“They don't know for sure; but he was robbed of all he had in his pockets, an' his hat was gone. A nigger, Pete Watson, is missin', and they say the sheriff and a passle o' deputies, an' half the county, are out scourin' the woods for 'im. Ef they ketch 'im thar 'll be a lynchin' as sure as preachin'.”
A voice now came from the farm-house. It was Amanda leaning out of the kitchen window.
“Come on in an' git yore dinner,” she cried. “Don't listen to that stuff or you won't eat a bite. Yore pa's chatter has already turned my stomach inside out.”
“That's the woman of it,” Ralph sniffed, wearily. “They both begged an' begged for particulars, an' wormed every bit they could out o' me, an' now they talk about its gaggin' em.”
CHAPTER VII
THAT evening, after Hoag had put his sister and niece into his phaeton, and told Cato, the negro driver, to take them to Grayson, he went back to the veranda where his wife and her mother, Mrs. Sarah Tilton, stood waving their handkerchiefs at the departing guests. Mrs. Hoag was a thin, wanfaced woman of questionable age and health. In honor of the visitors she wore her best black-silk gown, and its stiff, rigid folds and white-lace collar gave her a prim and annual-excursion look. There was a tired expression in her gray eyes, a nervous twitching of her needle-pricked fingers. Her mother was of a lustier type, having a goodly allotment of flesh, plenty of blood and activity of limb and brain, and a tongue which occupied itself on every possible occasion with equal loquacity in small or large affairs.
“I couldn't help from thinkin' what an awful time we'd have had,” she was saying to her daughter, “if they had stayed here this summer instead of at the hotel. I can stand it for a day or two, but three months on a stretch would lay me stark and stiff in my grave. Did you ever in all yore bom days see such finicky ways? They nibbled at the lettuce like tame rabbits eatin' cabbage-leaves, and wiped their lips or fingers every minute, whether they got grease on 'em or not, and then their prissy talk! I presume, if Harriet said presee-um once she did fully a dozen times, an' I didn't know any more what it meant than if she'd been talkin' Choctaw.”
“They are simply not used to our country ways,” Mrs. Hoag sighed. “I don't feel like they are, to say, stuck up. I think they was just tryin' to be easy an' natural-like.”