Mary-Clare took no notice of her but nodded to Jan-an.
“And then,” the girl went on, “I went in to Peneluna and told her and then we et and went to bed. Long about midnight, I guess, there was a yell!” Jan-an lost her breath and paused, then rushed along: “He’d raised his winder and after all the keeping still, he called for Peneluna to come.”
Mary-Clare visualized the dramatic scene that poor Jan-an was mumbling monotonously.
“And she went! I just lay there scared stiff hearing things an’ seeing ’em! Come morning, in walked Peneluna looking still and high and she didn’t say nothing till she’d gone and 76 fetched those togs of hers, black ’uns, you know, that Aunt Polly gave her long back. She put ’em on, bonnet and veil an’ everything. Then she took an old red rose out of a box and pinned it on the front of her bonnet––God! but she did look skeery––and then said to me awful careful, ‘Trot on to Mary-Clare, tell her to fotch the marriage service and the funeral one, both!’ Jes’ like that she said it. Both!”
“This is very strange,” Mary-Clare said slowly and got up. “I’m going to the Point, Jan-an, and you will take Noreen to the inn, like a good girl. I’ll call for her in the afternoon.”
“Take both!” Jan-an was nodding her willingness to obey. And Mary-Clare took her prayer-book with her.
Mary-Clare had the quiet Forest to herself apparently, for on the way to the Point she met no one. On ahead she traced, she believed, Larry’s footprints, but when she turned on the trail to the Point, they were not there.
All along her way Mary-Clare went over in her thought the story of Philander Sniff and Peneluna. It was the romance and mystery of the sordid Point.
Years before, when Mary-Clare was a little child, Philander had drifted, from no one knew where, to the mines and the Point. He lived in one of the ramshackle huts; gave promise of paying for it, did, in fact, pay a few dollars to old Doctor Rivers, and then became a squatter. He was injured at the mines and could do no more work and at that juncture Peneluna had arrived upon the scene from the same unknown quarter apparently whence Philander had hailed. She took the empty cottage next Philander’s and paid for it by service in Doctor Rivers’s home. She was clean, thrifty, and strangely silent. When Philander first beheld her he was shaken, for a moment, out of his glum silence. “God Almighty!” he confided to Twombly who had worked in the mines with him and had looked after him in his illness; “yer can’t shake some women even when it’s for their good.”
That was all. Through the following years the two shacks became the only clean and orderly ones on the Point. When Philander hobbled from his quarters, Peneluna went in and 77 scrubbed and scoured. After a time she cooked for the old man and left the food on his back steps. He took it in, ate it, and had the grace to wash the dishes before setting them back.