Rhodes's eye was suddenly steady. His face had grown graver, indeed, but it had cleared. It wore a look now adjusted to inspection, and thoroughly in character—the pallid hue, the relaxing ligaments, and flabby flesh it showed only a moment ago were all resolved into the firm, controlled countenance of a man who has his nerves, his fears, his prospects, well in hand.
"Mrs. Yates," he said, with sober circumspection, "this is a very serious matter, to threaten to shoot Mr. Shattuck. I hope your husband told you so."
Poor Adelaide! With that sense of responsibility for woe which is in some sort assuaged by a completeness of confession, she broke out, with all the abasement of self-blame: "Oh, he did! he did! That's why we quar'led; that's why he lef' me. I know 'twar wrong, now. I reckon I never meant it then. But I wanted the Leetle People lef' be in thar graves, like they hev always been."
Rhodes's comprehension was at best but ill adapted to the reception of any subtle meanings. To his mind those words expressed a recantation of her former denial. His face hardened, but at the same time there was a look of genuine relief upon it, which Shattuck—still leaning upon the back of the chair, and airily flirting his hat in his hand as he glanced from one to the other—could not altogether interpret.
"It was indeed very wrong," Rhodes said, severely. "And might have been far worse. If your aim had been better, you might have killed Mr. Shattuck instead of Guthrie's colt."
She turned her eyes, full of a sort of confused terror, and her pallid face toward Ephraim, who stood near the doorway, a massive, stolid presentation of the rustic. He met her look with a glance of deep reproach.
"Fee hev been in mighty hard luck ter-day," he remarked. "Somebody hev been a-shootin' of his cattle—the leetle red steer, an' that thar small crumply cow named Beauty Bess." His tone was as if he recalled acquaintances to Mrs. Yates's mind, and had something of an elegiac cadence. "An' now hyar's that leetle colt ez he sot sech store by—spry leetle critter, with a powerful springy gait. Fee looked ter him ter show speed one o' these days."
Her wild eyes dilated. "Why, Eph," she cried, in a convincing, coercive voice, "I—I never shot the pore leetle critter!"
"He warn't pore! He war fat, fur true," asseverated Ephraim, with a farmer's pride in the state of his stock.
Rhodes burst into a sudden rollicking laugh, and Shattuck wondered at the evident change in his moral atmosphere. The candidate had found the explanation of his friend's unpopularity far more easily to be endured than the idea that he himself sustained a secret enmity. The circumstance of the rifle-shot would be felicitously accounted for by this woman's threats against Shattuck's projected investigation, her husband's quarrel with her for this reason and his subsequent desertion of her. The political status of the canvass might remain intact, suffering naught from her inimical feeling against Shattuck, who had made her husband his partisan.