She held her face down, with her features drawn and her eyes half closed, rejecting the vision of recollection as if it were the sight itself. "I can't abide the name o' cor'ner's jury,—I never wants ter hear it nor see it agin! I never shall furgit how them men all looked a-viewin' the traveler's body what I fund dead in the road; they looked like jes' so many solemn, peekin', heejus black buzzards crowdin' aroun' the corpse; then a-noddin' an' a-whisperin' tergether, an' a-findin' of a verdic' ez they called it. They fund nuthin' at all. 'T war me ez done the findin'. I fund the man dead in the road. An' I ain't a-goin' ter be a witness no mo'. Nex' time the law wants me fur a witness I'll go ter jail; it's cheerfuller, a heap, I'll bet!"
As she still held her head down, her bonnet well on it now, her face with its riant cast of features incongruously woebegone, overshadowed by the tragedy she recounted even more definitely than by the brim of her headgear or the first gray advance of the dusk, he made a clumsy effort to divert her attention.
"I 'lowed ye war mightily in favor of juries; ye talk mighty nigh all day 'bout the jury of view."
"I want a road up hyar," she exclaimed vivaciously, raising her eyes and her joyous transfigured face, "a reg'lar county road! In the fall o' the year the folks would kem wagonin' thar chestnuts over ter sell in town, an' camp out. An' all the mounting would go up an' down it past our big gate ter the church house in the Cove. I'd never want ter hear no mo' preachin'. I'd jes' set on our front porch, an' look, an' look, an' look!"
She cast up her great bright eyes with as vivid and immediate an irradiation as if the brilliant procession which she pictured deployed even now, chiefly in ox-wagons, before them. She caught off her bonnet from her head,—it seemed a sort of moral barometer; she never wore it when the indications of the inner atmosphere set fair. She swung it gayly by one string as she walked and talked; now and again she held the string to her lips and bit it with her strong, even teeth, reckless of the havoc in the clumsy hem.
"Then county court days,—goin' to county court, an' comin' from county court,—sech passels an' passels o' folks! I wisht we-uns hed it afore the jury o' view kem, so we-uns mought view the jury o' view."
"It's along o' the jury o' view ez we-uns will git the road,—ef we do git it," the young man said cautiously.
It was one of his self-imposed duties to moderate, as far as he might, his sister's views, to temper her enthusiasms and abate her various and easily excited anger. He had other duties toward her which might be said to have come to him as an inheritance.
"Ben's the boy!" his consumptive mother had been wont to say; "he's sorter slow, but mighty sure. 'Brag is a good dog, but Hold-Fast is a better.' Ef he don't sense nare 'nother idee in this life, he hev got ter l'arn ez it's his business ter take keer o' Nar'sa. Folks say Nar'sa be spoiled a'ready. So be, fur whilst Ben be nuthin' but a boy he'll l'arn ter do her bid, an' watch over her, an' wait on her, an' keer for her, an' think she be the top o' creation. It'll make her proud an' headin', I know,—she'll gin her stepmammy a sight o' trouble, an' I ain't edzactly lamentin' 'bout'n that,—but Ben'll take keer o' her all her life, an' good keer, havin' been trained ter it from the fust."
But his mother had slept many a year in the little mountain graveyard, and her place was still empty. The worldly wise craft of the simple mountain woman, making what provision she might for the guardianship of her daughter, was rendered of scant effect, since her husband did not marry again. The household went on as if she still sat in her accustomed place, with not one deficiency or disaster that might have served in its simple sort as a memorial,—so little important are we in our several spheres, so promptly do the ranks of life close up as we drop dead from their alignment.