Once more she looked up and down the road.
“Snake’s at home,” he told her. “At least I was told he was, when I came by his place just now. Maybe Nat’s there with him. I don’t know. Well, good-day.”
Without another look at the girl he swung about. At his first step, however, Marion stopped him.
“Wait a minute,” she said. As he glanced at her he found another change in her attitude. She still stood with unconscious dignity, but the smouldering scorn had died from her eyes, and her face had softened.
“I want to say thank you for what you done that day onto the road—makin’ that detective feller let go of me; and, more’n that, for helpin’ out—you know who—up to Uncle Eb’s. And you meant all right by tellin’ me jest now to look out, I shouldn’t wonder. So I say thank you for that too. G’by.”
With that she was gone into the house. He opened his mouth, shut it, glanced at Eliza Oaks, saw a faint smile in her face, and laughed shortly. With a wave of his free hand he started off again, and kept going.
“What a wayward, fiery little thoroughbred!” he thought. “Quick as a cat—now you see her mind and now you don’t. She made one awful fool of you, Hamp. Serves you right, too, confound you, with your tattling! But she thanked you, at that, like the real little lady she is. If she only had a chance to be somebody—if it weren’t for the black blood—and Steve—— Lordy, what a woman she’d make!”
The thought kept revolving in his mind until he entered the fallow little field beside his bleak abode. Then it fled.
His front door was open.
Instinctively he slowed. His searching scrutiny revealed no other change in the house. Only that door, which he had made to fit tightly by tacking on strips, stood as if shoved back by a hurried entrance—or departure.