"Why'n't ye gin dad them messages ez Abs'lom gin ye from me?"
Joe received this in blank amaze; then, with sudden comprehension, his lower jaw dropped. He looked at her with a plea for pity in his eyes. And yet his ready tact strove to reassert itself.
"I mus' hev furgot 'em," he faltered.
"Did Abs'lom ever gin 'em ter ye?" she persisted.
"Ef he did, I mus' hev furgot 'em," he repeated, crestfallen and hopeless.
She laughed and turned jauntily away, once more throwing the corn-meal batter to the greedily jostling poultry. "Tell Abs'lom I hev f'und him out," she said. "He can't sot me agin dad no sech way. This be my home, an' hyar I be goin' ter 'bide."
And so she left the good Joe Boyd hooked on by the elbows to the fence.
The Quimbeys, who had heard this conversation from within, derived from it no small elation. "She hev gin 'em the go-by fur good," Timothy said, confidently, to his father, who laughed in triumph, and pulled calmly at his pipe, and looked ten years younger.
But Steve was surlily anxious. "I'd place heap mo' dependence in Eveliny ef she didn't hev this hyar way o' cryin' all the time. She 'lows she's glad she kem—so glad she hev lef' Abs'lom fur good an' all—an' then she busts out a-cryin' agin. I ain't able ter argufy on sech."
"Shucks! wimmen air always a-cryin', an' they don't mean nuthin' by it," exclaimed the old man, in the plenitude of his wisdom. "It air jes' one o' thar most contrarious ways. I hev seen 'em set down an' cry fur joy an' pleasure."