Whatever it was aunt Eunice saw, it must have been very interesting, for there she stared, and never once looked around until her name was called. Then she seated herself at a little distance from the lovers, pulling out from her pocket a huge stocking, that could only be intended for one person in the settlement, unless worn upon both feet at once, industriously knitting, as deaf now as she had been blind before.
Who says she never had been young?
We need record but one passage in the conversation, as the remainder was foreign to our purpose.
"Well, pet, I will explain what your father meant when alluding to my leaving Kentucky. It is true, I did leave there to save my life, much as I fled from here, although matters had not gone quite so far then.
"When I was but a child, my father was accused—falsely, as I ever will maintain, although I have no proof—of belonging to Sturdevant's gang of counterfeiters and horse-thieves. He was arrested and thrown into prison, but he never had a trial. A band of disguised men forced the jail, and taking him from his cell, proceeded to a grove some four miles distant, and hung him like a dog!
"It was nearly a month before the remains were found, by a man hunting cattle, and then, after his burial, my mother sickened, dying within the same year. I was but eleven years old then, and although so young, these fearful events made me desperate.
"The neighbors all looked upon me as a sort of outcast, and taught their children to shun me as though I were a moral pest. This did not help me much, and as I grew older, I was taunted and hooted at, for my father's crime!
"But, as my muscles grew, they found this fast becoming a dangerous sport, for I bitterly resented every insult, even from those twice and thrice my own age. I had no relations, not even a friend to lean upon, or to whom I could turn for aid or counsel. And thus I grew up.
"I admit being wild and reckless; but I can honestly say that I never once committed a mean or criminal deed. And yet I was often accused in whispers, of being both a counterfeiter and a horse-thief! Almost any one would have left the place in disgust; but I did not. The only beings that I had ever loved were lying in the little yard back of our house.
"I often, when my trials had been unusually bitter, have spent the livelong night beside the graves of my parents, sobbing as if my heart would break; and it is to those sacred influences alone that I attribute my remaining clear of a life of crime—that I did not yield to the temptations presented to me of living a wild, free life.