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Griggs's Intelligence Office a little counter and show case dividing off its farther end, making a sanctum for Mrs. Griggs, who sat here in rheumatic ponderosity, dependent for whatever involved locomotion on the rather alarming alacrity of an impish-looking granddaughter who is elbowing her way through the throng of applicants for places and servants.
There was in it, too, a very slight suggestion of danger; for it was conceivable, though almost impossible, that some letter of hers or her husband's might fall into Griggs's hands. There was a perverseness about it which was seductive to her tortuous mind. At the first opportunity she wrote a very long letter. It was the letter of a penitent.
He would have done it at the time if Geddis and Whitredge hadn't discovered him and scared him stiff with a threat to put him in the prisoner's dock with you, as an accomplice. After I had secured Griggs's affidavit I wanted one more thing, and I got it bought it. That was a map of the Lawrenceburg underground workings, corrected up to date.
It was two miles through the wood to Mr. Griggs's farm-yard, and more than three miles back by any route which the cart could take. And then it might be more than probable that in Farmer Griggs's establishment there was not always a horse ready in harness, or a groom at hand prepared to yoke him.
It made a good deal of talk, but people, although they listened eagerly, and wondered and questioned, were rather incredulous about it. They thought Mrs. Griggs must be drawing considerably upon her imagination; there were not lacking those who declared that she had invented the whole account, since her reputation for strict veracity was not wholly unquestioned. Mrs. Griggs's story was as follows:
I makes my own soft soap. I has plenty to clean with. I don't want no soft soap. I want money." She laughed loud and long, a ringing, mocking peal. Madame Griggs's loud sobbing united with it. The dissonance of unnatural mirth and grief was ghastly. "Good God! Hear them!" whispered Sigsbee Ray to the druggist. "I'd rather owe fifty men than one woman," the druggist whispered back.
"Waal," said Byers, leaning back against the wall of the smoke- house, and holding the knife idly poised in his hand, "I kem down ter the tanyard betimes that mornin' arter the storm. Both ye an' Birt war late. I noticed Nate Griggs's coat hangin' thar in the shed, with a paper stickin' out'n the pocket, ez I started inter the smoke-house ter tend ter the fire.
Me to play, is it?" Down he went, and not finding a good open for a hazard, again waxed himself to the cushion, to the infinite disgust of Griggs, who did indeed hit the ball this time, but in such a way as to make the loss of another life from Griggs's original three a matter of certainty. "I don't think it's hardly fair," whispered Griggs to a friend, "a man playing always for safety.
He nodded toward Joe, and took his departure. Something of what was in his mind was revealed in Garson's first speech after Griggs's going. "That's a mighty big stake he's playing for." "And a big chance he's taking!" Mary retorted. "No, Joe, we don't want any of that. We'll play a game that's safe and sure."
After ten years of worry with incubators that did not hatch, and with tiny and in their own way lovely balls of fluff that passed on into semi-naked pullethood and from that into dead hen-hood, we threw all aside and packing our belongings on a wagon drove down Griggs's Road toward Bidwell, a tiny caravan of hope looking for a new place from which to start on our upward journey through life.
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