Haines sought to withdraw his glance from their baleful significant expression, but his eyelids faltered and quivered, and he continued to look wincingly at his interlocutor. “I ’lowed ’twar too heavy for enny one man ter move,” he commented vaguely, at last.
“’Thout he war helped by the devil,” Knowles stipulated.
There was a pause. The young workman’s hand was still. His companion’s society did not accord with his mood. The loneliness had been soft and sweet, and of peaceful intimations. His frequent disappointments were of protean guise. Where was that work for the Master that Peter Knowles had promised him?
“Owen Haines,” cried Peter Knowles suddenly, “hev that thar man what calls hisself a juggler-man done ennythin’ but harm sence he hev been in the Cove an’ the mountings?”
Haines, the color flaring to his brow, laid quick hold on his shingle-knife and rived the wood apart; his breath came fast and his hand shook, although his work was steady. He was all unnoting that Peter Knowles was watching him with an unguarded eye of open amusement, and a silent sneer that left long tobacco-stained teeth visible below the curling upper lip. But a young fool’s folly is often propitious for the plans of a wiser man, and Knowles was not ill pleased to descry the fact that the relations between the two could not admit of friendship, or tolerance, or even indifference.
“Fust,” he continued, “he gin that onholy show in the church-house, what I never seen, but it hev set folks powerful catawampus an’ hendered religion, fur the devil war surely in it.”
Owen Haines took off his hat to toss his long fair hair back from his brow, and looked with troubled, reflective eyes down the long aisles of the gold-flecked verdure of the woods.
“Then he tricked you-uns somehows out’n yer sweetheart, what ye hed been keepin’ company with so long.”
Haines shook his head doubtfully. “We-uns quar’led,” he said. “I dunno ef he hed nuthin’ ter do with it.”
“Did Phemie an’ you-uns ever quar’l ’fore he kem ter Sims’s?” demanded the sly Knowles.