“An’ then there’s another man, besides,” suggested the elder Berridge. A certain wrinkled anxiety had corrugated the bedraggled limpness of his countenance and he was obviously relieved by the effect of the computation of the odds.
“Oh, yes,” cried Mrs. Berridge, “that comical galoot what bided here las’ night, an’ this evenin’ hired our dugout an’ paddled out to the steamboat. He ain’t back yit.” She paused at the door and peered into the gathering gloom.
“Jessy Jane,” cried her husband with an accession of interest, “tell ’em all what you heard him say las’ night. Every other word was ‘Duciehurst.’”
The younger Berridge was a stalwart fellow, in attire and features resembling his father, save that his straw-tinted beard and shock of hair were not yet bleached by the river-damp and the damage of time to the dull drab hue of the elder’s locks. The woman had evidently intended to reserve such values as she had discovered for the benefit of her own, her husband and his father. But Dan Berridge, all improvident and undiscerning, was gobbling a second great supply of the cat-fish, and did not even note the expanding interest that began to illumine Binnhart’s sharp eyes as they followed her around the table while she again set on the platter. She sought to gain time and perchance to effect a diversion by inviting him to partake of the meal, but he replied that he had eaten his supper already, “and a better one,” he added as he cast a disparaging glance at the cloth. The rude jeer would have served to balk his curiosity, one might have thought,—that in resentment she would have withheld the disclosure he coveted. But the jeer tamed her. She realized and contemned their poverty, and despised themselves because they were so poor. The dignity of labor, the blessedness of content, the joy of health and strength, the relative values of the gifts of life, the law of compensation, no homilies had ever been preached here on these texts. She could not controvert nor contend. It was indeed a coarse, cheap meal brought to the door by the river, a poverty-cursed home on its fantastic stilts, where they might live only so long as the waters willed, and she was all at once ashamed of it, and of her own compact of rude comfort and quiescence with it. She had a certain spirit, however, and when the other visitors chuckled their enjoyment of her discomfiture she included them in the invitation after this wise, “Mebbe you-all ain’t too proud to take a snack with us.” The shanty-boater, who permitted nothing good to pass him, compromised on a slice of pork, eaten sandwich-wise, in a split pone of corn-bread held in his hands as he crouched over the monkey-stove at the other end of the room. Nevertheless, she was submissive and in some sort constrained to respond when Binnhart said with a suave intonation: “Yes, ma’am, we would like to hear from you about that talk of Duciehurst.”
“I dunno what you mean,” she said, still with an effort to fence: “oh, yes, the man jus’ talks in his sleep, that’s all.”
“He’s got secrets,” said her husband, over his shoulder to Binnhart. He paused suddenly with an appalled countenance to extract from his mouth a great spiny section of fishbone, which seemed to have caught on the words. “Tell on, Jesse Jane. I can’t. I’m eatin’.”
It was obviously useless to resist. “Why,” she said, “when the baby had the croup las’ night an’ kep’ me up an’ awake—don’t you dare to look at me an’ laugh, you buzzard!” she broke off to speak to the infant, who was bouncing and crowing jovially at the end of his tether where he was tied in the bunk, “he knows I’m talkin’ about him. Why, what was I saying? Oh, I was in the back room there, an’ the man was sleepin’ in here. An’ he talked, an’ talked in his sleep, loud fur true every wunst in a while. I wonder he didn’t wake up everybody in the house.”
“What did he say?” asked Binnhart with a look of sharp curiosity.
“I didn’t take time to listen much,” replied the woman, fencing anew. “Old ‘Possum thar,” nodding at the baby, “looked like he’d choke every other minute. He’ll smell of turkentine fur a month of Sundays. I fairly soaked his gullet with that an’ coal-oil.”
“A body kin make money out of other folks’ secrets ef they air the right kind of secrets.” Binnhart threw out the suggestion placidly.