“Sam begin to yowl. ‘I seen ye was stuck,’ he sais, ‘an’ I thot I’d help ye out.’
“With that Perry th’owed his brother off into a corner o’ the room. Then he stood up straight an’ looked Hannah Ciders right in the eye.
“‘He thot I was stuck,’ he sayd, steppin’ off the platform an’ walkin’ up to the girl. ‘But I ain’t. The last syllable’s e-a-l-a-s!
“‘No,’ she answers quiet like. ‘It’s e-a-l-i-s—but that ain’t no difference.’”
CHAPTER III.
Absalom Bunkel.
The Patriarch flattened his nose against the grimy windowpane and peered out into the storm.
“Mighty souls!” he cried. “Jest look at it a-comin’ down! Hed I a-knowd we was goin’ to hev it like this, you’d ’a’ seen me a-leavin’ home—you’d ’a’ seen me a-leavin’ home.”
The old man thoughtfully stroked his beard. He felt that he had met but just retribution for coming to the store to loaf. When an hour before he had awakened from a doze in his arm-chair, picked up his stick and hobbled to the village, the sky was clear and blue; not a cloud was visible anywhere, and the sun was blazing down on the fields of yellow grain that he overlooked from the porch of his little house on the hill. But the storm had been gathering its force unseen behind the neighboring mountains, piling black cloud on black cloud. And then, like an army charging on a sleeping enemy, it swept forth from its hiding-place, amid the flash of lightning and the crash of thunder, and deluged the valley.