"Dave Wisner," says Old Man Wright, "I come acrost to settle things with you. Our account is some long. You've made it hard for me—awful hard!—when you made your hired man run off with my girl. Your son! What kind of talk is this? What do you mean?"
"But he is our son!" says Old Lady Wisner right then, her speaking for the first time. "In heaven's name, who did you think he was? Hired man! What do you mean?"
"It's what I been trying to tell you and Curly," says Bonnie Bell now, holding to her pa's coat with one hand and patting him hard on the shoulder with the other. "I told you it was all a mistake—everything was all mixed up. Except for Gawd's mercy sending me here right now, somebody might of been killed, for all I know," says she. "You men ain't got no more brains than a rabbit. It's time I come!"
"Your son!" says Old Man Wright. "Son! And Curly said he was your hired man!"
Old Man Wisner laughs right out loud at that.
"Hired man! Oh, I see how you thought that! You maybe seen him pottering around in the flowers like—he was always dotty about them things—but no hired man; he wasn't hardly worth a salary."
"And what do you think?" laughs Bonnie Bell at Old Lady Wisner then. "His mother thought once I was a hired girl!"
Old Lady Wisner for quite a while she'd been playing a sort of accompaniment, talking to herself. First, she starts in and says: "Oh, my laws! Oh, my laws sakes! Oh my laws sakes alive!"—over and over again, she was that scared. And now she begun to say: "Bless my soul! Gawd bless my soul! Oh, Gawd bless my soul!" And she says that right over and over again too.
"I told you, Curly," says Bonnie Bell now, "that there'd been a mistake all around. Why didn't you tell my dad I was here?"
"Well," says I, "I allowed he'd find it out after a while. Ain't he?"