"No," he answered, "no, I ain't never hed no kin. I ain't never hed nobody—father ner mother, neither!"
Caleb saw Sarah start a little and bite her thin lips. But the bird-like movement of surprise was lost upon the speaker.
"I ain't never hed nobody," he re-averred, and Caleb, straining to catch a note of self-pity or plea for sympathy in the words, realized that the boy didn't even know what the one or the other was. "I ain't never hed nobody but Old Tom. And he was—he wasn't nuthin' but what he called my—my"—the sentence was broken while he paused to get the phrase correctly—"he was what he called my 'logical custodian.'"
Guiltily Caleb knew that his next question would savor of indelicacy, but he had to ask it just the same.
"Still, I suppose his—his taking-off must have been something in the nature of a blow to you?" he suggested.
The boy pursed his lips.
"Wall, no," he exclaimed at last, nonchalantly. "No-o-o! I can't say's it was. We'd both been expectin' it, I reckon. Old Tom, he often sed he knew that some day he'd go and git just blind, stavin' drunk enough to try an' swim the upper rapids—and two weeks ago he done so!"
And the rest of the words were quite casual.
"I kind-a reckon he'd hev made it, at that," he offered his opinion, "if they'd hev been a trifle more water. But the rocks was too close to the surface fer comfortable swimmin'. The Jenkinses found him down in the slack water, Sunday noon or thereabouts, and they sed he'd never be no deader, not even if he'd a-died in a reg'lar bed, with a doctor helpin' him along."
Caleb threw his sister one lugubriously helpless glance. Sarah had choked, apparently upon a crumb of bread, and was coughing, stranglingly. And Caleb made to change the drift of the conversation, but he was not quick enough.