Spurrier looked at the strong-featured face as he prompted, “Yes?”
“Waal,” Sam Mosebury waved his hand, and even his gestures had a spacious bigness about them, “ef God Almighty didn’t see fit fer thet thar bird an’ thet thar cat ter love one another—I don’t seek ter alter His plan. Nonetheless I sets a passel of store by both of ’em.” He filled his pipe, then his words became musing, possibly allegorical. “Mebby some day I’ll reelax a leetle mite too much in watchin’ an’ then I reckon ther cat’ll kill ther bird—but thet’s accordin’ ter nature, too, an’ deespite I’ll grieve some, I won’t disgust ther cat none.”
That night Spurrier lay on the same shuck-filled mattress with the man whom the law had not been strong enough to hang, and for a while he remained wakeful, reflecting on the strangeness of his bed-fellowship.
But, had he known it, his life was saved that night because the murderer had arrived and provided an interfering presence when the plans on foot required solitude.
CHAPTER XI
Perhaps old Cappeze had spoken too late when he sounded his sharp warning to the newcomer against unsettling the simple contentment of his daughter’s mind. Always realizing his transient status in the aloofness of this life, Spurrier had scrupulously guarded his contact with the girl who belonged to it and who had no prospect of escaping it. He had sought to behave to her as he might have behaved to a child, with grave or gay friendliness untouched by those gallantries that might have been misunderstood, yet treating her intelligence with full and adult equality.
But his inclination to see more of her than formerly was one that he indulged because it gave him pleasure and because a failure to do so would have had the aspect of churlishness.
Those self-confessed traces of snobbery that adhered to this courtier at the throne of wealth, were attributes of which the girl saw nothing. Neither did she see the shell of cynicism which Spurrier had cultivated and this was not because her insight failed of keenness, but because in these surroundings they were dormant qualities.