Tom had but the primitive processes of mind and feeling. He possessed no cultivated sensibilities either for himself or for others, and even his perceptions of policy were rudimentary. The old man, the exemplar of all the distillers, by virtue of his age, his experience, his patriarchal position, struck in abruptly with a sharp reproof.
"Ain't you uns got no better sense an' showin', Tawmmy, than ter be settin' out so brash ter talk 'bout things that ye dunno nuthin' 'bout? Clotildy ain't goin' ter be allowed ter marry nobody till she's twenty, an' she hev now jes' turned eighteen."
"Twenty!" exclaimed Clotilda with a sudden revival of interest. "Why, I'll feel so old whenst I'm twenty that I reckon I'll hev ter walk with a stick by then."
"Like the stranger-man do now," cried Tom, the irrepressible. He sprang up and took a few erratic steps along the aisle of the arcade, twirling an imaginary cane, now flinging it jauntily up into the air, now striking it with emphasis on the ground, but a sudden twinge in his lame shoulder gave him pause. He stopped short, with a grimace of pain, seeking to put his hand to it, and then he came heavily enough back to the furnace and sank down on his improvised couch of sacks of grain. "He air a better man than you uns—he downed you uns, Tawmmy," Clotilda exclaimed with such obvious pleasure and pride in the stranger's prowess that Shadrach Pinnott was minded to take reluctant account of the cloud that lowered on the brow of Eugene Binley.
"Shucks," he said contemptuously, "that war jes' sleight o' hand. Them show folks hev l'arned tricks that take the eye. He ain't no spunky fighter sech ez—sech ez—waal, sech ez Eujeemes thar fur instance."
There was a momentary pause, broken only by the muffled roar of the flames of the furnace fire and the trickle of the doublings dropping down from the worm into the keg below.
"You boys mus' be powerful cautious," Shadrach Pinnott presently remarked with a serious thought. "You uns mus'n't talk foolish an' wild. Course Eujeemes ain't got no notion, sure enough, o' goin' ter Colb'ry ter see the show." He hesitated, then spoke plainly and to the point. "I don't want no man along o' me that the sher'ff air lookin' fur." He paused expectant of reassurance.
"I knows that," Eugene Binley answered with a lowering brow.
Shadrach Pinnott expected him to say more. His face, with the pallor that is the concomitant of red hair, bleached yet more by his indoor occupation, was turned with ghastly effect toward the young man who still stood with the girl beside the column. The moonshiner's eyebrows were insistently raised; his eyes had a pointed interrogation; his lips had fallen apart in the stress of immediate anticipation, his mouth showing like a dark hollow in the midst of his great red beard. The pause continued unbroken.
The sound of gentle purling was distinct in the silence. The dripping of the ardent spirits from the worm was hardly to be distinguished from the ripple of the rill of water in the troughs led down from one of the subterranean springs to its mission of utility in the condenser and the big burly mash-tubs, or the occasional irregular trickling from the roof of the drops with their solution of lime charged with the building of the fantastic architecture of the cavern.