Together they walked leisurely toward the cabin, hand in hand, Swickey swinging the empty bowl, all unconscious of Smoke’s capering and rushing in circles round his liberators. He quieted down and trotted silently behind them when his first joy had evaporated. They didn’t seem to enter into the spirit of the thing.
David, unlike his usual self in Swickey’s presence, was silent to taciturnity. Boston, of which he was thinking, seemed vague and unreal, a place he once knew. His surroundings were the only realities, and now that he was going away they seemed to hold him with a subtle force he could not analyze. Was he really growing fonder of his life here, of Swickey and her father, than he cared to acknowledge?
“’Fraid Dave’d get lost in the long grass?” said Avery, who stood in the doorway, grinning as they came up.
David stopped and turned toward Swickey. She slowly withdrew her fingers from his.
“I reckon Dave’s sick,” she replied.
“How sick?” queried her father, with undisguised solicitude.
“Sick of us as don’t know nothin’,” she answered, her cheeks flaming. And she pushed past the figure in the doorway and disappeared into her room.
“Wal, sweatin’ catfish! What ails the gal? She was puffin’ like a hen drawin’ rails when she went past me. Huh!”
The old man fumbled in his pocket for tobacco, oblivious to Smoke’s appeal for notice. Then the dog trotted quietly after Swickey, who in the sanctuary of her own tiny bedroom was crying her heart out. Smoke was sympathetic from his cold, friendly nose to the tip of his querulous tail, which wagged in an embarrassed way; and he licked her chin at intervals when it was visible, with dumb solicitude for the sorrow of his idol, a sorrow wholly incomprehensible to him, and vague even to Swickey, but more emotionally potent, perhaps, for that very reason.