“He’d hev walloped the life out’n me, ef I hed told. He kem nigh every day ter the mill arterward, whenst they war a-s’archin’ fur the body. An’ his eyes looked so black an’ mad an’ cur’ous whenst he cut ’em round at me, I ’lowed he knowed what I knowed. An’ I war afeard o’ him.”
Aunt Dely could not be altogether repressed. “Waal, ’Gustus Tom, ye air a bad aig,” she remarked, politely. “Ye ter know all that whenst ye war down thar at Shaftesville, along o’ yer gran’dad, an’ seen them men a-talkin’ by the yard-medjure, an’ a-cavortin’ ’bout in the court, ez prideful ez ef thar brains war ez nimble ez thar tongues; an’ ye look at ’em try Mink fur bustin’ down the mill an’ drowndin’ Tad, an’ ye ter know ez Pete Rood done it,—an’ ye say nuthin’!”
“Waal,” said ’Gustus Tom, sorely beset, “he war a-settin’ thar in the cheer; he could hev told hisself.”
“Whyn’t ye tell arter he drapped dead?” suggested the politic Mrs. Purvine.
The boy winced at the recollection. “He looked so awful!” he said, putting up his hand to his eyes as if to shut out the image presented. “I war ’feared he’d harnt me.”
It occurred to sister Eudora that this investigation was degenerating into a persecution of ’Gustus Tom. She had looked from one to the other in grave excitement and with a flushing face, as she stood on the hearth, the breath from the fire waving her flaxen hair, hanging upon her shoulders.
Suddenly, with an accession of color, she stepped across the broad, ill-joined stones, and, fixing a threatening eye on Mrs. Purvine’s moon-face, she lifted her fat hand, and retributively smote that lady on the knee.
’Gustus Tom had never manifested any special desire to suit his own conduct to a high standard of deportment, but he appeared to entertain the most sedulous solicitude concerning sister Eudory’s manners, and to be jealous that she should be esteemed the pink of juvenile propriety. His mortification at the present lapse was very great. It expressed itself in such unequivocal phrase, such energetic shakings of his tow-head, which seemed communicated, with diminished rigor, however, to her plump little shoulders,—for he went through all the motions of discipline,—that Mrs. Purvine, beaming with injudicious laughter, was forced to interfere. Her indulgence did not serve to reassure sister Eudory, who stood dismayed at the fullness of fraternal displeasure. She presently put her hands before her eyes, although she did not shed tears, and thus she was led toward the door, to be taken home as unfit for polite society. Mrs. Purvine hurried after her, carrying the roasted egg—which was very hot, in its shell—between two chips, and further pressing upon her a present of a sweet-potato, an ear of pop-corn, and a young kitten, all of which sister Eudory, regardless of the animate and the inanimate, the hot and the cold, carried together in her apron. The affront was but a slight matter to aunt Dely, whose lenient temperament precluded her from viewing it as an enormity; but as the brother and sister went away in humiliation, one could well guess that sister Eudora would be a woman grown before she would be allowed to contemplate with indifference the dreadful day when she “hit Mis’ Purvine.”
In whatever manner it might have seemed judicious to make use, in Mink’s interest, of the disclosures of Peter Rood’s agency in the destruction of the mill, anything like caution, or reserve, or secrecy was rendered impossible by the circumstance that it was Mrs. Purvine who shared in the discovery of the fact. For weeks no one passed the house, going or coming on the winding road, whom she did not descry through the worldly glass windows,—which thus demonstrated an additional justification for their existence,—and whom she did not hail with a loud outcry from the unsteady flight of steps, and bring to a not unwilling pause as she hurried out to the fence, with her glib tongue full of words. There was no weather too cold for the indulgence of this gossip. Sometimes aunt Dely would merely fling her apron over her head, if the exigency suggested haste; or she would hood herself with her shawl, like a cowled friar, and stand in the snow, defiant of the rigors of the temperature. More often, however, the passer-by would suffer himself to be persuaded to come in and sit down by aunt Dely’s fire, and discuss with her all the details so tardily elicited. Pete Rood’s death, considered as a judgment upon him, was a favorite point of contemplation, offering that symmetrical exposition of cause and effect, sin and retribution, peculiarly edifying to the obdurate in heart and acceptable to the literalist in religion. So much was said on this subject at the store, and the blacksmith-shop, and the saw-mill,—those places where the mountain cronies most congregated,—that it came to the ear of Rood’s relatives with all the added poignancy of comment. They indignantly maintained that only the ingenuity of malice could feign to attach any special meaning to the moment or manner of his death, for it was widely known that he had for years suffered from a serious affection of the heart; they stigmatized the whole story as an effort to blacken his name in order to clear Mink Lorey. Their attitude and sentiment enlisted a certain sympathy, and it was only when they were not of the company that the counter-replication was made that it was a supremely significant moment when Peter Rood’s doom fell upon him, and that it behooves those who sit in the shadow of death to be not easily diverted from the true interpretation of the darkling signs of the wrath of God.