By now the boy was quite himself and making desperate efforts to breathe without sobbing. “It’s powerful mizzable to be borned with ways that you can’t help,” he faltered, and the girl essayed to change the current of his thoughts.
“You knowed your Aunt Carliny and little Jakey had come back here to live, didn’t you, Grover Cleveland?”
“She done gran’daddy mean,” answered the boy and added after a long, tremulous breath, “Jakey’s shoes is wore out.”
They drove on in silence. When the boy had become quiet and too sleepy, Arsula believed, to take notice of what she was saying, she ventured to relieve her mind of some of its distracting emotions.
“If Carliny was where she’d ought to be, a-keepin’ house for her father, this little soul’d never get out of the house at night without her knowin’ it—I’m plumb sure of that. To think of her livin’ away off up there in that gully where nary somebody passes, month in and month out, in a ole hut with nothin’ but a dirt floor and no window; and chinks between the logs that you can put your hand into and her father the best-off man round yer! What you reckon he’d say if they was found froze plumb to death? And he such a powerful pious man and a-standin’ way up high in the church! Free-handed too—where he takes a notion—givin’ the preacher his rent free and all the wood he’s a mind to cut and haul and all the apples and corn and potatoes he’s a mind to harvest; and a-pilin’ up fodder stacks close to ole Mis’ Jimson’s fence and a-pullin’ out a rail with his own hands so’s her ole cow can get her head through and help herself.
“Carliny told me with her own lips that after she and her boy had come all the way from Yancey County—mighty nigh every step afoot too—her father wouldn’t let her in. She wouldn’t have come—for she’s got along tollable since she’s been a widow—only but she heard that he and Grover Cleveland wasn’t doin’ any good a housekeepin’ by theirselves; and it hurt her powerful to think that her sister Missouri’s little boy wasn’t gettin’ the right kind of care.
“Everybody’s clean done out about it. The preacher, he set out to labour with him, but Colonel Ledbetter he give him to understand that he was oversteppin’ his authority and since then nary neighbour darst speak up. But I’d give a pretty to tell Colonel Ledbetter what I think of him, and I aim to do it this very night.”
“Don’t you, Suly; ole man Ledbetter ain’t pleasant to talk to when he’s riled.”
There came the sound of some one tearing through the woods, and Thad brought Beauregard to a sudden stand. “Here we are,” he shouted.
“You-all got him!” called a quavering voice out of the darkness.