“Yes, I kin wait.”
She left him, and went into the house, and was gone a full hour. What the man thought of as he leaned against the rails, or sat on top, I do not know. He had the patience of an ant.
When he saw Dorothy again at the door he climbed down, and, with some excitement in his face, went toward the cabin.
“It wasn’t right easy, Joe. I was thinking I might ask Mr. Carington about it. Mr. Lyndsay he’d be best; but I guess I wouldn’t ask him.”
“No,” said Joe, promptly. He saw why this might not be well. “I don’t want nobody to know, Dory, ’cept you and Susie. It’ll kind of surprise her, and she’ll like it.” Then he added, with some cunning, “She hates to have folks goin’ there where them children’s buried.”
“I shall never want to,” said Dorothy. She still carried an unpleasant remembrance of the dismal burial.
“Well, I thought I’d tell you, Dory.”
“Yes, of course.” She took the hint as but another evidence of Susie’s state of mind and of Joe’s dreads and anxieties, and failed to examine it closely, not being of a suspicious turn, despite a life which had given little and taken much. Whoever asked of Dorothy a favor approached her on the side of her nature most open to capture.
“You are a good deal more patient than most men,” she said. “Come in; come in.” Joe entered after her. A Sunday quiet was in the air of the place. There was no fire, and the sun, as it looked in, disclosed no want anywhere of neatness and care. It was not lost on poor Joe as he looked around the small house. He had been here often, but there are times when we see and times when we do not. Now, perhaps because of being on guard, all his senses, and the inert mind back of them, were more alive than usual. A book lying open on the spotless table struck him most; a snow-white rolling-pin had been hastily laid on it to keep the place at the moment of Joe’s coming.
He was bent on making himself agreeable to his hostess, who now stood by an open window, well satisfied with her work, a large sheet of paper in her hand. She had put on for Sunday a white gown which had known the summers of Georgia. It was clean and much mended, but it set off her fair rosiness and dark hair, and made her look larger than she was.