"Would you remember if I was to tell you?"
"Yes."
Irene was leaning against the window-sill, holding the half-closed shutter in her hand. In her eagerness she pressed forward, pushing the shutter so far open that it slipped from her hold and swung crashing back against the house. She sprang back into the room to prevent discovery, and when next she glanced from her window, Crazy Joe was alone. His strange companion had disappeared, and Joe sat nodding under the tree more than half asleep.
It was nothing uncommon for Joe to pass the night under a tree, and Irene only watched to see him stretch down under a tree and compose himself to sleep, when she crept to her own bed, filled with wonder and curiosity. Crazy Joe's parentage, like her own, was shrouded in mystery, and perhaps it may have been their common misfortune that had awakened her sympathy and drawn her so strongly towards the lunatic.
It was late before Irene closed her eyes for sleep, and when she did, Joe's troubled eyes, Abner's eyes, sad and reproachful, and the gleaming eyes of the stranger haunted her dreams.
Early next morning she went out to where Crazy Joe was sitting on the grass, communing with himself. As she approached him she heard him say:
"Yes, yes, I remember the cotton fields and the palmetto tree by the lake, the boats I sailed there, but then something heavy strikes my brain."
She tried to persuade him to tell her who it was he was talking with on the night before, but the light of memory faded from his face, and his mind immediately averted to his father Jacob, who was soon to come down into Egypt.
It was about two weeks after Abner's visit that Oleah found himself at the head of a small scouting party in the neighborhood of his home.