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"I have obliged to do it. There must be a law somewhere. God won't let me fail." "Huh-uh," grunted Buckheath, instantly. "You can't do such a thing. Ef you was married, and yo' mother would let you adopt 'em, I reckon the courts might agree to that." "Shade," Johnnie turned upon him, "you've got more influence with Pap Himes than anybody.
I reckon the live body of one o' them chaps is worth a thousand dollars. That's jest what he said," concluded the old man, turning toward her; "an' from what you tell me, Johnnie, I'll bet Shade Buckheath put the words in his mouth, if not the notion in his head." "Yes," whispered Johnnie through white lips, "yes; but Shade Buckheath isn't looking to make money out of it.
I ain't never asked you, but you'd have knowed if they had." "I should have known anything that Rudd Dawson or Groner or Venters knew," Gray said, "but I'm not sure about Buckheath or Himes. However, Himes is dead, and Buckheath I don't suppose anybody in Cottonville will ever see him again." Pros's face changed instantly. He leaned abruptly forward and laid a hand on the other's knee.
"They've got a party," she deprecated. "My old dress is jest as dirty as the floor. You go ax 'em, Shade." As she spoke, Johnnie, carrying a tray of cups and saucers, passed a lighted window, and Buckheath uttered a sudden, unpremeditated oath. "I don't know what God Almighty means makin' women such fools," he growled.
For a wild moment she had an impulse to denounce Buckheath and her stepfather. But almost instantly she realized that she would weaken her cause and lose all chance of assistance by doing so. Her standing in the mill was excellent, and as she ran up the stairs she was going over in her mind the persons to whom she might take her story. She found no one from whom she dared expect credence and help.
"We're running so short-handed that I don't know how to get along; and if I try to get an extra man, I find he's out with the searchers. I sent up for Himes yesterday, but him and Buckheath was to go together to-day, taking Mr. Stoddard's car, so as to get further up into the Unakas." Johnnie felt as though the blood receded from her face and gathered all about a heart which beat to suffocation.
Then she began to wonder if she could find Shade Buckheath, and discover from him the truth of the matter. Whenever she would have made a movement toward this, she winced away from what she knew he would say to her. She flinched even from finding out that her fears were well grounded.
Buckheath asked, turning to her with a half-taunting, half-relenting smile on his face. "Red-headed people always do." "No, I'm not mad," Johnnie told him, as she had told him long ago. "But I'll thank you not to name Mr. Stoddard to me again. If I haven't the right to speak to anybody I need to, why it certainly isn't your place to tell me of it."
"I'm sorry," he said, presenting it to Johnnie with exactly the air and tone he had used in speaking to the lady who was with him in the car. "If I had seen it in time, I might have saved it. I hope it's not much hurt." Buckheath addressed himself savagely to his work at the machine. The woman in the auto glanced uneasily up at the house on the slope above them.
Shade worked in silence for a moment. "Now she'll go, I reckon," he announced, and once more the driver started up his car. It curved perilously near the bundle she had set down, with the handkerchief containing her cherished blossom lying atop; the mud-guard swept this latter off, and Buckheath set a foot upon it as he followed the machine in its progress.
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