The sight moved him, stern and revengeful as he was; he gazed on, his face gradually softening, and finally turned away, slipping the dagger into its sheath, then half withdrawing it as his eye fell on the old man on the farther side of the bed, soundly sleeping also, with his face to the wall, and little dreaming that there was but a step between him and a death of violence and blood. One moment of hesitation, and the intruder withdrew as stealthily as he had entered, passing on through the kitchen into the open air.
“I’ll let ’em alone,” he muttered, “and they’ll revinge Phalim O’Rourke on aich ither better’n he cud do it hisself; an’ that widout anny danger o’ State prison fer sendin’ ’em aforehand to purgatory, that mabbe wadn’t be no worse nor what they’re makin’ atween theirselves now.”
CHAPTER VIII.
There was a belt of timber, principally oak and hickory, on the Himes place, and one afternoon the old man informed his wife that “a young feller was comin’ to help him for a week or so fellin’ trees and cuttin’ ’em up into cord wood.”
“More work for me, I s’pose,” she said, in a sullen tone.
“He’ll board and lodge here. You kin git a room ready fer him and set an extry plate onto the table. He’ll be here to supper to-night if he’s a man o’ his word,” was the nonchalant reply. And Mr. Himes stepped from the kitchen door and walked off in the direction of the barn.
Belinda’s face brightened as she went upstairs and busied herself in making a bed in a little room usually appropriated to the use of the hired man, when they had one. They had now been without one for some time, and she was inexpressibly weary of the uncongenial society of her old husband. Any change, she thought, must be for the better.
She was bustling about, setting her table while the supper was cooking over the fire, when the outer door opened, and a man’s step—not that of her husband, yet strangely familiar—crossed the threshold. She turned to see whose it was, then uttered a low cry full of terror, while her cheek blanched and the dish in her hand fell to the floor with a crash and lay in fragments at her feet.
For several minutes they stood silently gazing into each other’s eyes, hers dilating with fear, his stern and gloomy, a grim smile upon his lips.