Dr. Darrow patted her arm. “Now, don’t you worry, Granny Manders, he’ll come, all right! He’s just a little shy and timid, but——”
The boy wheeled to face him. Who was afraid?—Afraid of the chicken-livered mill hands? He was Luke Manders and his father’d been Luke Manders before him, and his Grandpappy Luke Manders before that! Ask anybody in these mountains if ever a Manders was scared of anything or anybody that walked the earth!
A furious outpouring, vigorous, incoherent, picturesque and profane. Boyish bombast, but something more than that: a seething hatred incompatible with fresh youth.
Glen Darrow, looking and listening with breathless interest, saw with amazement that her father was keeping his temper—the temper which boiled up and over so promptly for less cause than this.
“Well, by George, boy,” he stated with amusement and approval, “I believe your grandma’s right about you! I believe you’ll go pretty far, once you get something under your skull beside fancy cuss words, and learn to do something smarter than aim a pop gun behind berry bushes!”
The pacific speech further enraged the young savage. “I don’t want to know anything but what my pap knew!” he shouted. “I don’t aim to do anything but what my pap did!”
“All right, son, all right! All right!” The choleric doctor was entirely good-humored, immensely entertained. “You just run and play Injun till you’re fed up on it, and then you come to me!”
Luke Manders flung himself out of the cabin, cursing and snarling, and the old crone began to weep the slow and difficult tears of age, bright drops trickling grudgingly from her hot little eyes.
“Don’t you fret yourself, Granny Manders!” Dr. Darrow took her leathery old claws in a warm and reassuring grip. “That’s a great boy, and he’ll come out all right—you mark my words!”
The great-gandmother hung her head. “I am purely shamed of my kin, for unmannerly orneryness! Shamed to my marrow bones.”