“Waal,” retorted Mink, hardily, “I know she’d make it up with me enny minit I axed her.”
Doaks said nothing for a time. Then suddenly, “Waal, then, ef ye air layin’ off ter marry Lethe Sayles, whyn’t ye quit hangin’ round Elviry Crosby, an’ terrifyin’ Peter Rood out’n his boots? They’d hev been married afore now, ef ye hed lef’ ’em be.”
“Whyn’t she quit hangin’ round me, ye’d better say!” exclaimed Mink, with the flattered laugh of the lady-killer. “Laws-a-massy, I don’t want ter interfere with nobody. Let the gals go ’long an’ marry who they please,— an’ leave me alone!”
His manner implied, if they can! And he laughed once more.
Doaks glanced at him impatiently, and then turned his eyes away upon the landscape. Fascinations invisible to the casual gaze revealed themselves to him day by day. He had made discoveries. In some seeming indefiniteness of the horizon he had found the added beauty of distant heights, as if, while he looked, the softened outline of blue peaks, given to the sight of no other creature, were sketched into the picture. Once a sudden elusive silver glinting, imperceptible to eyes less trained to the minutiæ of these long distances, told him the secret source of some stream, unexplored to its head-waters in a dark and bosky ravine. Sometimes he distinguished a stump which he had never seen before in a collection of dead trees, girdled long ago, and standing among the corn upon so high and steep a slope that the slant justified the descriptive gibe of the region, “fields hung up to dry.” The sky too was his familiar; he noted the vague, silent shapes of the mist that came and went their unimagined ways. He watched the Olympian games of the clouds and the wind. He marked the lithe lengths of a meteor glance across the August heavens, like the elastic springing of a shining sword from its sheath. The moon looked to meet him, waiting at his tryst on the bald.
He had become peculiarly sensitive to the electric conditions of the atmosphere, and was forewarned of the terrible storms that are wont to break on the crest of the great mountain.
Often Mink appealed to him as he did now, imputing a certain responsibility.
“Enny thunder in that thar cloud?” he demanded, with the surly distrust which accompanies the query, “Does your dog bite?”
“Naw; no thunder, nor rain nuther.”
“I’m powerful glad ter hear it, ’kase I don’t ’sociate with this hyar bald when thar’s enny lightning around.”