She looked out of the window.
“I went for help—to Anne Marshey. Her babies had had it. Her husband was going to town and she said he would get the medicine for me. She did not tell him it was for me. He would not have done it for you. He did not know. So I gave her a dollar to give him—to bring it out to me.
“He came home in the snow last night. Baby was bad by that time, so I was watching for Doan. I stopped him in the road and I asked for the medicine. When he understood, he told me. He had not brought it.”
The woman was speaking dully, without emotion.
“It would have been in time, even then,” she said. “But after a while, after that, baby died.”
I understood in that moment the working of the mills. And when I looked at Hazen Kinch I saw that he, too, was beginning to understand. There is a just mercilessness in an aroused God. Hazen Kinch was driven to questions.
“Why—didn’t Marshey fetch it?” he asked.
She said slowly: “They would not trust him—at the store.”
His mouth twitched, he raised his hands.
“The money!” he cried. “The money! What did he do with that?”