Belle-Ann smiled ambiguously, lifted her pretty arched brows, and centered her azure eyes upon a red-head which at that instant was hammering a hole into a dead sycamore hard by. Orlick sighed.
"Yo' orten t' git down on a feller lessen he's done somethin' pesky," he resumed tentatively. "What hev I done more'n cum an' go peaceable—an' make more money than any of 'em? Yo' see, Belle-Ann, our people hain't got no use fer a feller whut's got spunk enough t' git out o' th' mountains an' make money. Hit's hard draggin' when a feller's tryin' t' do right an' everybuddy ag'in em."
His words stopped. Belle-Ann gazed his way. Orlick looked like a martyr, the very picture of persecuted righteousness. The left corner of his mouth, usually tilted, descended in emulation of its mate.
His woebegone eyes followed the sky-line, and he appeared to be on the verge of an oral prayer.
Belle-Ann's tender, unsophisticated heart was momentarily swayed with compassion. She glanced covertly at his averted, forlorn face, and her frigidity thawed a trifle as she was cognizant of an element of truth in Orlick's claims.
She knew that a mountaineer was respected and eligible only while he stayed closely in the mountains.
Orlick sat rigid, immobile, with eyes afar and apparently utterly oblivious of Belle-Ann's presence at that moment. She walked back to the wagon-bed.
Her low, dulcet voice roused him out of his lethargy.
"Orlick," she said, "why don't yo'-all stop traipsin' round an' snookin' below—an' cum Sabbath an' jine pap's church? Don't yo'-all want t' be a Christian?"
If all the sins of Orlick's past had taken life and come up out of the ground at his feet to confront him he would have been less shocked. He flushed guiltily.