Henry backed away. All his life he had been terrified in the presence of women.
"He can't hear you, lady," explained Charlie Sanders.
"Oh—make him understand, somebody." The girl followed Henry with her double handful of currency, but he backed further, sidling, his lips lifted at the corners.
He was in a cold agony, a wretchedness of shaking relief and anguish of conscience. He wanted to be let alone. He wanted to creep into his old bed under the wool quilts, deep down where he could shut his ears against the penetrating jeers that clanged like sleighbells in his brain. The girl's insistence drew from him a painful burst of his rare, dreadful speech.
"I don't want any money!" he shrilled. Then, snatching away from them, he leaped the fence and tore through his tiny back garden. Inside his house he jerked the blinds shut over the outraged window and sagged down in a chair, shaking from head to foot.
"Now," he thought gloomily, "now—they'll tear up that spur. Now what you goin' to do, Henry Hornbone? You're a dad-blamed old fool."
But something seemed to warm him as he crept half-clothed into his bed.
"Gosh, that girl had little hands," he thought aloud. "Might 'a' killed her anyway. Might 'a' killed a lot of folks. Didn't kill 'em though. Didn't kill anybody."
The visitor who banged on Henry's old warped front door in the morning grew weary after a while and went around to the back. The knock on the back door meant nothing to Henry's sealed ears, but the jar came presently to his senses and he opened the closed shutters and thrust out his head. The grin was absent from his grizzled face. He glowered. He scowled till he saw that the intruder upon his doorstep was feminine and young, that she had red hair and little hands and feet that looked as though dancing were their chief mission in life. Then he grinned.