hand at all times, and Drumright was safe always to approve him. He was the kind of man who seeks the acquaintance and company of those well-to-do and older than himself, paying a sober court to 22 respectability and money, and thus coming eventually to be rated as one of the elders, while he yet held the dubious position of an unmarried male who shilly-shallied in the matter of wedding.
No actual scandal ever attached to Flenton Hands. If there were improprieties to be debited against him, he kept such matters out of the sight of Turkey Track people, and only a vague rumor of something discreditable associated itself with his Valley connections to warrant young girls in pouting their lips and referring to him as "that old Flenton Hands"; while their mothers reproved and told them that he was one of the best young men, as well as one of the best matches, in the neighborhood.
So far as personal appearance went, he was well enough, yet with a curious suggestion of solidity as though his flesh might have been of oak or iron. The countenance, too, with its round, high cheek-bones, had an unpleasing immobility, resting always in a somewhat slyish cast of expression which the odd slant of the light gray eyes gave to it. For the rest, he was thin-lipped, with thick, straight, dark hair, and an almost urban air of gentlemanliness, an effort at gentility which, in a shorter and more cheerful individual, would have been smug.
"Flenton's gone for the coffin," Sallie Blevins said. "He 23 always tends to it when there's anything to do that calls for money to be spent."
"I reckon he's got a plenty," supplied little Rilly Trigg; "but someway I never could like his looks greatly. There, I oughtn't to have said that—and his granny laying dead in the house that-a-way."
Callista did not add her opinion to this discussion, but finding that she was in no danger of meeting Flenton, hurried the others promptly up to the house. As soon as she came in sight, Little Liza, six feet tall, with a jimber-jaw and bass voice, came and fell upon her neck and wept. Little Liza Hands got her descriptive adjective from being the third of the name. To-day she was especially prominent, because Granny Yearwood, the first Eliza, ninety pounds of fiery energy and ambition, had at last laid down the burden of her days. Her daughter, Eliza the second, had lain beside her husband, Eliphalet Hands, in churchyard mold these twenty years; and her big daughter, with the bovine profile, the great voice, and the timid, fluttered soul of a small child, remained in the world, the only Eliza Hands—yet still Little Liza to those about her. And for her name's sake, Little Liza was chief mourner.
The Hands girls all had a sort of adoring attitude toward Callista Gentry. Flenton wanted her, and they had been trying to get Flenton everything he wanted since he was small enough to cry for the moon, and strike at the hand which failed to 24 pluck it down for him. Callista had not intended to stay. She was to be over later in the day—or the same night, rather—with the young people who sat up. But Little Liza managed to detain her on one pretext or another until the coffin arrived and Granny was finally placed therein.