“It would be awful mis’able if he didn’t come back at all, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes; too miserable to contemplate for a moment. Come, my darling, and sing to me for a little while; then, most likely, he will return.”
But, at that very moment, a solitary old man, in curious attire, and with a gay Navajo blanket folded over his shoulder, was making his way through the gathering twilight toward Rookwood. His head was bowed, and his face hidden by his wide sombrero, and he moved slowly as one whose footsteps are hindered by a heavy heart.
A pathetic figure which the growing gloom receives and hides, the humblest, and the noblest, perhaps, of all those whose hearts have been touched by the love of the child Steenie, he passes thus out of the story of her life at Old Knollsboro.
CHAPTER XV.
MR. TUBBS AND STEENIE.
Mr. Tubbs sat with his spectacles in place, his Bible on his knee; and Steenie, peering in at the kitchen-door and seeing it otherwise deserted, would speedily have retreated, had she been allowed. But an outrageous groan from Resolved arrested her flight, and awoke her ready sympathy.
“Is it so bad, poor dear? Is it worser ’n usual?”
“Oh! Ah-h-h!” That sigh appeared to have arisen in the sigher’s very feet, it was so long drawn out and so unutterably doleful. “To think I’d a lived ter see this day! Man an’ boy, forty odd years, have I been uset ter settin’ beside this very fire an’ a peroosin’ o’ Scripters by this very winder; an’ now—My-soul-I-declare,—life ain’t wuth livin’!”