“Don’t you remember me?” Penny asked. “I stopped here this afternoon with my girl friend. We had a drink at your pump.”
“Humph! That ain’t no gal with you now! Who is he?”
“Oh, just a friend who works at—” Penny was on the verge of saying the Riverview Star, but caught herself in time and finished—“a friend who works where I do.”
“And what you spyin’ around here for?”
“We’re looking for another friend of ours.”
“’Pears to me you got a heap o’ friends,” the woman said harshly. “This afternoon you was cryin’ you lost a dog.”
“It was Louise who lost the dog,” said Penny, well realizing that her story would never convince the woman.
“Whatever you lost, man or beast, git off this property and don’t come back!” Mrs. Hawkins ordered. “We hain’t seen no dog, and we hain’t seen none o’ yer friends. Now git!”
Another face had appeared at the window—that of the bearded stranger Penny had seen earlier in the day on Lookout Point. No longer could she doubt that he was Ezekiel Hawkins, the man who a few minutes earlier had ordered his two sons to bed.
“We’re leaving now,” said Salt, before Penny had an opportunity to speak again of Louise’s missing dog. “Sorry to have bothered you.”