The prisoner’s eyes travelled down to the face on the carte. “That’s right,” he said, with another ring in his voice. “I wouldn’t mind half so much if I could keep my going to the pen from her. She’s never found out about me.”
“How much family you got?” said Wickliff, thoughtfully.
“Just a mother. I ain’t married. There was a girl, my sister—good sort too, ’nuff better’n me. She used to be a clerk in the store, type-writer, bookkeeper, general utility, you know. My position in the first place; and when I—well, resigned, they gave it to her. She helped mother buy the place. Two years ago she died. You may believe me or not, but I would have gone back home then and run straight if it hadn’t been for Mame. I would, by ⸺! I had five hundred dollars then, and I was going back to give every damned cent of it to ma, tell her to put it into the bakery—”
“That how she makes a living?”
“Yes—little two-by-four bakery—oh, I’m giving you straight goods—makes pies and cakes and bread—good, too, you bet—makes it herself. Ruth Graves, who lives round the corner, comes in and helps—keeps the books, and tends shop busy times; tends the oven too, I guess. She was a great friend of Ellie’s—and mine. She’s a real good girl. Well, I didn’t get mother’s letters till it was too late, and I felt bad; I had a mind to go right down to Fairport and go in with ma. That—she stopped it. Got me off on a tear somehow, and by the time I was sober again the money was ’most all gone. I sent what was left off to ma, and I went on the road again myself. But she’s the devil.”
“That the time you hit her?”
The prisoner nodded. “Oughtn’t to, of course. Wasn’t brought up that way. My father was a Methodist preacher, and a good one. But I tell you the coons that say you never must hit a woman don’t know anything about that sort of women; there ain’t nothing on earth so infernally exasperating as a woman. They can mad you worse than forty men.”
It was the sheriff’s turn to nod, which he did gravely, with even a glimmer of sympathy in his mien.
“Well, she never forgave you,” said he; “she’s had it in for you since.”
“And she knows I won’t squeal, ’cause I’d have to give poor Ben away,” said the prisoner; “but I tell you, sheriff, she was at the bottom of the deviltry every time, and she managed to bag the best part of the swag, too.”