"'Why, Emerel,' Mis' Toplady says, 'I thought Otie was getting ever so much better. Is it the real typhoid, do you s'pose?' she ask' her.
"Emerel looked over to me. 'Isn't it?' she says. And then I spoke right up with all there is to me.
"'Yes, sir,' I says, 'it is the real typhoid. And if you want to know what's giving it to him, ladies and gentlemen, ask the common council that's setting over there by the wall. Dr. Heron says that Black Hollow, that's a sink for the whole town, give it to him, and that nothing else did—piled full of diseases right in back of Emerel's house. And if you want to know who's responsible for his dying if he dies,' I says right out, 'look over in the same direction to the men that wouldn't vote to fill in the Black Hollow with sand because they needed the money so bad for paving up half the county swamp.'
"It was most as still in the room as when Timothy had said 'prostitute.' All but me. I went right on—nothing could of kept me still then.
"'Us ladies,' I says, 'has tried for two years to get the Council to fill in that hole. We've said and said what would happen to some of us, what with our pumps so near the place, and what with flies from it visiting our dinner-table dishes, sociable and continual. What did you say to us? You said women hadn't no idee of town finances. Mebbe we ain't—mebbe we ain't. But we have got some idea of town humanity, if I do say it, that share in it. And this poor little boy has gone to work and proved it.'
"With that, Emerel, who had been holding in—her that's afraid even to ask for starch if you forget to give it to her—she broke right down and leaned her head on her arm on the clock shelf:—
"'Oh,' she says, 'all the years I been giving him his victuals and his bath and sewing his clothes up, I never meant it to come to this—for no reason. If Otie dies, I guess he needn't of—that's the worst. He needn't of.'
"Mis' Toplady put her arm right around Emerel and kind of poored her shoulder in that big, mother way she's got—and it was her that went with her, like it's always Mis' Toplady that does everything. And us ladies turned around and all begun to talk at once.
"'Let's plan out right here about taking things in to Emerel,' says Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss. 'I've got some fresh bread out of the oven. I'll carry her a couple of loaves, and another couple next baking or two.'