The drops were redoubled on the roof, but presently they grew fewer, discursive, and now sounded only the fitful patter of those shed by the foliage where they had lodged.
A more turbulent gust banged the batten shutters and shook the door, then went screaming, screaming through the black night, with a voice so dolorous and wild that more than once Adelaide put down her knitting, and looked up with a face pallid and agitated, as if she realized in the sound the utterance of the dreary grief that rent her heart.
"Shet the door an' bar it up, Baker," observed Letitia. "Ye air younger'n me"—with a mimicry of age—"or I'd wait on you-uns."
The boy's manner of shuffling to the door and window and securing them kindled a smile in her eyes. He could not encounter them when he was once more ensconced in the corner, so he chanced to glance at the old dog, which instantly growled, and then he was fain to stare sedulously into the fire. "I wouldn't be s'prised none ef the coals war ter hop up an' scorch me," he said bitterly to himself, for the inner man, or boy, was by no means the submissive, humble entity which the outward shy, awkward cloddishness might intimate. The gusts had sprung after him upon the door, and shook it as if a hundred beasts had lain in ambush there, baffled by his forethought.
"Oh!" cried Adelaide, all her distraught nerves a-jarring. "What do that sound like?"
"Like the wind," said Letitia, bending her smiling face to the spinning-wheel, "the wind ez air stoppin' the rain, an' the corn crap'll be short. Don't ye see Baker thar drappin' a tear, like a good farmer, 'count o' the drought that this leetle rain don't break?"
Baker turned scarlet and shuffled his big feet and moistened his lips with his tongue, his traduced dry eyes, hot and angry, staring steadily at the fire.
"One tear, Baker, shed fur sins mought go further than that leetle tear o' yourn will go with the country's corn crap."
Letitia spoke solemnly, and looked with affected gravity at the boy, who was so lugubrious under her teasing that she could not resist, and burst into a peal of laughter. His lips mechanically distended, exhibiting two great unbroken arches of strong teeth.
"Don't, don't show all them teeth ter Moses, Baker," she adjured him, in pretended alarm. "Think how bent on gittin' teeth he be now, an' ef he war ter set his heart on havin' yourn too, how lonesome ye'd be 'thout 'em at meal-times!"