“I don’t want ye ter tell me nuthin’!” he cried, fixing on her his brown fiery eyes, with a bright red spark in their pupils. “Ye make a fool out’n me. Ye don’t let me hev no mind o’ my own. I reckon it air ’kase I be in love with ye,—an’ nobody else. All the t’other gals war in love with me.”
There was none of his jaunty self-sufficiency as he said this,—only a dreary recognition of the fact.
“Ye hev cut me out’n a heap, Lethe; enny one o’ ’em would hev been mighty willin’ ter put up with me an’ my ways. They never harried me none, ez ef I couldn’t do nuthin’ right. I reckon I’d hev been happy an’ peaceable married ter enny o’ them.”
“I know, Reuben, an’ that’s the reason I wanter tell ye”—She paused, expecting to be interrupted. But he was looking at her coolly and calmly, waiting and listening. He was saying to himself that he might safely hear; it was best that he should know. He would be on his guard. He would not blindly fall again under her influence. He felt with secret elation, stern and savage, the handle of a pistol in his pocket. He had thought it no harm to borrow Jerry Price’s for the purpose of resisting arrest, finding it on the shelf in the spare room at Mrs. Purvine’s, the less because it was he who had given it to his friend, with his wonted free-handedness,—but indeed he had won it lightly, shooting for it at a match.
He stood with one hand on his hip, the other laid against the rock. His head was a little thrown back, his hair tossing slightly in the renewing breeze; he looked at her with dissent and doubt in every line of his face.
“Ye see, he kem hyar ter ax me ’bout Sam Marvin. Ye know I tole on the trial ’bout him moonshinin’.”
Mink nodded. The thought of those terrible alternations of hope and despair and remorse was very bitter to him still.
“An’ he ’lowed I knowed whar Marvin be now.”
“What’s he want along o’ Marvin?” demanded Mink, surprised.