They tarried not long afterward, but trooped noisily up the ladder to the roof-room; and as they strode about on the floor, which was also the ceiling of the room below, it seemed momently that they would certainly come through.
Jerry lighted his pipe and sat on the doorstep; the fashionable Mrs. Purvine lighted hers and took a chair near. All the doors stood open, for the night was sultry. The stars were very bright in the moonless sky. The dogs lolling their tongues, sat on the porch, or lay in the dewy grass; making incursions now and then into the room, climbing cavalierly over Jerry’s superfluity of long legs, and nosing about among the ashes to make sure that none of the scraps had escaped.
“Don’t ye know I never waste nuthin’, ye grisly gluttons?” demanded Mrs. Purvine, the model housekeeper. But their fat sides did not confirm this statement, and, bating a wag of homage in the extreme tip of their tails, they paid no attention to her.
“What I’m a-honin’ ter know,” said Jerry Price presently, “air how them boys ez war along o’ Mink an’ war summonsed ez witnesses air goin’ ter prove he war drunk. Ef they ’low Mink war drunk the ’torney-gin’al ’ll try ter make out he war sober. He’s a-goin’ ter ax, ‘Whar’d he git the whiskey, bein’ ’s all the still thar is air a bonded still, an’ by law can’t sell less ’n five gallons. Then them boys’ll be afeard ter tell whar they got the whiskey, ’kase folks mought think they knowed who war makin’ it. An’ ef the moonshiners war raided, they mought declar’ ez some o’ them boys war aidin’ an’ abettin’ ’em, an’ the revenuers would arrest them too.”
“Don’t ye know who air makin’ it?” Alethea asked, a vivid picture in her mind of Boke’s barn, and Jerry Price and his cronies stalking their fantastic rounds about it.
“Naw, sir! an’ don’t wanter, nuther. I war along o’ ’em in the woods that night. I holped tote the jug. We lef’ it empty in Boke’s barn an’ fund it filled, but I dunno nuthin’ mo’.”
“Lethe,” said Mrs. Purvine, handing her a ball of gray yarn, the knitting-needles thrust through an ill-knit beginning of a sock, “I wish ye’d try ter find out whar I drapped them stitches, an’ ravel it out an’ knit it up agin. I hate ter do my work over, an’ I hev ter be powerful partic’lar with Jerry’s socks,—he wears ’em out so fas’. Ye’d ’low he war a thousand-legs, ef ye could see the stacks of ’em I hev ter darn.”
Alethea drew up a great rocking-chair, and now and then leaned over its arms toward the fire to catch the red glow of the embers upon her work, as her deft hands repaired the damages of Mrs. Purvine’s inattention. Suddenly she said in a pondering tone, “Why would the ’torney-gineral ruther prove Reuben war sober?”
“’Kase ef he war proved drunk the jury would lean ter him,” said Jerry.