"Maybe I am talking moonshine; but I can't get the notion off me that I won't be long following the old dog."
"Don't talk nonsense, Molly."
She shrugged her shoulders in the brief fashion he found so charming. The growl of thunder came a third time from the distance, grumbling louder and enduring longer than the claps which had sounded before, and on the echo of this final rumble a feverish breeze sprang up, and wooed the hair upon her forehead and laid a kind breath against his cheek. Power looked in the track of the storm and saw only the black sky. He began to doubt if the burst would wait for midnight. He wanted to rouse the child into better spirits, but himself must first summon courage to shake off the oppression of the night. Now she was speaking again—to herself as much as to him.
"Maybe it isn't hard to die. The old dog was curled round quiet and easy when I found him. Sometimes when I get fair sick of hearing mum and dad and of doin' the same old things, I think it easier to be dead than to start to-morrow." She broke without warning into low, charming laughter. "When we have sat a few weeks inside there with the rain coming through every crack of the roof and each of us fair tired of looking at the other, we'll reckon it a better game to be dead than alive."
"Wise men say there is another life to be lived when this one is done with, Molly."
"I've heard that story before, Jim. There was a parson round our ways once with a pack-horse. He reckoned there was more business when we had done with this place. I got him talking, for I hadn't seen a feller for a month. But I expect there isn't too much in the tale. What do you think, Mister?"
"Why Mister again?"
"Jim."
"If there is, let us hope we make less muddle of things next time."
"Phew! it's hot. See the lightning. You will have a wet skin to go home in. No, I don't want to die yet. Some things don't happen too bad. I'd be sorry not to ride a horse again or to go fishing or to hear the birds. It isn't too bad of a morning when the sun first comes over the plain, and it isn't too bad to hear the noises in the scrub of a night." She stopped to smile. "And I don't want to say good-bye to you fellows."