The meaning that she put into her words belied their harsh face-value. With Jim in jail, her mind was comparatively at rest about him. She knew he had been branding other men’s cattle since the destruction of his sheep, and she knew the fate of cattle-thieves, and that Jim would be no exception to the rule. With her purely instinctive maternity, she had been fond of Jim. He had been one more boy to mother. She harbored no ill-feeling towards him that he was not her own. Moreover, she wanted no gallows-tree intermingled with the annals of her family. It suited her convenience at this particular time that Jim should stay in jail. That he had been given his freedom loosed the phials of her condemnation on the incompetents that released him.
“I ’low they wuz grudgin’ him the mouthful they fed to him, that they ack so outdaciously plumb locoed as to tu’n a man out to get hisself hanged. An’ Jim never wuz a hearty eater. He never seemed to relish his food, even when he wuz a growin’ kid.”
A pale, twinkling point of light, faintly glimmering in the vast solitudes above the billowing peaks, suddenly burst into a dazzling constellation before the girl and her mother. “It’s a warning!” shivered the old woman. “Some’um’s bound to happen.” She began to rock herself slowly. The thing she dreaded had already come to pass in her imagination. Jim a free man was Jim a dead man. He was so dead that already his step-mother was going on with a full acceptance of the idea. She reviewed her relationship to him. No, she had nothing to blame herself for. He had been more troublesome than any of her own children and for that reason she had been more liberal with the rod. And yet—the face of the squaw rose before her, wraithlike, accusing! “Ai-yi!” she said; but this time her favorite expletive was hardly more than a sigh.
“I mind Jim when he first kem to us,” she said, more to herself than to Eudora, who sat at her feet. The impending tragedy in the family had robbed her of all the joy in her suitors. They sat on a bench on the opposite side of the house, divided by the very nature of their interests yet companions in misery.
“He wuz scarce four, an’ yet he had never been broke of the habit of sucking his thumb. Ef he’d ben my child, I’d a lammed it out’n him before he’d a seen two, but seem’ he was aged for an infant havin’ such practices, I tried to shame him out’n it. But, Lord a massy, men folks is hard to shame even at four. I hissed at him like a gyander every time I seen him do it. Now I’d a knowed better—I’d a sewed it up in a pepper rag.”
“What’s suckin’ his thumb as an infant got to do with his gettin’ lynched now?” demanded Eudora, with the scepticism of the second generation.
“Wait till you-uns has children of your own,” sniffed her mother, from the assured position of maternal experience, “an’ see the infant that’s allowed to suck its thumb has the makin’s in him of a felon or a unfortunit.” She rocked a slow accompaniment to her dismal, prophecy.
Eudora’s eyes, big with wonder, were fixed on the crouching flank of a distant mountain. Her mother broke the silence. Not often did they speak thus intimately. Old Sally belonged to that class of mothers who feel a pride in their reticent dealings with their daughters, and who consider the management of all affairs of the heart peculiarly the province of youth and inexperience.
But to-night she was prompted by a force beyond her ken to speak to the girl. “Eudory, in pickin’ out one of them men,” she jerked her thumb towards the opposite side of the house, “git one tha’s clar o’ the trick o’ stampedin’ round other wimming. It’s bound to kem back to ye, same as counterfeit money.”
Eudora giggled. She was of an age when the fascinations of curiosity as to the unknown male animal prompt lavish conjecture. “I ’lowed they all stampeded.”