“If there is,” he said, so seriously she knew he meant his offer. “If there is, let me know. Maybe I can help.”
“I’m not asking help,” she told him sullenly.
“Is there anything definite? Anything wrong?”
She said, with a hot flash of her dark eyes in his direction: “I told you no, didn’t I? What do you have to butt in for?”
Wint considered that, and he filled his pipe and lighted it; and at last he turned to the door. From the doorway he called to her: “If anything turns up, Hetty, count on me.”
She nodded, without speaking; and he left her. He was more troubled than he would have cared to admit; and he was convinced, in spite of what Hetty had said, that there was something wrong.
The third or fourth day after, Hardiston meanwhile moving along the even tenor of its way, Wint decided, after supper at home, that he wanted to see Amos. He telephoned the Congressman’s home, and Agnes answered. He asked if Amos was at home.
“He went uptown for the mail,” Agnes told him. “But he said he’d be right back. He’ll be here in a few minutes.”
“Tell him I’m coming down, will you?” Wint suggested, and Agnes promised to do so. Wint took his hat and started for Amos’s home. He thought of going through town on the chance of picking Amos up at the Post Office; but the mail had been in for an hour, and he decided Amos would have reached his home before he got there, so he went on. Wint and Amos lived on the same street, but at different ends of the town. The better part of a mile lay between the two houses. The stores and business houses were the third point of a triangle of which the Chase home and Amos’s formed the other angles.
The night was warm and moonlit; a night in June. The street along which Wint’s route lay was shaded on either side by spreading trees, and lined with the attractive, comfortable homes of Hardiston folks who knew what homes should be. Wint met a few people: A young fellow with a flower in his buttonhole, in a great deal of a hurry; a boy and a girl with linked arms; a man, a woman here and there. At one corner, in the circle of radiance from a sputtering electric light, a dozen boys were playing “Throw the Stick.” Wint heard their cries while he was still a block or two away; he saw their shadowy figures scurrying in the dust, or crouching behind bushes and houses in the adjoining yards. As he passed the light, a woman came to the door of one of the houses and called shrilly: