“That’s a lie.”
“It ain’t! I swear it ain’t no lie. I heerd Michelle a-sayin’ so.”
“When was it?”
“I don’t rightly remember. I—I couldn’t do it.”
“Git him here, and I’ll do it,” she said. “It’s just to pull a trigger. So.” And she snapped her thumb and finger so as make a sharp click. The blood was up in splotches of dusky red upon her angular and sallow face. The man recoiled, more scared at the woman than at the crime which he lacked power to conceive of as possible.
“Gosh!” he cried, “you’re a devil!”
In an instant she was changed. She had a share of the singular dramatic power of the abler and more resolute criminal nature.
“Oh, I’m just crazy, Joe, what with one thing and another. Don’t you never mind me.” And a smile, which to another man would have seemed hideous, disturbed her features with unwonted lines. “Might nothin’ ever chance. You and me we’ll have to just fight along. ’Tain’t every man would have stood by me all along, the way you’ve done.”
“That’s so,” said Joe, relieved. “I’ll work for you, Susie: don’t you go to fear I won’t. I was a-thinkin’ you was ’bout downded all along of them children.”
“That’s it, Joe; you’re better a heap than me.” She knew, or thought she knew, that if the chance came she would have the power to compel him into doing her will. There was strange self-confidence in her sense of capacity to hurl this child-man into evil-doing, as one may cast a stone; and now the notion possessed her almost continually. How to do it? how to bring about the occasion? how to escape consequences? The craving for this thing to become possible grew as the days went by. Nor is this abiding temptation rare in minds of her class. I have said that it possessed her, and the phrase suffices to describe her condition. The idea of crime owned her as a master owns a slave. It was a fierce and a powerful nature which poor Joe had taken to his unchanging heart.