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But as quickly the arms drew back, and the expression clouded with doubt. "No...." reflected Bas without words. "No, hit ain't needful nohow ... an' Jase Burrell mout detect I'd done hit." The bending figure straightened again and its hands began calmly rifling the pockets of the wounded man's coat.
The room that Dorothy Harper had given over to the wounded man looked off to the front, across valley slope and river commanding the whole peak and sky-limited picture at whose foreground centre stood the walnut tree. Uncle Jase came often and as yet he had been able to offer no greater assurance than a doubtful shake of the head.
The original Day in Poketown had built a shingled, gable-ended cottage upon the side-hill which had now, for numberless years, been called "the old Day house" nothing more. "Jason! You Jase! I'd give a cent if you'd mend this pump," complained Mrs. Almira Day. "Go git me a pail of water from Mis' Dickerson's and ask how's her rheumatism this mawnin'. Come on, now!
And as Jase Mallows rose to the bait of that unusual call, so others like him rose and each of them was a man conspicuous for recklessness and wildness among a people where these qualities do not elicit comment until they become extreme. An hour or two later Brent, eying the fresh arrivals, frowned a bit dubiously as he compared them with the human beavers who had moiled there through the night.
He recognized that having compacted with Jase they could not ignore him. In a whisper he ventured the suggestion, "Mebby Jase hes done come ter grief. Mebby we'd better kill ther gal atter all an' git away. But if we does we've got ter git Jase afore he has time ter blab an' hang us all."
He suffered Vaughn to shake his hand, then frankly took the child's and pressed it warmly. "I like 'oo," cried the little fellow, whereat Jase gave a great horse laugh of undisguised satisfaction. "These young uns has got more sense than all of us older fools," exclaimed the gratified father. "Ain't that so, old man?" he added, looking at the elder Granger.
The conspiracy fathered by Lute Brown and Jase Mallows had its inception in a small coterie whose ambitions had been stirred to avarice by the bait of sharing among them a sum of over four thousand dollars.
Then Jase, boy, and mule, whipped round a crook of the road and were seen no more. Ralph's first impulse was to throw the bill away. But sober second thoughts prevailed, and somewhat reluctantly he placed it with the rest of his slender stock of cash. "Jase means well," thought he, resuming his tramp. "I don't know that either of us are to blame 'cause our families have been at outs for so long.
He struck a lively pace and had walked nearly a mile, with his bundle under his arm, when he met Jase Vaughn returning from the mill. "Hello, youngster!" quoth that worthy man as cordially as if Ralph and himself had been warm friends all along. "Where you carryin' yourself to? Old man got in good humor yet?"
"Did you know you was locked in?" "Yes-s, I knowed it. Marthy, she locked the door." Jase reached out a bony hand covered with carrot-colored hairs and picked up a shriveling potato with long, sickly sprouts proclaiming life's persistence in perpetuating itself under adverse circumstances. He broke off the sprouts with a wipe of his dirty palm and threw the potato into a heap in the corner.