Wakeman shrugged his shoulders and said nothing. He filled his hands with the salt from a pail and began to rub it on the pork.
Lingeringly the woman left him and turned up the slight incline toward the house. His eyes did not follow her. He was scrutinizing the pile of pork she had salted.
“Goodness gracious!” he grunted. “Lu-cindy has wasted fifteen pound o’ salt. Ef I’d ‘a’ done that Marty’d ‘a’ tuk the top o’ my head off. I wonder ef Marty could ‘a’ got careless sence she’s had all the work to look after.”
He had salted the last piece of meat when, looking up, he saw Lucinda standing near him.
“She wouldn’t come a step,” she announced, with some awkwardness of delivery. “When I told ’er you wuz down heer she jest come to the door an’ looked down at you a-workin’ an’ grunted an’ went back to ’er cracklin’s. But that’s Marty.”
The convict dipped his hands into a tub of hot water and wiped them on an empty salt-bag.
“I wonder,” he began, “ef I’d better—” But he proceeded no further.
“I think I would,” said the angular mind-reader, sympathetically.
“Well, you come on up thar, too,” Wake-man proposed. “I’ve always noticed that when you are about handy she never has as much to say as she does commonly.”
“I ’ll have to go,” said Lucinda. “Ef Marty gits to talkin’ to you she ‘ll let the cracklin’s burn, an’ then—then she’d marry Goardley out o’ pure spite.”