And they were off on the trail that leads back to childhood. They had talked long, and intimately, when the shadows of the early evening crept into the corners of the room. He had carried her across the flooded slew again after the big rain. They had relived a dozen moving incidents by flood and field. Jennie recalled the time when the tornado narrowly missed the schoolhouse, and frightened everybody in school nearly to death.
“Everybody but you, Jim,” Jennie remembered. “You looked out of the window and told the teacher that the twister was going north of us, and would kill somebody else.”
“Did I?” asked Jim.
“Yes,” said Jennie, “and when the teacher asked us to kneel and thank God, you said, ‘Why should we thank God that somebody else is blowed away?’ She was greatly shocked.”
“I don’t see to this day,” Jim asserted, “what answer there was to my question.”
In the gathering darkness Jim again took Jennie’s hand, but this time she deprived him of it.
He was trembling like a leaf. Let it be remembered in his favor that this was the only girl’s hand he had ever held.
“You can’t find any more scars on it,” she said soberly.
“Let me see how much it has changed since I stuck the knife in it,” begged Jim.
Jennie held it up for inspection.