Says I coolly: “Do jest as you are a mind to, but if you must go, it is my duty to stand by you and go, too; if my pardner has got a hard job in front of him to tackle, it is my duty to tackle it, too.”
JOSIAH’S DISAPPOINTMENT.
“Wall,” says he, “I guess I’ll go out to the barn and onharness. The old mare hadn’t ort to go out with her off shoe in such a condition.”
But as he drawed on his overhauls, I heard him mutter sunthin’ to himself about “its bein’ the last night the Elder would be there till fall.” But I overheard him, and says I:
“You know, Josiah Allen, that Elder Bamber has gin up goin’ home; his mother’s fits is broke up, and he hain’t a goin’. And there’l be meetin’s right along every night jest as there has been.”
They’ve been holdin’ protracted meetin’s to Jonesville for quite a spell, and I s’posed them was the meetin’s that Josiah meant. Ah! little, little did I know what Elder he meant, or what meetin’s. But he knew me too well to tell me. He knew well the soundness and heft of my principles. He hadn’t lived with ’em above 20 years without findin’ ’em out. But more of this hereafter and anon.
When Josiah come into the house agin, and sot down, he had that same sort o’ cross, brow-beat look to him. And he spoke out sort o’ surly like: “Hain’t it about supper-time, Samantha? And if you’ve got over bein’ in such a dreadful hurry with that dress, mebby you’ll have time to get a little sunthin’ better to eat. I declare for’t,” says he in a pitiful tone, “you have most starved me out for a week or two. And you hain’t seemed to have had time to say a word to me, nor nothin’. Your mind hain’t seemed to be on me a mite. And,” says he, with a still more depressted and melancholy look, “a cream-biscuit is sunthin’ I hain’t seen for weeks. Nothin’ but bread! bread!”
Oh! how my conscience smited me as I heard them words—it smited and smarted like a burn. Yet at the same time his words kind o’ chirked me up, they made me think what a powerful arrow I had in my hands to shoot down my sorrow with. They made me feel that it wuzn’t too late to save my pardner, and that was a sweet thought to me.
Yes, with a thankful and grateful heart, I grasped holt of that weepon that had defended me so many times before on hard battlefields of principle. I held that weepon firm and upright as a spear, and says I: