All relics of the supper were cleared away; the fire leaped joyously up the chimney. L’onidas and Lucindy were asleep. The baby in his night-gown, all unaware that he cut an unpresentable figure before company, pounded up and down the floor, unmolested. The pipes were lighted. As Ben Doaks leaned down to scoop up a coal from the fire, his face was distinct in the flare, and Mrs. Jessup noted the disappointment and trouble upon it. Mrs. Sayles too deduced a sage conclusion. A glance was exchanged between the two women. Then Mrs. Jessup, with a view to righting matters between these young people, whom fate seemed to decree should be lovers, asked abruptly, “Did ye tell Lethe the news ’bout Mink?”
“Naw,” Doaks responded, somewhat shortly. “I ’lowed she knowed it long ago.”
“Naw, she don’t,” said Mrs. Jessup; “none o’ we-uns hyar on the mounting knowed it.”
She paused to listen to the wind, for it was astir without. A hollow, icy cry was lifted in the dark stillness,—now shrill and sibilant, now hoarsely roaring, then dying away in the distance, to be renewed close at hand. The boughs of the bare trees beat together. The pines were voiced with a dirge. The porch trembled, and the door shook.
“Why, Lethe,” resumed Mrs. Jessup, turning toward the girl, as she sat in a low chair in the full radiance of the firelight, “Mink ain’t out’n jail. The rescuers never tuk him out.”
The color left Alethea’s face. Her doubting eyes were dilated. Mrs. Jessup replied to the expression in them.
“Mis’ Purvine, she ’lowed ez she an’ you-uns hearn everybody sayin’ the rescuers tuk him out afore ye lef’ Shaftesville that mornin’. That war town talk. But ’twarn’t true. The jailer an’ the sher’ff tied an’ gagged him, an’ tuk him out tharse’fs in the midst o’ the dark, whenst nobody could see ’em. Makes me laff ter think how they fooled them boys! They jes’ busted up the jail so ez ’twarn’t safe ter try ter keep him thar no mo’, an’ the nex’ day the dep’ty an’ two gyards tuk him down ter the jail at Glaston,—an’ thar he’s safe enough.”
Alethea’s first thought, charged with vague, causeless self-reproach, was that she had let Sam Marvin, who had seen Tad since the disaster at the mill, go in the belief that Mink had been released. But how could she have detained him? And would he, a moonshiner, suffer himself to be subpœnaed as a witness, and thus insure his own arrest?
Her lips moved without a sound, as if she were suddenly bereft of the power to articulate.