The pacific voice of Amanda Wilks here broke in; but Paul did not wait to hear what she was saying, for his father, with bowed and shaking form, was tottering away in the moonlight toward the cow-lot. Ralph reached the rail fence, and with an audible moan he bent his head upon it. Paul's feet fell noiselessly on the dewy grass as he crept toward him. Reaching him he touched him on the shoulder.
“Father,” Paul said, softly, “what's the matter? Are you sick?”
Slowly Ralph Rundel raised his head and stared at his son, but he said nothing. His tattered nightshirt was carelessly stuffed under the waistband of his gaping trousers, which were supported by a single suspender over his shoulder. The other suspender hung in a loop over his hip. His grizzled head was bare, as were his attenuated feet. He continued to stare, as if he had no memory of the speaker's face, his lip hanging loose, quivering, and dripping with saliva. The damp, greenish pallor of death itself was on him, and it gleamed like phosphorus in the rays of the moon. A tremulous groan passed out from his low chest, and his head sank to the fence again.
“Father, father, don't you know me? Paul! Don't you know me?” The boy touched the gray head; he shook it persuasively, and it rocked like a mechanical tiling perfectly poised. The man's knees bent, quivered, and then straightened up again.
“Father, father, it's me—Paul!—your son! What's the matter?”
Ralph turned his face slowly to one side.
“Oh, it's you!—my boy! my boy! I thought—” He looked about the cow-lot vacantly, and then fixed his all but glazed eyes on his son's face, and said: “You go back to bed, my boy; you can't do me no good—nobody on earth can. I'm done for. I feel it all over me like the sweat o' death.”
“Father, tell me”—Paul stood erect, his head thrown back, and his young voice rang sharply on the still air—“do you believe that dirty whelp—” There was an insane glare in Rundel's watery eyes, and his head rocked back and forth again.
“He's after your ma, Paul.” Ralph emitted another groan. “He's took with 'er purty face, an' has set in to make a plumb fool of 'er, and make 'er hate me. He's the kind o' devil that won't pick and choose for hisself, like an honest man, out in the open among free gals an' women, but thinks that nothin' ain't as good as another man's holdin's. He thinks he is sorry fer 'er because she's tied to a sick man; but it hain't that—it's the devil in 'im!”
The boy laid his arm on his father's shoulders; his lips moved, but no sound issued; his face was rigid and white.