Bas seemed to hope for an affirmative reply, and his manner robbed his presence of any apparent intent of visiting a husbandless wife. Since no one but himself knew that his jackal Sam Squires was at that moment trailing after Parish Thornton as the beagle courses after the hare, he could logically enough make such an inquiry.
"No. Didn't ye know? He started out soon this mornin'. I reckon he's fur over to'rds Virginny by now."
"Oh!" Bas Rowlett seemed surprised, but he made prompt explanation. "I knowed he hed hit in head ter go—but I didn't know he'd started yit." For more than an hour their talk went on in friendly channels of reminiscence and commonplace, then the man lifted the basket he had brought. "I fotched some 'simmons offen thet tree by my house. Ye used ter love 'em right good, Dorothy."
"I does still, Bas," she smiled with that sweet serenity that men found irresistible as she reached for the basket, but the man sat with eyes brimming melancholy and fixed on the violet haze of the skyline until she noticed his abstraction and inquired: "What ails ye, Bas? Ye're in a brown study erbout somethin'."
He drew back his shoulders then, and enlightened, "Sometimes I gits thetaway. I fell ter thinkin' of them days when you an' me used ter gather them 'simmons tergether, little gal."
"When we was kids," she answered, nodding her head. "We hed fun, didn't we?"
"God Almighty," he exclaimed, impetuously and suddenly. "How I loved ye!"
The girl drew away, and her answer was at once sympathetic and defensive. "Thet war all a right long time back, Bas."
The defeated lover came to his feet and stood looking at her with a face over which the passion of his feeling came with a sweep and surge that he made no effort to control.
In that instant something had slipped in Bas Rowlett and the madman that was part of him became temporarily all of him.