There was a significant silence. “That thar man hev got suthin’ on his mind,” muttered Peter Knowles.
“I be powerful troubled myself,” returned the level-headed Sims weakly. “I oughtn’t ter hev tuk him in,—him a stranger, though”—he remembered the hospitable text in time for a flimsy self-justification. “But ’twar a-stormin’ powerful, and he ’peared plumb beat out. I ’lowed that night he war goin’ inter some sort’n fever or dee-lerium. I put him inter the roof-room, an’ he went ter bed ez soon ez he could git thar. But the nex’ day he war ez fraish an’ gay ez a jaybird.”
“What’s he talk ’bout whenst sleepin’?” asked Peter Knowles, his covert glance once more reverting to the refuse of quicklime at his feet.
“Suthin’ he never lays his tongue ter whenst wakin’, I’ll be bound,” replied Tubal Sims precipitately. Then he hesitated. This disclosure was, he felt, a flagrant breach of hospitality. What right had he to listen to the disjointed exclamations of his guest in his helplessness as he slept, place his own interpretation upon them, and retail them to others for their still more inimical speculation? Jane Ann Sims,—how he would have respected her judgment had she been a man!—he was sure, would not have given the words a second thought. But then her habit of mind was incredulous. Parson Greenought often told her that he feared her faith was not sufficient to take her to heaven. “I be dependin’ on suthin’ better’n that, pa’son,” she would smilingly rejoin. “I ain’t lookin’ ter my own pore mind an’ my own wicked heart fur holp. An’ ye mark my words, I’ll be the fust nangel ye shake han’s with when ye git inside the golden door.” And the parson, impaled on his own weapons, could only suggest that they should sing a hymn together, which they did,—Jane Ann Sims much the louder of the two.
Admirable woman! she had but a single weakness, and this Tubal Cain Sims was aware that he shared. With the returning thought of their household idol, Euphemia, every consideration imposing reticence vanished.
“Last night,” he began suddenly, “I war so conflusticated with the goin’s-on ez I couldn’t sleep fur a while. An’ ez I sot downsteers afore the fire, I could but take notice o’ how oneasy this man ’peared in his sleep up in the roof-room. He sighed an’ groaned like suthin’ in agony. An’ then he says, so painful, ‘But the one who lives—oh, what can I do—the one who lives! fur his life!—his life!—his life!’” He paused abruptly to mark the petrified astonishment on the group of faces growing white in the closing dusk.
An owl began to hoot in the bosky recesses far up the slope. At the sound, carrying far in the twilight stillness, a hound bayed from the door of the little cabin in the Cove, by the river. A light, stellular in the gloom that hung about the lower levels, suddenly sprung up in the window. A tremulous elongated reflection shimmered in the shallows close under the bank where the juggler had been lying. Was he there yet? Sims wondered, quivering with the excitement of the moment.
His anxiety was not quelled, but a great relief came upon him when Peter Knowles echoed his own thought, which seemed thus the natural sequence of the event, and not some far-fetched fantasy.
“That thar man hev killed somebody, ez sure ez ye live!” exclaimed Peter Knowles. “‘But the one who lives!’ An’ who is the one who died?”
“Jes’ so, jes’ so,” interpolated Sims, reassured to see his own mental process so definitely duplicated in the thoughts of a man held to be of experienced and just judgment, and much regarded in the community.