She withdrew, leaving the door partly open. Presently her voice floated to him from somewhere at the rear.
“’Tain’t here! Mom, you been usin’ it? Well, ’tain’t here. What’s ’come of it, I wonder?”
Hammerless Hampton’s face tightened. To the door he passed, drawing from under his coat the tool which, despite its clumsiness, he had managed to conceal.
“Maybe this is it,” he called. Feet padded inside, and both the girl and her mother appeared.
“Sakes alive! That’s it, now!” ejaculated the woman. “It’s hisn—got the two nicks into the edge that he never ground outen it, an’ there’s the place where one o’ the dawgs bit onto it.” She pointed to dull dents on the handle. “How come ye by it?” she added suspiciously. “What ye askin’ for it for, when ye got it already?”
“Just wanted to make sure it was his. I found it down the road a piece—in some corn-husks.” He watched her keenly. Her visage showed only blank wonderment. The girl, too, looked mystified, but she was probing his grim face with sharp eyes.
“An’—ye didn’t see nawthin’ o’ Nat?”
“Not a thing. But you can tell him, when he gets home, that I want to see him, and the best thing he can do is to wait for me.”
Without another word or look he swung away, leaving them staring after him in misgiving. On up the road he journeyed, turning off at the path leading to the lair of Snake Sanders.
The crawling mists had long since left the slopes, and when he emerged again into the Sanders field the shack was visible in all its raw nakedness. Smoke still curled from its shiftless chimney, but the only sign of life outside was a lonesome speckled hen pecking disconsolately at the bare dirt. Watching the windows, he marched up to the door and gave it a resounding kick. Then he jumped to one side.