For an instant she stood as tremulous as though she had seen or heard a ghost, while in her thin and shrunken bosom her heart pounded. Then she said: "I'll be thar d'reckly. I'll take ther baby back ter Mirandy."
"No," commanded the man, "bring hit with ye. I hain't nuver saw hit yit."
* * *
Parish Thornton had come safely home, and in forest stretches where fallen leaves lay crisp and thick under foot the razor-backs were fattening on persimmons and mast. Along the horizon slept an ashen mist of violet. "Sugar trees" blazed in rustling torches of crimson and in the sweet-gums awoke colour flashes like those which glint in a goblet of burgundy.
Before the house in the bend of the river the great walnut stood like a high-priest lording it over lesser clerics: a Druid giant of blond maturity, with outstretched arms that seemed to brush the drifting cloud-fleece by day and the stars by night. It whispered with the wandering voices of the little winds in tones of hushed mystery.
Mellow now and tranquil in its day of fruitage it had the seeming of meditation upon the cycles of bud and leaf, sun and storm; the starkness of death and the miracle of resurrection.
Yet the young wife searched its depths of foliage with an eye of anxiety for, though she had not spoken of it, her discernment recognized that the fungus-like blight was spreading through its breadth and height with a contagion of unhealth.
Beneath it Parish and Dorothy were gathering and piling the walnuts that should in due season be beaten out of their thick husks and stored away for winter nights by the blazing hearth, and in their veins, too, was the wine and the fragrance of that brief carnival that comes before the desolation of winter.
Dorothy straightened and, looking off down the road, made sudden announcement.
"Look thar, Cal. Ef hit hain't a stranger ridin' up on hoss-back. I wonder now who is he?"