“What was you sayin’?” said Hiram, entering.
“I was only p’inting myself, Hiram.”
“Do you have need to do that, Dory? I’d’a’ never guessed that.”
“Oh, pretty often.” She herself would scarcely have said “p’inting” in her talk with the Lyndsays, but that her husband used the word, and she had come to regard it by habit as having a specific significance other than that of its proper, unabbreviated parent.
Meanwhile Joe Colkett walked homeward, with so much mind as he possessed at ease. The rest of the enterprise seemed small compared to the difficulty over which poor Dorothy had so innocently helped him.
At times he had been inclined to content himself with a neat wooden tomb-mark. Being clever enough with tools, this might easily have been managed; but now, the hard, half-distraught woman, whose worn middle age still had his love, for whom he would have dared all his nature let him dare, was ever at his elbow with hints as to the possibility of crime. He had, however, no natural tendency to grave wrong-doing, and it seemed to him that if he could propitiate this relentless temptress by gratifying her lesser desire, she might be content and cease to urge him into worse ways. He was distinctly afraid of his wife, and, once or twice, of himself, when she had set before him what they could do with money, and how pleasant it might be to get drunk when he liked.
At least now she should have her more innocent wish satisfied. Nor was it strange that he gave no thought to the people he was about to plunder. He had lived too much of late in the black shade of the possibilities of larger crime to be troubled by the smaller sin he was so eager to commit. Nor could he supply to the minds of those he meant to rob more motives than his own imagination supplied, and it taught him nothing in the way of sentiment concerning these records of the dead.
CHAPTER XX
Joe went home, and, as he approached, saw the woman, his wife, at the wood-pile. One foot was on a log, and, as she struck, she swung the ax with the ease of habit and of strength. Joe stood a moment thinking what a fine, big creature it was. He admired the physical power and the dexterity of this gaunt being, to whom unkindly time had left none of the fair curves of her sex.