always
pulls the fodder an’ sech - I knows ez that air a true word,” said Birt, bluntly. “An’ I can’t git away from the tanyard at all ef ye won’t holp me, ’kase old Jube ’lowed he wouldn’t let me swop with a smaller boy ter work hyar; an’ all them my size, an’ bigger, air made ter work with thar dads, ’ceptin’ you-uns.”
Nate heard, but he hardly looked as if he did, so busily absorbed was he in fitting this fragment of fact into his mental mosaic. It had begun to assume the proportions of a distinct design.
He suddenly asked a question of apparent irrelevancy.
“This hyar land down the ravine don’t b’long ter yer folkses - who do it b’long ter?”
“Don’t b’long ter nobody, ye weasel!” Birt retorted, in rising wrath. “D’ye s’pose I’d be a-stealin’ of gold off’n somebody else’s land?”
Nate’s sly, thin face lighted up wonderfully. He seemed in a fever of haste to terminate the conference and get away. He agreed to his friend’s proposition and promised to be at the bark-mill bright and early in the morning. As he trudged off, Birt Dicey stood watching the receding figure. His eyes were perplexed, his mind full of anxious foreboding. He hardly knew what he feared. He had only a vague sense of mischief in the air, as slight but as unmistakable as the harbinger of storm on a sunshiny summer day.
“I wisht I hedn’t tole him nuthin’,” he said, as he wended his way home that night. “Ef my mother hed knowed bout’n it all, I wouldn’t hev been ’lowed ter tell him. She
de
spises the very sight o’ this hyar Nate Griggs - an’ yit she say she dunno why.”