“Whar be Tad now?” Alethea asked suddenly, realizing that here was the man who had seen him last.
He glanced quickly at her, then in perplexed dubitation at his wife. In common with many women, she was willing enough to steer when it was all plain sailing, but among the breakers she left him with an undivided responsibility. She fell to pulling corn with an air of complete absorption in her work.
He made a clumsy effort at diversion. “By Gosh,” he declared, waving his hand about his head, “ef this hyar smoke don’t clar away, we-uns’ll all be sifflicated in it.”
But the smoke was not now so dense. High up, its sober, dun-colored folds were suffused with a lurid flush admitted from the wintry sunset. The black, dead trees within the inclosure stood out distinctly athwart the blank neutrality of the gray, nebulous background. The little house on the rise was dimly suggested beyond the corn-field, across which skulked protean shapes of smoke,—monstrous forms, full of motion and strange consistency and slowly realized symmetry, as if some gigantic prehistoric beasts were trembling upon the verge of materialization and visibility. The wind gave them chase. It had lifted its voice in the silences. Like a clarion it rang down the narrow ravine below. But Sam Marvin, expanding his lungs to the freshened air, declared that he felt “plumb sifflicated.”
“Whar be Tad now?” persisted Alethea.
He spat meditatively upon the ground. “Waal, Lethe,” he said at last, “that’s more’n I know. I dunno whar Tad be now.”
She detected consciousness in the manner of the woman and the girl. She broke out in a tumult of fear:—
“Ye didn’t harm Tad, did ye?” with wild, terrified eyes fixed upon him. “Ye didn’t kill Tad fur a spy?—’kase he warn’t.”
“Shet up, ye blatant fool!” exclaimed Mrs. Marvin, “layin’ sech ez that at we-uns’s door.”