The next moment he felt an infinite relief. He suddenly recognized the fact that he had been chiefly restrained from repeating the words by an unrealized terror lest they prove true—lest something his father claimed was not his, indeed.
"'WHAT WORD DID HE SEND TER—ME?'"
But the expression of anger on Purdee's face was merged first in blank astonishment, then in perplexed cogitation, then in renewed and overpowering amazement.
The wife turned from the warping-bars with a vague stare of surprise, one hand poised uncertainly upon a peg of the frame, the other holding a hank of "spun truck." The grandmother looked over her spectacles with eyes sharp enough to seem subsidized to see through the mystery.
"In the name o' reason and religion, Roger Purdee," she adjured him, "what air that thar perverted Philistine talkin' 'bout?"
"It air more'n I kin jedge of," said Purdee, still vainly cogitating.
He sat for a time silent, his dark eyes bent on the fire, his broad, high forehead covered by his hat pulled down over it, his long, tangled, dark locks hanging on his collar.
Suddenly he rose, took down his gun, and started toward the door.