She justified her own dishonesty to herself by the conviction that she had worked hard enough for the club to have the turkey anyway, and as long as some ticket had to be left until the last, it might just as well be her’s as anybody’s. It was all a matter of chance anyway, and, as it turned out it would have been much better for everybody if Hyder Ali could have been kept in the neighborhood with her instead of being taken away. She considered that she had suffered a great injustice, and that a defenseless woman should be thus robbed and maltreated was to her the acme of outrage.
Varney had his own rig with him and left for the county seat soon after Flaherty and his spring wagon had departed in an opposite direction. The precious pair was gone—with Hyder Ali, and two hundred and eighty dollars of tangible profits.
A melodious gobble was faintly heard far away on the road while Flaherty was still in sight. It might have been a wail of sorrow and farewell.
“I s’pose,” remarked Bill, “that Hyder Ali’s yellin’ fer help. He’s prob’ly ’fraid them two jay birds’ll send ’im back to them Brummins an’ that Bungspout Swammy fish net man in India, where ’e’ll git ’is crop chilled with them frozen frogs, but ’e needn’t worry. I didn’t buy no chances fer I didn’t think there’d be any show for a white man with Josh an’ Sophy up on them boxes, an’ they wasn’t. I thought they was goin’ to be sump’n doin’ when I seen Sophy eyein’ Josh. She looked like she wanted to squirt some lye at ’im. Sophy’s got a bad eye. She c’n sour a pan o’ milk that’s twenty feet off by jest lookin’ at it in a cert’n way.
“Them kewpies ’ave finished the cookin’ this time an’ we’re done good an’ brown. I don’t think they’ll be ’round any more ’less Josh comes to sell us a striped elephant next year, an’ if ’e does I ’spose we’ll buy it. I don’t think we wanted that misquito fatted bird anyway. He didn’t look to me like ’e was healthy.”
Sophy was ill for a couple of weeks and visited the store but rarely during the rest of the summer.
“She looks like she’d been licked,” observed Rat Hyatt. “She don’t seem to have no pep any more. I met ’er on the bridge the other day, an’ when I spoke to ’er she answered as nice an’ polite as anybody, instead o’ lookin’ at me like I was a skunk, an’ pass’n on the way she used to do.”
During the latter part of August Sophy chanced to see a copy of a weekly paper that was published in a small town about fifty miles away. In it was an announcement of a “grand raffle,” to be held the following week, “for a wonderful white turkey imported from Siberia at great expense, the like of which has never been seen or heard of in this country.”
The article went on to say that “this is a great event that is about to take place in our midst, and ye editor blushingly owns to the soft impeachment of having taken ten chances with his hard earned pelf. We hope to win the splendid prize, but if we fail we respectfully ask anybody who is in arrears on their subscription to please call at our holy editorial sanctum with some mazuma, for though ye ed. toys with the trailing skirts of fickle fortune, yet must he eat.”
Sophy kept her own counsel and prevailed on Pop Wilkins to lend her his horse and two seated buggy for a few days to enable her to visit a sick relative who lived some distance away. She was gone a week, and when she returned Hyder Ali was in the buggy. His beautiful head protruded inquiringly from the top of a gunny sack in which he was carefully secured. Sophy drove home with her prize, returned the rig to the obliging Pop, and walked loftily into the store, on her way back, to make some purchases.