“No.”
“A dentist?”
“No.”
“What then?”
“None of your damn business!”
I felt disconcerted. Evidently, the man was a gentleman,—he objected to being interviewed. The tack looked like a bad one; clouds a little too electric for fine sailing. A thin-haired woman in a calico dress and rough shoes, with a care-worn expression on her pale face, was sitting at one end of the porch. She now spoke, in a voice inaudible to the unapproachable:
“Don’t pay any attention to him. He’s been drinkin’. Hit allers makes him ugly.”
“Who is he?” I whispered.
“My husband. We’ve been married a year; soon arter he cum from the West.”
And then she sighed and looked out across the rickety fence, the roaring waters of the Broad river, the brown mill and the few houses by it, and then at the stony-faced mountains beyond. I sighed in sympathy.