“Well, I guess you're safe here, Sandy,” she said; “they'll never think o' lookin' for you twice't in the same place. Why didn't you send word for me before? You've kep' me a mortal long time a-waitin', and down on the Woodrow farm would ha' done as well as here.”
“It's a little too near that Potter. He'd smell me out as quick as if I was a skunk to windward of him. Besides, it's time I was pitchin' on a few new holes; we must talk it over together, Deb.”
He lifted the jug again to his mouth. Deb. Smith, although she had kept nearly even pace with him, was not so sensible to the potency of the liquor, and was watching for the proper degree of mellowness, in order to broach the subject over which she had been secretly brooding since his arrival.
“First of all, Sandy,” she now said, “I want to talk to you about Gilbert Potter. The man's my friend, and I thought you cared enough about me to let my friends alone.”
“So I do, Deb., when they let me alone. I had a right to shoot the fellow, but I let him off easy, as much for your sake as because he was carryin' another man's money.”
“That's not true!” she cried. “It was his own money, every cent of it,—hard-earned money, meant to pay off his debts; and I can say it because I helped him earn it, mowin' and reapin' beside him in the harvest-field, thrashin' beside him in the barn, eatin' at his table, and sleepin' under his roof. I gev him my word he was safe from you, but you've made me out a liar, with no more thought o' me than if I'd been a stranger or an enemy!”
“Come, Deb., don't get into your tantrums. Potter may be a decent fellow, as men go, for anything I know, but you're not beholden to him because he treated you like a Christian as you are. You seem to forgit that he tried to take my life,—that he's hardly yet giv' up huntin' me like a wild beast! Damn him, if the money was his, which I don't believe, it wouldn't square accounts between us. You think more o' his money than o' my life, you huzzy!”
“No I don't, Sandy!” she protested, “no I don't. You know me better'n that. What am I here for, to-night? Have I never helped you, and hid you, and tramped the country for you back and forth, by day and by night,—and for what? Not for money, but because I'm your wife, whether or not priest or 'squire has said it. I thought you cared for me, I did, indeed; I thought you might do one thing to please me!”
There was a quivering motion in the muscles of her hard face; her lips were drawn convulsively, with an expression which denoted weeping, although no tears came to her eyes.
“Don't be a fool!” Sandy exclaimed. “S'pose you have served me, isn't it somethin' to have a man to serve? What other husband is there for you in the world, than me,—the only man that isn't afeard o' your fist? You've done your duty by me, I'll allow, and so have I done mine by you!”