“Sent for a priest?” I exclaimed, completely mystified.
“Yes,” she whispered. “He must have been a Catholic all the time. And the priest wouldn’t come either. That’s what that old preacher got for being so mean.”
She continued: “That preacher wasn’t much meaner than the man is in the company store.”
She was bristling again.
“He won’t deliver goods up here unless you run a big bill. If I want anything much while big Frank here is at work, I have to take Jimmy’s little play express-wagon and haul it up.”
And now she was telling me of her terrible fright three days ago, down at the company store, when there was a rumor of an accident in one of the far tunnels of the mine.
“All the foreign women came running down the hill, half-crazy. I am used to false alarms, but I could hardly get up to this house with my goods. I was expecting to see big Frank brought in, just like he was before little Frank was born, eight years ago.”
Little Frank lifted his face from its business of eating to listen.
“The first thing that boy ever saw was his father on the floor there, covered with blood.”
“You don’t remember it, Frank?” asked his father, grinning.