She looked down piteously at the girl; then as she stooped to lift the baby, her hands trembled, and she fumbled so that Moses made some shift to raise his own indolent bulk and snuggle into her arms.
"B'lieve them men?" echoed Letitia, her eyes ablaze. "I'd b'lieve his word agin the Bible. I ain't keerin' 'bout t'others." She seemed, with a toss of her head, as if she annihilated them.
Adelaide could not account for her own words afterward. It was so strange a transition from her own absorbing; tumultuous, insistent troubles to intrude into the subtle, incipient, unrealized thoughts and feelings of another.
"Litt," she said, as calmly as if nothing of moment had happened—she had seated herself, with the child's face close to her cheek—"ye oughtn't ter talk that-a-way. That man don't keer nuthin' 'bout you-uns."
Letitia slowly turned her face. There was in its expression many a phase of bitter introspection, wonder underlying them all, and a sort of helpless despair as a finality, dumb and infinitely pathetic. Somehow, ignorant as the other was, little as she could have described or differentiated it, she became sharply aware of the wound she had dealt, the poignant rankling of the heart that received it. She sought, in a panic of regret and self-reproach, to nullify it.
"Ye don't keer, though," she clumsily tried to laugh it off. "Ye be always a-tellin' ez how ye be no favorite 'mongst the men folks, an' 'pear ter think it's a sorter feather in yer cap ter be too ch'ice an' smart fur the gineral run."
To her surprise, the girl showed no resentment. It seemed that that calamitous possibility had dwarfed every other consideration.
"I ain't keerin' fur sech ez them," she said, slowly, with a tremor in her low voice, as if she made the distinction clear to her own mind.
The sudden, heavy footfalls of Baker Anderson sounded upon the puncheons. He had repaired to the wood-pile for pine knots, and he seemed, in heaping them upon the fire, to seek to make amends for a dereliction of duty, plain to his own sense if not to others.
"I didn't know what in thunder I oughter hev said or done, Mis' Yates," he remarked, as he knelt on one knee on the hearth, his square, boyish face showing its grave sympathy as the white light streamed up the chimney. "I didn't know but what whilst them men war a-sassin' round so 'twould be the right way ter pertect the fambly ter take down my rifle ter 'em."