“I don’t want any more of your cursed food,” answered Lupo, looking very much like his namesake, the wolf, at that moment. “But I tell you if you’ve given my wife money to leave me, you will have to pay for it in another coin.”
“Nobody has ever given your wife any money. She has never been back since the day she threatened Miss Campbell with a carving knife. If anybody has driven her away, it’s you, with your drunken, low habits.”
Lupo moved a step nearer and pointed his thumb at Phoebe.
“So you’re trying to make a lady of her, are you?”
Phoebe took not the slightest notice. She was watching the antics of a squirrel leaping in the branches of a giant oak tree, but she turned her eyes gratefully toward Billie, when that young woman burst out with:
“She is a lady and my friend. I think you’d better go now, Mr. Lupo.”
“Whoever meddles with those two shall pay for it,” cried the man fiercely, just as Ben seized him by the collar and flung him into a thicket of bushes, from where he presently crawled away out of sight, occasionally pausing to shake his fist in their direction.
“A nice return for hospitality,” exclaimed Billie.
“He’s a dangerous fellow,” said the doctor. “But I imagine he’s mostly talk. What do you know of him, Miss Phoebe?”
“I only know that years ago they tried to drive us away from our house. But an old man who lived with us, protected us. He owned the cabin and he left it to father and me. There was a will that made it ours. It became a home.” They smiled at her quaint expression. “And the Lupos have been turned against us always, but God has protected us from our enemies.”