“No. But I'm not surprised to hear it; about the next thing on the docket. Did he say that at the Cross Roads?”
“Said it right here in Leatherwood. Sally told me the first thing when I got home. You wasn't at the Temple last night, I reckon?”
“Well, not last night,” Braile said with an implication that he had been at the Temple all the other nights, which made Reverdy laugh with guilty joy.
“One o' the Hounds—no, it was Jim Redfield hisself—stopped on the way out, and he says, 'What's this I hear? You say you ain't goin' to die.' And Dylks he lifts his hands up over his head and he says, 'This shell will fall off'; and Jim he says, 'I've got half a mind to crack your shell,' and the believers they got round, and begun to hustle Jim off, but Dylks he told them to let him alone, and he says, 'I can endure strong meat, but I must be fed on milk for a while.' What you s'pose he meant, Squire?”
Braile took his pipe out and cackled toothlessly. “I'm almost afraid to think, Abel. Something awful, though. You say Sally told you?”
“Yes.”
“I should think Sally would know what he meant, if anybody.” He looked at Abel, and Sally's husband joined him in safe derision. “Tell you anything else?”
“Well, no, not just in so many words. But it 'pears he's been teachun' round all sorts of things in private, like. Who do you reckon he says he is?”
“Not John the Baptist, I hope. I don't know where we should get the locusts and wild honey for him in this settlement. Might try grasshoppers, but the last bee-tree in the Bottom was cut down when I was a boy. I got a piece of the comb.”
“I don't know if he said John the Baptist; but it was John, anyway. And they say—or that's what Sally hearn tell—that when he was off with Enraghty and Hingston on some 'pointments down round Seneca there was doun's that 'uld make your hair stand up.”