“Why don't ye hire money, if ye 'ain't got enough?”
“I don't hire money,” answered Jerome, and heaved another log with a splendid swing from his shoulders.
Cheeseman looked at him doubtfully. “Well,” he said, “I 'ain't got none to hire. I've got my money out of mills on the banks of roarin' streams, an' I'm goin' to keep it out. I believe in Providence, but I don't believe in temptin' of it. I 'ain't got no money to hire.”
“And I don't want to hire, so we sha'n't quarrel about that,” Jerome replied, shortly.
“I don't say that I wouldn't let ye have a little money, if you needed it, an' it was for somethin' safe for both of us,” said Cheeseman, uneasily, “but, as I said before, I don't believe in temptin' of Providence, especially when it seems set agin you.”
“I am not going to shirk any blame off on to Providence,” Jerome responded, scornfully. “It was Stimson's weak dam up above.”
“Mebbe the dam was weak, but Providence took advantage of it,” insisted Cheeseman, who, in spite of his cheerful temperament, had a gloomy theology. “I'd like to know why ye think your mill went down; do ye think ye done anything to deserve it?” he said, further, in an argumentative tone.
“If I thought I had, I'd do it again,” Jerome returned, and went off to a distant pile of lumber out of sound of Cheeseman's voice.
He felt a proud sensitiveness, almost a shame, over his calamity, which he would have been at a loss to explain. All day long, when men came to view the scene of disaster, he tried to avoid them. He shrank in spirit even from their sympathy.
“No worse for me than for anybody else,” he would reply, when told repeatedly, with gruff condolence, that it was hard luck. His sensitiveness might have arisen from some hereditary taint from his orthodox ancestors of their belief that misfortune is the whip-lash for sin, or from his native resentment of pity. At home he could not talk of it either with his mother or Elmira; as for his father, he sat in the sun and dozed. It was doubtful if he fully realized what had happened.