“Whyn’t ye go ter his lawyer?” asked Jerry. “Harshaw, they say, he hev got ter defend him.”
“He wouldn’t listen; he fairly run from me.”
“In Moses’s name!” cried Mrs. Purvine, with sibilant inversion of her favorite exclamation, “what ails them crazy bucks in Shaftesville? All of ’em got the jim-jams, in jail an’ out!”
“Waal,” said Jerry coolly, “ef ye want ter tell him sech ez ye know, I’ll make him listen ter ye. I hev been summonsed on the jury fur the nex’ term, an’ I’ll hev ter go ter Shaftesville or be fined. An’ ef ye air thar I’ll see Harshaw don’t run from ye,—else he won’t run fur, no mo’. He’ll lack his motions arter that.”
“Ai-yi! When Jerry talks he ain’t minchin’ his words!” cried aunt Dely admiringly.
Alethea was very grateful for this stalwart championship. She said nothing, however, for she had no cultured phrases of acknowledgment. Her spirits rose; her flagging brain was once more alert; she was eager to be alone,—to think what she would say to the lawyer, to Mink, on the witness-stand. She hardly noticed Mrs. Purvine’s manner of self-gratulation, or her frequent glances toward her young people as they sat together before the dull fire. Alethea was very beautiful, and Jerry—Mrs. Purvine never deluded herself with denials of her adopted son’s ugliness—was good and manly, and as sharp as a brier. Any man might be esteemed a poor match for looks, unless it were the worthless Mink, so safe in jail.
The feat a woman’s imagination can accomplish in a given time is the most triumphant illustration of the agility of the human mind. Before either spoke again Mrs. Purvine had elaborated every detail of the courtship and engagement, pausing from time to time, as she placed the dishes on the table, and looking about the room in complete abstraction, planning how to arrange the furniture to give space for the dancing at the infair.
“Set out the supper in the shed-room, an’ take these hyar two beds an’ thar steads up-steers inter the roof-room,” she muttered, measuring with her eye. “The loom kin jes’ be h’isted out ’n the shed-room inter the yard—an’ I don’t keer ef I never see it agin—an’ the spinning-wheels set in the bedroom.” As to Satan, she had forgotten that he was quite capable of making himself small enough to hide in the fiddle.
The light was growing dull out of doors; the stridulous voices of the September insects sounded ceaselessly, scarcely impinging upon the sense of quiet, so monotonous was the iteration of their song. The strokes of an axe, betokening activity at the wood-pile, seemed to cleave the silence, and reverberated from the mountains, as if the echoes were keeping a tally. Alethea had rolled up the quilting frame, and it swung from the beams. Presently the children were trooping in, three great awkward boys, who evidently formed themselves upon Jerry Price’s manner, except the youngest, a lad of fourteen, whose face had a certain infantile lower, saved over from his juvenile days, and concentrating readily into a pout. Even his mother admitted that he was “sp’iled some.” Together they made short work of the egg-bread and “br’iled bacon.”