“I won't—I can't.” Then an idea came. “Your mother will have to whip you.”
Chris shook his head and was silent. He was not on good terms with his mother. It was a current belief that she had “put pizen in his daddy's liquer.” She had then married a man younger than she was, and to the boy's mind the absence of dignity in one case matched the crime in the other.
“All right,” he said at last; “but I reckon you better send somebody else atter her. You can't trust me to git by that still”—he stopped with a half-uttered oath of surprise:
“Look thar!”
A woman was coming up the road. She wore a black cotton dress and a black sunbonnet—mourning relics for the dead husband which the living one had never had the means to supplant—and rough shoes. She pushed back the bonnet with one nervous, bony hand, saw the two figures on the edge of the creek, and without any gesture or call came toward them. And only the woman's quickness in St. Hilda saw the tense anxiety of the mother's face relax. The boy saw nothing; he was only amazed.
“Why, mammy, whut the—whut are you doin' up hyeh?”
The mother did not answer, and St. Hilda saw that she did not want to answer. St. Hilda rose with a warm smile of welcome.
“So this is Chris's mother?”
The woman shook hands limply.
“Hit's whut I passes fer,” she said, and she meant neither smartness nor humor. The boy was looking wonderingly, almost suspiciously at her, and she saw she must give him some explanation.