"They know ever'thing, these newspaper men," she went on. "They advised me right. Tom, two years ain't long. We waited longer than that to get married. Remember, Tom? We ain't old yet....
"Poor old gal," said Tom.
It was the sight of a dilapidated and deserted blacksmith shop near the road they were widening, and of some rusted fragments of tools scattered about here and there, which caused old Tom, as the road-scraper passed and repassed the spot, to look very closely down into the upturned dirt. And it was the glimpse of something in that dirt which caused him suddenly to rein up the four mules and glance quickly in the direction of the two guards.
It was an afternoon of terrific heat, following a prolonged drought. In the road ahead the gang of Negro convicts toiled silently, sluggishly, in the blinding glare. Simmons had driven off in the direction of Greenville an hour before. The two remaining guards, with shotguns under their arms, stood in the scant shade of two dust-covered trees.
"Jake," said the old mountaineer calmly to the Negro on the machine behind him, the Negro who handled the levers, "Jake, there's a bolt loose some-whar' on this scrape. Reckon I better 'tend to it myself."
Without any apparent hurry, he clambered down from the seat. Quickly, secretly, he picked out of the upturned earth an object which he thrust into his shirt. Deliberately, as if encountering obstacles which caused him trouble, he hammered away at the supposed loose bolt. When at last he clambered back into the iron seat, heated like the top of a stove, there was just a slight flush on his lean cheeks and a brightness as of triumph in his deep-set eyes.
On the way back to camp they passed Tom Belcher's store. Here he asked permission of one of the guards (they were not all like Simmons) to go in and buy himself some tobacco. The guard who went in with him saw nothing suspicious in the fact that, along with the tobacco, the old man purchased also a package of chewing gum.
That night he did not sleep. By raising up on his elbows in his cot he could see, in a chair tilted back against an oak tree, the night guard with a gun across his knees and, farther on, in front of the guard tent, the outline of the bloodhound asleep. Once, when he thought the guard nodded, he reached in his shirt. He got out the object he had picked up in the road and rubbed it against his shackles. The rasp of file on steel sounded loud in his tent like an alarm. He thought he saw the guard stir and the bloodhound lift his head. He lay silently down again. Later he punched a hole in the mattress and stuck the file deep into the straw.
Next day he thought of Molly and home. As he sat on the road-scraper the mountains, purple and lofty against the sky, seemed now to be beckoning him. Once within them, once across the state line, the law would not follow him. He was satisfied of that from what Molly had told him.