Then there was another painful silence, and Limber Tim twisted a paling off the fence with his arms, and kicked half the bark off his right shin with his left boot-heel.
"Sandy?"
"Limber."
Then Limber Tim reached out his tongue and spun it about as if it had been a fish-line, and he was fishing in the darkness for words. At last he jerked back as if he had got a bite, jerked and jerked as if his throat was full of fish-hooks, and jerked till he jerked himself loose from the fence; and poising on his heel before falling back into the darkness, and twisting himself down the hill, said this:
"Git the Judge, Sandy. Fetch her home to-morrow. Spliced to-morrow. Sandy, git the Judge to-morrow!"
And "to-morrow" kept coming up the hill and out of the darkness till the nervous man was half way to the Howling Wilderness.
The Judge was there, a cooler man now, even though it was midsummer. His shirt was open till his black hairy breast showed through as if it had been a naked bear-skin.
The Forks came in force to its second wedding, but the Forks, too, was cooler, and had put aside to some extent its faith and its folly. And yet it liked Bunker Hill ever so much. Bunker Hill, said the Forks, had not been the best of women in days gone by, but Bunker Hill had never deceived.
She stood alone there that day, the day of all days to any woman in the world, and the boys did not like it at all.
Why had she not asked the Widow to be by her side? Surely she had stood by the Widow in the day of trouble; why was not the Widow there? And then they thought about it a little while, and saw how impossible it was for poor deformed little Bunker Hill to dare to ask the Widow to come and stand with her at her wedding.