“Lafe ain’t no chance. They’ll put him in the chair.”
Such awful words! The import was pressed deeper into two young hearts by Peg’s wild weeping.
Jinnie staggered to her feet. Blind Bobbie broke into a prolonged wail.
“Lafe ain’t never done nothin’ bad in all his life,” went on the woman, from the shelter of her hands. “He’s the best man in the world. He’s worked an’ worked for everybody, an’ most times never got no pay. An’ now––”
“Don’t say it again, Peggy!” Jinnie’s voice rang out. “Don’t think such things. They couldn’t put Lafe in a wicked death chair—they couldn’t.”
Bobbie’s upraised eyes were trying to pierce through their veil of darkness to seek the speaker’s meaning. 256
“What chair, Jinnie?” he quivered. “What kind of a chair’re they goin’ to put my beautiful Lafe in?”
Jinnie’s mind went back to the teachings of the cobbler, and the slow, sweet, painful smile intermingled with her agony. Again and again the memory of the words, “He hath given his angels charge over thee,” swelled her heart to the breaking point. She wanted to believe, to feel again that ecstatic faith which had suffused her as Maudlin Bates pulled her curls in the marsh, when she had called unto the Infinite and Theodore had answered.
Peg needed Lafe’s angels at that moment. They all needed the comfort of the cobbler’s faith.
“Peg,” she began, “your man’d tell you something sweet if he could see you now.”