She was a changed woman, and victory was on her brow. She greeted the loiterers about the store, but, as Posey expressed it, “she spoke from above.”
Naturally the neighborhood was in a ferment of curiosity.
“How’d you git ’im?” asked Bill pleasantly.
“I caught ’im on a fish line,” she replied grimly.
Beyond this she refused any explanations and her attitude was regarded as the height of cruelty. She said it was nobody’s business but her own, and no further light was thrown on the subject.
Early in the fall a band of gipsies came and camped on a grassy glade in the woods not far from where Sophy lived. They remained several weeks. The men traded horses with the nearby farmers, and the women went about the neighborhood in their picturesque costumes, begged small articles, and told fortunes.
One morning Sophy was horrified to find that Hyder Ali was gone. She at once suspected the gipsies, and rushed to their camp, but the Romany folk had departed. She found a long white feather on the ground that undoubtedly had come from her cherished bird. She at once enlisted all the help she could get. The assistance of the sheriff was invoked and the trail of the gipsies was taken by a large party. They were located about fifteen miles away. Thorough search revealed no trace of the missing property. The gipsies were confronted with the tell-tale feather, but denied all knowledge of it. There seemed to be nothing further to do and the matter was dropped by the sheriff.
In November, just before the annual turkey shoot, Mr. Roscoe Plunkett, of the firm of Plunkett & Mott, whose goods Varney had sold for several years, came to Posey’s store to check up their account. He said that his firm had suffered considerable losses through the shady and sinuous methods of Varney, and that he was no longer with them. They had delved deep into his history before he came to them and found that he had a rancid past. It was checkered with a couple of jail confinements, but he had managed in each case to obtain his freedom after trial. He had been a champion rifle shot, and had given exhibitions of trick shooting in a wild west show for a year or two. Of late he had been mixed up with a man named Flaherty. They had found a farmer in the southern part of the state who had an albino turkey—one of those rare freaks of nature, due to deficient pigmentation. It was a beautiful gobbler of abnormal size. They bought the bird for twenty-five dollars, and, since that time they had been going about the country raffling it off. One of them had always won it.
During the previous week a friend of Plunkett’s, who was a commercial traveler, had written him that he had met Varney in Michigan, and that Flaherty and the white turkey were with him.
This new light on the general cussedness and dark ways of Josh Varney came too late to be of any benefit to Sophy. She had gone to live with some relatives in a small town in Iowa, taking her illusions and her bitter hatreds with her. Her henpecked husband had mercifully been relieved of his earthly troubles, but this had not seemed to disturb her as much as her other afflictions. She had become completely disgusted with her surroundings, and had sought new fields for her restless propensities.