"I dunno ez thar be, and I dunno ez thar be," Marsden answered.
Both parties seemed to understand each other perfectly. They approached as warily as two foxes. When the roll was finally spread out on the counter, the dim lamplight flickered over a patchwork quilt of the familiar log-cabin pattern, gay with colors as varied as those of Joseph's coat.
"What cher s'pose yer could give fur this?" [Pg 75] the new-comer asked with a relapse into unwary eagerness, and an irrepressible pride in this evidence of the household industry of his women folk.
"Dunno, I'm sure," said Marsden, slowly, shifting his quid of tobacco and spitting meditatively on the floor. "Shop-keepin' 's all a resk anyhow. I'll give yer seventy-five cents for it though, jest for a gamble; but nobody has much use for quilts in this weather, except to hide their heads under from the skeeters."
"Truth will out," whispered Flint. "Marsden always declares that mosquitoes are unknown at Nepaug."
The owner of the quilt shook his head dubiously.
"Couldn't you go a dollar on it?" he queried. "It took my wife a month to make it, sewin' evenin's."
"Did—did it?"
"Yaas, 'n' it's made out of pieces of the children's clothes, and some on 'em 's dead—and associations ought to caount for somethin'."
"Will it last?" questioned the cautious Marsden, twitching it this way and that, and testing the material with his thumb-nail, which he kept long and sharp apparently for the purpose of detecting flaws in dry-goods.