Joe didn’t heed her.
“They’ve always helt the’r heads above us becase we’re poor an’ they’re rich,” he ran on. “You sha’n’t go a step, mother!”
Mrs. Thompson said nothing. She rolled her churn aside and went into the cabin. Ewebanks saw her bending over the pots and kettles in the red light from the live coals. He saw her rise to arrange the table, and knew she was going to ask him to supper. He got up to go, said good day to Joe, who had lapsed into sullen silence, and descended the rocky path toward his cabin.
It was growing dusk; a deepening haze, half of smoke, half of mist, hung over the wooded hill on the right of the road, and on the left a newly cleared field was dotted with the smoldering fires of brush-heaps.
At the foot of the hill he glanced back and saw Mrs. Thompson in the path signaling to him. He paused in the corner of a rail fence half overgrown with briars and waited for her. She was panting with exertion when she reached him.
“I didn’t care to talk up thar ’fore Joe,” she began. “He’s so bitter agin Melissa an’ ’er folks; but I want to know more. What seems to be ailin’ ’er, Jim?”
“A general break-down, I reckon,” was the answer. “She’s been gradually on the fail fer some time. I reckon yore duty-bound to see ’er, Mrs. Thompson. I’d not pay any attention to Joe nur nobody else. Maybe thar’s been some pride on yore side, too.”
“I don’t know,” she said doubtfully, and then she was silent. She broke a piece of worm-eaten bark from a pine rail on the fence and crumbled it in her hand.
“I’ve been wantin’ to tell you some’n fer a long time,” Ewebanks put in cautiously, “but it wasn’t no business o’ mine, an’ I hate meddlin’. I hain’t no talebearer, but this hain’t that, I reckon.”
“I hauled some wood fer ’er one day last spring when me’n my team was detained at court over thar. She come out in the yard in front o’ her fine house whar I was unloadin’. She looked mighty thin an’ peaked an’ lonesome. I had no idea she knowed me from a side o’ sole leather, grand woman that she is, but she axed me ef I wasn’t from out this way. I told ’er I was, an’ then she reached over the wagon-wheel an’ shuck hands powerful friendly like, an’ axed particular about you an’ Joe, an’ how you was a-makin’ of it. I told ’er you was up an’ about, but, like the rest of us, as pore as Job’s turkey. She said she’d been a-layin’ off to go to see you, but, somehow, hadn’t been able to git round to it. She said she’d been porely fer over a year.”