“He says we’ve got to pay up or git out in October. Guess he got my mind ’bout it. I’d have licked him if I’d been a man. He wasn’t far from scared, anyhow.”
“That won’t help us none,” said Joe, with a glimmer of good sense. “He’ll be wus’n ever he was.”
“Who cares?” Then, turning, she set her eyes, aglow with the firelight, large, red, and evil, on Joe. “That man Carington was around to-day, asking if we’d seen bear-tracks. Bill Sansom told me. He didn’t come here. I did see him yesterday, on the lower road, a-twiddlin’ a gold watch-chain and a-singin’. What might a big gold watch be worth, Joe? I asked him the hour, just to git a look at it.”
“Lord, Susie, I don’t know.”
To this she made no reply. He stood beside her, shifting his feet uneasily.
Of a sudden she got up and caught the man by the shoulders, and, as she stood, towered over him a full foot.
“What—what’s the matter, Susie?” he gasped.
“Git that man up here in September, you fool.”
Joe looked aside, Dorothy’s imperfect warning in his mind.
“I heerd he’d give up that notion.”