He stood at the fence and watched her till she had disappeared in the cottage, and then, like a man in a delightful, bewildering dream, he turned his face toward the lights in his own house.
Old Wrinkle was waiting for him at the gate, and he held it open for him. "Your supper—sech as it is—is on the table waitin' for you," he said, picking his teeth with a splinter from the fence. "Ma got it ready for you; I've had mine; I made me some mush out of the yaller corn-meal Pomp fetched from the mill. Mush-an'-milk, with a dab o' cream an' a pinch o' salt, is all right to sleep on. We've had a day of it; Hettie has gone all to flinders, and went to bed at sundown with a crackin' headache, an' eyes swelled as big as squashes. Her uncle Ben is in trouble. He sent her a letter fifty pages in duration by one of his niggers. As well as I can make out betwixt Hettie's spasms her uncle Ben's fine Baltimore lady has turned him down. Thar seems to be a Yankee feller in the way. She advanced a hundred reasons fer deciding not to retire to lonely mountain-life. She's riled up, for one thing, on the nigger question—says she understands a lady has to go armed to the teeth just to walk from the well to the back porch, an' that she never had learned to shoot, nohow. The Yankee feller has more scads than Ben, an' has bought an estate in New York City which he lays at her feet as an inducement. Het an' Ben must be slices off the same block, for his letter was soaked in salt water, an' she had to run a hot flatiron over hern before it would do to send. He writ her that she was the only faithful woman on earth—he was hintin' at Dick's burial arrangements, I reckon—an' that if she was thar he'd put his head in her lap an' have a good cry. They would have had to swap laps if they had been together to-day, for Het needed a foot-tub to take care of her overflow. Well, I'm keepin' you from your royal banquet. You'll find it on the dinner-table, with the cloth all drawed up over it like a bundle ready for the wash. Ma tied it up that way to keep the cat out of it. I don't think the cat 'u'd care for any of it, but I reckon Jane 'lowed the thing mought paw it over in the hope o' strikin' some'n worth while."
Conscious of little that the old man was saying, Henley passed on into the dimly lighted farm-house, experiencing a vague sense of relief that he was not just then to face his wife.
CHAPTER XXVI
NE evening shortly after this Henley was returning from the store about an hour later than was his custom. He was nearing Dixie Hart's cottage, when, in the clear moonlight, he saw the girl emerge from the little apple-orchard behind her barn and come rapidly toward him. Her glance was on the ground, and she had evidently not seen him. As she drew near where he stood waiting, he noted that her head was bare, and that she had a medicine-bottle in her hand. He noted, too, from her gait and hurried manner, that she was greatly disturbed. She was about to pass him when he called out, cheerily, "Where away, in such a hurry?"
"Oh!" She looked up and stopped. "You scared me, Alfred. I couldn't imagine who it was. I'm going over to Sam Pitman's. Joe is sick—powerful sick. If I am any judge, it is pneumonia, and a bad case at that."
"Pneumonia!" he echoed, aghast. "I didn't know anything was wrong with him."
"It's been coming on some time," she said. "He caught an awful cold. You know the day it rained so hard and the creek got out of banks? I was trying to cross the ford below Pitman's in my wagon. I thought I could make it all right, but the current washed the wagon in a hole, and old Bob couldn't touch bottom. The wagon was floating like a boat, and he finally got stuck in the mud with just his head and neck out and couldn't budge. Joe was digging sprouts in the field on the right-hand side, and ran down to me. I yelled at him not to come in, but he struck out toward me with his clothes on, swimming like a dog. He got to me and helped me out in the water on a high place, and made me stand there while he worked and tugged at the trace-chains for twenty minutes till he finally unhitched Bob and pulled him out of the mire. Then he helped me out and dragged the wagon ashore."