“Oh, you are not p’inted right yet. Don’t you kill more than two chickens. Here,” and she set two pins in his sleeve, “you can look at these.”
“There, one pin stands for each chicken,” he said. “Guess I’m p’inted,” and he went away.
“What’s wanting,Joe?” she said. “How’s Susie?”
“Oh, she’s kind of upsot. She takes on ’bout that last boy like there wasn’t a boy on airth.”
“There isn’t for her.”
“There’s no gainsayin’ that. She’s allus a-talkin’ about them Lyndsays, and how they sot a stone, a right handsome stone, up on that there boy of theirn,—and she ain’t got none. Women’s awful queer, Dory. I can’t buy no tombstone.”
“It doesn’t seem so queer to me. Can’t you get some kind of a thing, just to please the woman? Why, if it was only of wood, you see, it might help.”
“That’s so. I was a sort of thinkin’ ’bout that. Queer how folks thinks ’bout the same things.”
“Were you? Well, you’re a better kind of man than I took you for, Joe Colkett. Your wife’s about half off her wits with grieving. If I was you, I wouldn’t—well, I wouldn’t take her too serious. People that are troubled the way she is do have strange notions. I think the devil he’s as like as not to get a grip on us when we are—”
“What was you a-thinkin’, Dory?” he broke in, suspiciously.