“Well,” Josh said, removing his pipe from his lips and spitting thoughtfully, “seems Mis’ Graham’s bound to get some kind of a husband!” Then he chuckled, and thrust his pipe back under his long, shaven upper lip.
“Now look a-here, Josh Butterfield; you don’t want to be talkin’ that way,” his wife said, bitterly. “Bad enough to have folks that don’t know no better pokin’ fun at her; but I ain’t a-goin’ to have you do it.”
“Well, I was only just sayin’—”
“Well, don’t you say it; that’s all.”
Josh poked a gnarled thumb down into the bowl of his pipe, reflectively. “You ain’t got a match about you, have you, Emmy?” he said, coaxingly.
Mrs. Butterfield rose and went into the kitchen to get the match; when she handed it to him, she said, sighing, “I’m just ’most sick over it.”
“You do seem consid’able shuck up,” Josh said, kindly.
“Well,—I know Lizzie’s just doin’ it out of pure goodness; but she’ll ’most starve.”
“I don’t see myself how she’s calculatin’ to run things,” Josh ruminated; “course Jim’s pension wa’n’t much, but it was somethin’. And without it—”
“Without it?—land! Is the government goin’ to stop pensions? There! I never did like the President!”