“You git out!” he quavered senilely. “I kin housekeep for myself!”
“Git your other leg in your britches, or I’ll—”
He did it so suddenly, in his fright, that Mrs. Krantz’s humor returned, and she laughed. She was dressing him. He broke out afresh at this evidence of safety:
“I built this here house before I was twenty-one or you was born—I did. My mother she says, says she: ‘Bill, soon it will be a man in the house. Don’t you think you’d better git the house? You and Emmy’s mighty thick.’ I took the hint. And, on the morning I got twenty-one, here I was! And, begosh, there”—he pointed to the other side of the fireplace—“was Emmy! She and me done it all—together. She drawed the plan. You see them bricks that ain’t the right color? Emmy laid ’em! Yessir! With her little hands—and a trowel—and mortar! They are all right except the color. I says, says I, ‘Take ’em right out!’ But she threw the mortar on me, and it went in my hair and eyes, and she had to wash it out—that’s why they was never changed. And I’m glad they wasn’t. Whenever I look at ’em—one of ’em’s a little loose—I kin see my Emmy laying ’em! Well, you never see nothing as nice, I’ll bet you, as Emmy laying bricks! Old Gaertner made the bricks—out there where the boys swim now. That was all clay once. None of the ground clods like you git in bricks nowadays! It’s too long for you to remember, I expect. You not more’n sixty-five or so.” Then his mind flew back to the cause of his rebellion, and he was all the more angry that he had forgotten it in thinking of Emmy. “And now you want to boss me! I won’t stand it. Git out! You’re just a spring chicken.”
“You shut up!” cried Mrs. Krantz.
At this anathema he gasped in fresh fear.
“Betsy,” he said humbly when he could speak, “you’re too young to talk to me like that!”
“I’m going on seventy!” snapped Mrs. Krantz; which boast was untrue.
“So?”
Old Liebereich caught the insincerity and turned to inspect her.