“True enough! Oh, we shall come out all right, now, thanks to you, Joe.”
And Jessie spoke with the happy little laugh that we had not heard for a long, long time.
CHAPTER XXII
AN OPEN WINDOW
It was, apart from the pecuniary relief that his coming had brought us, a great satisfaction to have old Joe again with us. Remembering his habit of not speaking until he was, as he sometimes expressed it, “plumb ready,” we forbore to ask any more questions until he had finished his supper, and smoked his pipe afterward. Smoking is a bad habit, I know, but I am afraid that there are few good habits from which people derive more comfort than fell to Joe when he was puffing contentedly away at his old clay pipe. After a long interval of blissful enjoyment he knocked the ashes out of his pipe, pocketed it, and then remarked, rather wistfully, apparently to the fire as much as to either of us: “I reckons he’s fas’ asleep, shore’ nuff!” “He” meant Ralph, of course.
“Yes,” Jessie said, “he’s been asleep ever since a little while before dark.”
“Yo’ reckons hit gwine fur ’sturb him, jess fur me ter tek’ a look at him, honey?”