The house was dark and silent, but there was some sort of a light in the cooper-shop beyond. My hope had been to see Esther rather than her wild old father, but there was nothing for it but to go over to the shop. I pushed the loosely fitting door back on its leathern hinges, and stepped over the threshold. The resinous scent of newly cut wood, and the rustle of the shavings under my feet, had the effect, somehow, of filling me with timidity. It required an effort to not turn and go out again.
The darkened and crowded interior of the tiny work-place smelt as well, I noted now, of smoke. On the floor before me was crouched a shapeless figure—bending in front of the little furnace, made of a section of stove-pipe, which the cooper used to dry the insides of newly fashioned barrels. A fire in this, half-blaze, half-smudge—gave forth the light I had seen from without, and the smoke which was making my nostrils tingle. Then I had to sneeze, and the kneeling figure sprang on the instant from the floor.
It was Esther who stood before me, coughing a little from the smoke, and peering inquiringly at me. “Oh—is that you, Jimmy?” she asked, after a moment of puzzled inspection in the dark.
She went on, before I had time to speak, in a nervous, half-laughing way: “I've been trying to roast an ear of corn here, but it's the worst kind of a failure. I've watched ‘Ni’ do it a hundred times, but with me it always comes out half-scorched and half-smoked. I guess the corn is too old now, any way. At all events, it's tougher than Pharaoh's heart.”
She held out to me, in proof of her words, a blackened and unseemly roasting-ear. I took it, and turned it slowly over, looking at it with the grave scrutiny of an expert. Several torn and opened sections showed where she had been testing it with her teeth. In obedience to her “See if you don't think it's too old,” I took a diffident bite, at a respectful distance from the marks of her experiments. It was the worst I had ever tasted.
“I came over to see if you'd heard anything—any news,” I said, desiring to get away from the corn subject.
“You mean about Tom?” she asked, moving so that she might see me more plainly.
I had stupidly forgotten about that transformation of names. “Our Jeff, I mean,” I made answer.
“His name is Thomas Jefferson. We call him Tom,” she explained; “that other name is too horrid. Did—did his people tell you to come and ask me?”