Before the stove, in a sadly abused, wooden bottomed armchair, and with his back humped up a good deal like the chicken under the lilac bush outside, sat an old man with weazened, wrinkled face, eyes like a hawk’s, a beak-like nose, and a sparse settlement of gray hairs on his crown and chin.
He leaned forward in his seat, and both claw-like hands clutching the arms of the chair, seemed to be all that kept him from falling upon the stove.
At the window, just where the light fell best upon the book in his hand, sat a youth of sixteen years—a well made, robust boy, whose brown hair curled about his broad forehead, and whose face was not without marks of real beauty.
Just now his brows were knit in a slight frown, and there was a flash of anger in his clear eyes.
“I dunno what’s comin’ of ev’rything,” the old man was saying, in a querulous tone. “Here ’tis the first o’ April, an’ ’tain’t been weather fit ter plow a furrer, or plant a seed, yit.”
“Well, I don’t see as it’s my fault, Uncle Arad,” responded the boy by the window. “I don’t make the weather.”
“I dunno whether ye do or not,” the old man declared, after staring across at him for an instant. “I begin ter believe yer a regular Jonah—jest as yer Uncle Anson was, an’ yer pa, too.”
The boy turned away and looked out of the window at this mention of his parent, and a close observer might have seen his broad young shoulders tremble with sudden emotion as he strove to check the sobs which all but choked him.
Whether the old man was a close enough observer to see this or not, he nevertheless kept on in the same strain.
“One thing there is erbout it,” he remarked; “Anson knew he was born ter ill luck, an’ he cleared out an’ never dragged nobody else down ter poverty with him. But your pa had ter marry—an’ see what come of it!”