“You would have done just the same, wouldn’t you, Mrs. Panther,” said Azalea in her light, almost gay little way, “if you had heard we were in trouble and had known you could help us out?”
“Who, me?” gasped Mrs. Panther. “I never helped nobody. Never had the chanct.” Again the bitterness came into her voice.
“I’m going to give you the chance sometime, Mrs. Panther,” said Azalea, laughing softly. “Then you’ll help me the very best you know how; won’t she, Aunt Zillah?”
On that they parted. Keefe and Mr. Thompson slept at some distance, guarding the path—though indeed there was no one to guard it against. Aunt Zillah and her girls lay beneath a hemlock tree. Beside them, Paralee watched the slow roll of the stars till far into the night, unable to sleep for the thoughts that beset her.
“I couldn’t stay in the house,” she whispered to Azalea. “It made me think of the dark days.”
“The dark days?”
“Before I went away—when I thought we was forgot by all on the world.”
The night was good to them; the wind was low and kind; the dew softer than fairy fingers; the stars softly bright. Even the dawn did not come blazing upon them. In pink and gray, delicately it smiled from the farther hills. True, all night long the whippoorwill teased the air with his foolish song, but all there were too used to the notes of his voice to heed.
An hour after sunup, the procession was on its way. Mrs. Panther and Paralee rode the horses which had carried Keefe and Haystack Thompson the day before. In the panniers by their side cackled the excited and displeased chickens, and following them came the equally surprised and disgusted pig, for whom Keefe had constructed a harness by means of which Paralee led him. Last of all came Keefe and Haystack, carrying the paralyzed man in his hammock.
The little house looked wretchedly deserted when Paralee had closed its shutters and Keefe nailed up its door. He noticed that Mrs. Panther kept her head turned away from it and he wondered if she had, after all, some strange, irrational love for this grim place, where she had suffered so much, and known such bitter solitude.