“As for the piece of board you speak of, I d’no whose it wuz, but I believe it wuz hern. Anyway, I know she earnt every mite of food and drink you took into your miserable body.”
And the remembrance of Annie’s wrongs and woes so overmastered me, that I sez right out—
“You drunken, low-lived snipe, you! how dast you be comin’ round that good little creeter, and tryin’ to git her back into her starvation and slavery, and peril of life and limb? How dast you, you drunken coot, you?” sez I, a-lookin’ two or three daggers at him and some simeters.
He quailed. I d’no as I ever see signs of quail any plainer than I see it in him.
But he muttered sunthin’ about—“A man’s having a right to his wife and child.”
“A right?” sez I; “do you dast to look anybody in the face and talk of your right to wife and child, when it wuz your poor, abused, half-starved wife’s weak arms and mighty love that riz up between you and your child and murder? Riz up between you and the gallows?”
He quailed deeper, fur deeper than he had quailed, and his lips trembled.
And I see under the quail, come to look clost at him, that there wuz a kinder good-hearted look under all the weakness and dissipated look of his face. I see, or thought I see, that it wuz bad influences that had led him astray, and if he had kep’ under good influence and away from bad ones (the B. I. L. and his hard cider, etc.), I thought like as not, from the generous lay of his features, that he might have been a tolerable good-lookin’ feller and behaved middlin’ well.
And that is why I spozed that Annie looked so heart-broken, that wuz why, I spoze, that, in spite of all she had underwent, my contoggler loved him.
But anon he sprunted up some and said sunthin’ about bein’ bound to have his wife.