"When he took his text I knew he meant it for you," said the other woman. "I have never seen a madder man in the pulpit, never in my life. While he was talking, he never once looked at you, though he knew everybody else was doing nothing else. Then I seed you rise to your feet. He stopped to take a drink from his goblet, and you could 'a' heard a pin fall, it was so still. I reckon the rest thought like I did, that you was going right up to him and pull his hair or slap his jaws. You looked like you hardly knowed what you was doing, and, for one, I tuck a free breath when you walked straight out of the house. What you did was exactly right, as most fair-minded folks will admit, though I'm here to tell you, my friend, that you won't find fair-minded folks very plentiful hereabouts. The fair-minded ones are over there in that graveyard."
Mrs. Boyd stroked her quivering lips with her hard, brown hand, and said, softly: "I wasn't going to sit there and listen to any more of it. I'd thrown aside pride and principle and gone to do my duty to my religion, as I saw it, and thought maybe some of them—one or two, at least—would meet me part of the way, but I couldn't listen to a two hours' tirade about me and my—my misfortune. If I'd stayed any longer, I'd have spoken back to him, and that would have been exactly what he and some of the rest would have wanted, for then they could have made a case against me in court for disturbing public worship, and imposed a heavy fine. They can't bear to think that, in spite of all their persecution, I've gone ahead and paid my debts and prospered in a way that they never could do with all their sanctimony."
There was silence for a moment. A gentle breeze stirred the leaves of the trees and the blades of long grass beside the road. There was a far-away tinkling of cow and sheep bells in the lush-green pastures which stretched out towards the frowning mountain against which the setting sun was levelling its rays.
"You say you haven't seen anybody since Sunday," remarked the loitering woman, in restrained, tentative tones.
"No, I've been right here. Why did you ask me that?"
"Well, you see, Ann," was the slow answer, "talking at the rate Bazemore was to your face, don't you think it would be natural for him to—to sort o' rub it on even heavier behind your back, after you got up that way and went out so sudden."
"I never thought of it, but I can see now that it would be just like him." Mrs. Boyd took a deep breath and lowered her pail to the ground. "Yes," she went on, reflectively, as she drew herself up again and leaned on the fence, "I reckon he got good and mad when I got up and left."
"Huh!" The other woman smiled. "He was so mad he could hardly speak. He fairly gulped, his eyes flashed, and he was as white as a bunch of cotton. He poured out another goblet of water that he had no idea of drinking, and his hand shook so much that the glass tinkled like a bell against the mouth of the pitcher. You must have got as far as the hitching-rack before his fury busted out. I reckon what he said was the most unbecoming thing that a stout, able-bodied man ever hurled at a defenceless woman's back."
There was another pause. Mrs. Boyd's expectant face was as hard as stone; her dark-gray eyes were two burning fires in their shadowy orbits.
"What did he say?" she asked. "You might as well tell me."