Here the preacher's voice broke in like the deep roll of a bass drum. "Has this—ah—young woman any idea of what—ah—produces such a state of—ah—obstinacy in the brother's mind?"
"Not an i-dee!" was the reply, jolted out shrilly as the carryall struck a stone. "Not one good reason could he give Luella for putting off attending to his soul's salvation and trifling away his day of grace. Not one good reason, even to get her to marry him. But I think Luella is getting tired of dangling along. The other day I heard her joking about that little bald spot that's beginning to show on his head, and I noticed that Mr. Sam Carter's buggy has been hitched at their gate several times when I've happened to be passing. He's a widower, and you know, Brother Hubbs, that when widowers—"
The loud clanging of the church bell struck Sister Bowles's sentence in the middle, and the end of it was lost to the eager ears on the porch. Although this sound of the church bell was what Baptist Sloan had been waiting to hear for the last hour, he did not rise until the final echo of its ringing had died away in the farthermost part of the valley. Then he went slowly into the house and lighted a lamp.
The open door into the kitchen revealed the table where he had eaten his dinner and supper without removing the soiled dishes. In every corner was the cheerless look that betrays the lack of a woman's presence. He had done his own housekeeping since his sister's death in the early winter. As he passed the table he gathered up a plateful of scraps which he had intended to give to the cat, but had forgotten, and carried it out to the back door-step. He tried to be mindful of the old creature's comfort for his sister's sake; but he was an absent-minded man, irresolute in nearly every action, and undecided in all things except the one for which the neighbourhood condemned him.
Just before he entered the house he had almost made up his mind that he would not go to church that night. Sister Bowles's conversation had startled him with a new idea, and jogged him out of his well-worn rut. He would sit out on the porch till church was over, and then follow Luella home, and take up the thread of his protracted courtship where she had snapped it five years before.
But the habit of decades asserted itself. He bolted the back door, carried the lamp into the little bedroom adjoining the kitchen, and proceeded to brush his hair according to the usual Sunday-night programme of preparation. Sarah had always tied his cravat for him, and his stiff fingers fumbled awkwardly at the knot. That was one ceremony to which he could not grow accustomed, and he had serious thoughts of turning out a beard that would hide all sins both of omission and commission in the way of neckties.
At last he was ready, but even with his hand on the knob and his hat on his head, he wavered again and turned back. Cautiously tiptoeing across the floor to see that the blue paper shade was drawn tightly over the one tiny window of the little bedroom, he opened the door into the closet, and felt around until his hand struck a nail that marked some secret hiding-place in the wall. From somewhere within its depths he drew out a little japanned canister, branded, in gilt letters, "Young Hyson;" but it was not tea that he emptied on the bed and poured through his rough hands, horny with long contact with hoe and plow. It was a stream of dollars and dimes and nickels, with an occasional gold piece filtering through like a disk of sunshine. A wad of paper money stuck in the canister until he shook it. He counted that last, smoothing out the ragged bills one at a time, and then folding them inside a crisp new one so that its flaunting V was displayed on top.
One might have thought him a miser gloating over his gold, so carefully he counted it again and again, sitting there on the edge of his bed. But there was no miserly greed in the wistful glance that followed the last coin into the little canister, and it was with a discouraged sigh that he replaced the cover and sat looking at it, the slavish hoarding of years.
"It will take twenty dollars more," he finally whispered to himself; "and I can't depend on any ready cash until after wheat harvest." He counted slowly on his fingers May, June, July—it might be three months before he could get his threshing done, and three months, now that he was so near the goal of his life's ambition, seemed longer than the years already passed in waiting.
They were singing in the church when he went out on the porch again, and as he did not want to go in late, that decided the question that had been see-sawing in his mind. He sat down in the rocking-chair, with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. Sister Bowles's conversation still rankled.