"Say! ain't that coon ever goin' to get done shootin' off?" he broke in wearily, in the midst of a long speech from Eliphaz the Temanite.
John McIntyre did not hear. He had come to the answer of Job, words that found an echo in his own bitter heart:
"I was at ease, but He hath broken me asunder; He hath also taken me by my neck and shaken me to pieces, and set me up for His mark. His archers compass me round about. He cleaveth my reins asunder, and doth not spare."
The anguish in the reader's voice, conveying the strength of the man's mighty grief, made itself felt in the child's soul, and stilled him. He gazed up into John McIntyre's haggard face with a strange heaviness at his heart. Through chapter after chapter he waited, silent and subdued, but at last his weariness overcame his fears. He rolled over on the rug and yawned loudly.
"Aw, shucks!" he muttered; "they're as bad at gassin' as Ella Anne Long!" He waited through another chapter, and then broke in once more.
"Say! couldn't you skip all that blather, an' tell us what happened next? Didn't the devil get after him again?"
The reader paused, and gazed down at the boy in a dazed fashion. "What do you want?" he asked vaguely.
"I wish them fellows would hustle up, an' quit chewin'. Did Job get all right again?"
John McIntyre mechanically turned the leaves. He experienced a grim satisfaction in the boy's complaints. What did these wordy friends of Job know of sorrow and despair? As though they were conditions that could be explained away! He turned almost to the end of the story, and there he paused. A new actor had entered the sorrowful drama. Out of the whirlwind there came a Voice—the voice of the Infinite—and before its thunder the souls of Job and his friends bowed in self-abasement.
The reading went on again, continuing uninterrupted to the end. The man closed the Book, dropping it heavily upon the table.