“Yes’dy mawning,” he said thickly, without lifting his head.
The man handed the emptied bowl back to his daughter, and chuckled at the hungry pleading in the boy’s eyes. “That’ll hold you for a while, son. Can’t let you founder yourself. Now, then, how’d you pick up that lead, and what brought you here?”
Glen, on her way to the kitchen, halted silently in the doorway to look and listen.
The gaunt young face darkened and his words came hoarsely and jerkily. “Reckon hit were Olivers.” (The Olivers were hereditary foes of his house, the other side of the feud four generations long.) “And yet—” his eyes widened—“hit’s ontelling how.... Farley Oliver, he’s abed with a misery, and Jake’s down to the county seat, and Link has got his right arm broke, and Eddie, which is the least one, is purely too small....” He drew a quick breath and spent a moment in brooding silence. “My gran’mammy, she named hit to me when she were a-dying ... if I crossed her wish ... if I didn’t come down hyar to yo’all, she’d ha’nt me, day and night, night and day, twel I did!”
“Well?” the doctor prodded him.
To Glen, flattening herself against the kitchen door, hardly breathing in the tenseness of her interest, it seemed as if a chill and eerie wind stole into the room which had no kinship with the gale outside.
The youth’s pallor deepened. “I know in reason hit were some Oliver,” he insisted stubbornly, more to himself than to his interrogator. “Hit were purely erbleeged to be! But my gran’mammy were a right quare woman....” His lean young frame began to shake violently, so that the old couch vibrated with it.
“All right,” said the doctor briskly. “Lie still, now, and keep covered up warm! Got your feet on that hot-water bag? Well, your Grandma was a wise old woman! Maybe you didn’t mind her as well as you might, but I guess you will now!”
“Reckon so, suh,” he answered unsteadily, with the first note of respect he had ever shown.
“You get to sleep now. Here—swallow this!” The doctor eased the dark head back on the pillow and tucked the blankets about him, stirred up the fire, and opened a window to admit a breath of snarling storm. “I’ll leave my door open; you just shout if you need anything or if you get to feeling bad. I’ll be down, two—three times before morning, anyway.” He snapped off the light and herded Glen out of the kitchen.