"Ye said it was a boy?" This was Mr. Darton's voice, unmistakable now.
"I didn't say," the woman's whisper floated down to me as a door creaked open. "But it is—a girl. You must be ver—"
Her words were cut off by the report of a door banging shut. There was the sibilant sound of a breath being drawn in and, at the same moment, Mr. Darton's voice again.
"What the hell made ye think I'd want to see another girl for?" he growled.
A pause followed, the emptier for the preceding stridor of his voice. Then—"You c'n get along now—we ain't got no more call fur neighbors."
With that he came stamping down the stairs and slouched into the front room, where, upon his catching sight of me, a frightened look crossed his face, followed, almost instantly, by a queer expression, a mixture of relief and cunning that gave his face a grotesqueness that I can recall to this very day.
"Well, boy," he said in that low drawl and wavelike inflection of the voice that I was to learn to know so well, "yer father sent ye, did he?"
I proffered the note and the pills, and he frowned at them a second before pocketing them.
"Come—he-re." He seemed to pull at the words, giving each a retarded emphasis. As I approached, he drew me towards him, where he had sunk on the dingy, orange-fringed sofa. "N-ow, y're a nice young fellow—a bit scrawny, though. Ye—gotta horse?"
I shook my head.