Amos Wentworth shot a quick look at him. “She's a crank,” was the reply. “So are we all cranks, for that matter. But Heaven save me from the crank that won't wash the dishes that he eats off of, and that's what this crowd of cranks are like.”
A few minutes later, Smoke was talking with Laura Sibley. Supported by a stick in either hand, she had paused in hobbling by his cabin.
“What have you got it in for Wentworth for?” he asked, apropos of nothing in the conversation and with a suddenness that caught her off her guard.
Her green eyes flashed bitterly, her emaciated face for the second was convulsed with rage, and her sore lips writhed on the verge of unconsidered speech. But only a splutter of gasping, unintelligible sounds issued forth, and then, by a terrible effort, she controlled herself.
“Because he's healthy,” she panted. “Because he hasn't the scurvy. Because he is supremely selfish. Because he won't lift a hand to help anybody else. Because he'd let us rot and die, as he is letting us rot and die, without lifting a finger to fetch us a pail of water or a load of firewood. That's the kind of a brute he is. But let him beware! That's all. Let him beware!”
Still panting and gasping, she hobbled on her way, and five minutes afterward, coming out of the cabin to feed the dogs, Smoke saw her entering Amos Wentworth's cabin.
“Something rotten here, Shorty, something rotten,” he said, shaking his head ominously, as his partner came to the door to empty a pan of dish-water.
“Sure,” was the cheerful rejoinder. “An' you an' me'll be catchin' it yet. You'll see.”
“I don't mean the scurvy.”
“Oh, sure, if you mean the divine steeress. She'd rob a corpse. She's the hungriest-lookin' female I ever seen.”