Mason Hope felt called upon, at this, to explain and apologize. He did so with the patient air of one detached and disdainful.
"Liza do make a powerful scene when she is called to pass through her trial. This is her ninth, and I done urged her to act sensible, but when I saw how it was going with her, I just left her to reason it out along her own lines. Sally Taber is sitting 'long of her ready to help when the time comes. I done all I could." Tansey Moore nodded significantly. He had an unreasonable wife of his own, and he had no sympathy with women in their "hours."
"Theodore Starr, he done say," Townley was becoming lachrymose, "that women got mighty nigh to God when they reached up to Him in their trial and offered life for a life. He done say if God didn't forgive a woman every earthly thing for such suffering, he was no good God. He done say that to me onct."
"That be plain blasphemy," Tansey Moore remarked. "I reckon he was a right poor parson. The religion he doctored with was all soothin' syrup and mighty diluted at that, where women was concerned. I never trusted that Yankee."
"The women, children, and old folks counted some on him in his day." Greeley was getting interested in this heretofore myth. Moore nodded his head suspiciously.
"They sho' did, and a mess they made of it. Did you ever hear 'bout his mix-up with the Walden girls?"
Greeley never had and, as the last Walden "girl" was a woman of sixty and over, he looked puzzled.
"Miss Ann, her as is now, was considerable older than Theodore Starr, but she shined up to him and let him lead her about considerable—some said him and her was—engaged to marry. Then there was the Walden girl as isn't now, her they called Queenie. She was a right pert little thing what growed into a woman like a Jonas gourd, sudden and startling! That was the summer that young Lansing Hertford came back to the old home place of his forebears to look about—there was a general mess of things up to Stoneledge those days, and all I know is that Starr he went up into the hills to nurse a fever plague and there he died. Lansing Hertford went off like a shot—but them Hertfords allus lit out like they was chased—never could stand loneliness and lack of luxury. Queenie, she done died the winter following that summer; died of lung trouble off to some hospital way off somewhere, and Miss Ann she settled down—an old woman from that time on! You can't get her to speak Starr's name. You never could. Us-all tried. When things got too hard for Miss Ann she done adopt little Miss Cyn—that chile has considerable brightened up Miss Ann, but Lord! she never was the same after that summer, and I hold, and allus shall, that Starr wasn't what we-all thought him at first. A man don't go dying off in the hills for folks what hadn't any call upon him, lest he has a reason for doing so."
Moore loved to talk. Some one always has to be the orator of a club, and Tansey, self-elected, filled this position in the circle around the old stove. Greeley was bored. Past history did not concern him and Moore's opinions he ignored. He had not been listening closely, for his thoughts would, in spite of him, follow the ramshackle buggy down The Way.
"She had a right pleasant look and manner," he pondered. "I reckon she'll get some fun out of her job, no matter what that job is."