Nevertheless, while he piqued himself on his domination, he was under her influence at the fleeting moment when he was with her. Perhaps her presence induced some tender affinity for the better things. He said with a sigh, “I hev done gone an’ got in a awful scrape, Lethe. I reckon nobody never hed sech a pack o’ troubles in this worl’.”
With a sort of pitying deprecation of the wiles of old Tobias Winkeye she gravely listened. Once she unconsciously put up her hand and stroked his mare. He was petulant, like a spoiled child, when he told how he only meant a jest and such woful destruction had ensued. “An’ me so boozy I dunno what I done. An’ that thar pore old man! An’ his mill plumb ruined! An’ all his gran’chillen an’ Tad ter keer fur!”
Her face had become very pale. Her voice trembled as she said,—
“Ain’t sech agin the law, Reuben?”
She always called him by his name, rather than the sobriquet his pranks had earned. He was unfamiliar with himself thus dignified, and it gave him an added sense of importance.
“Yes, but ’tain’t nuthin’ but ten dollar fine, mebbe, an’ a few days in jail,”—she gasped,—“ef they ketches me.”
He looked at her with a swift, crafty brightness that was wonderfully like the little creature whose name he bore.
“I wouldn’t keer fur that, though,” he added after a pause. “Bein’ in jail fur rollickin’ roun’ the kentry jes’ fur fun ain’t a disgrace, like fur stealin’ an’ sech. What pesters me so is studyin’ ’bout the old man and his mill, plumb ruined. Lord! Lord! I’d gin my mare an’ hogs an’ gun ef it hed never happened!”
She stood meditative and motionless against the leafy background, all dark and restful verdure close at hand, opening into a vista of luminous emerald lightened in the distance to a gilded green where the sunshine struck aslant with a climax of gold.
“I reckon ye think so, Reuben, but ye wouldn’t,” she said at last, with her fatal candor.