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The Quimbeys took note of his mature demeanor with sinking hearts; they looked anxiously at the judge, wondering if he had ever before seen such precocity anything so young to be so old: "He 'ain't never afore 'peared so survigrus so durned survigrus ez he do ter-day," they whispered to each other. "Yes, sir," his father was saying, on examination, "year old.
"Shucks!" cried Absalom, unfilially; "ye'd aheap better be a-studyin' 'bout'n my good now 'n whenst I war a baby a-givin' away my child ter them Quimbeys; a-h'istin' him out'n the winder!" She was glad to retort that he was "impident," and to take refuge in an aggrieved silence, as many another mother has done when outmatched by logic.
Occasionally he swayed to and fro, with his teeth on exhibition, laughing and babbling and shrilly exclaiming, inarticulately bragging of his agile prowess, as if he were able to defy all the Quimbeys, who would not notice him.
Quimbeys and Kittredges who had not visited the town for twenty years were jogging thither betimes that morning on the red clay roads, all unimpeded by the deep mud which, frozen into stiff ruts and ridges here and there, made the way hazardous to the running-gear. The lagging winter had come, and the ground was half covered with a light fall of snow.
And so she left the good Joe Boyd hooked on by the elbows to the fence. The Quimbeys, who had heard this conversation from within, derived from it no small elation. "She hev gin 'em the go-by fur good," Timothy said, confidently, to his father, who laughed in triumph, and pulled calmly at his pipe, and looked ten years younger. But Steve was surlily anxious.
The Quimbeys watchfully kept about him in a close squad, his pink sun-bonnet, in which his head was eclipsed, visible among their brawny jeans shoulders, as his mother carried him in her arms. The sheriff looked smilingly after him from the court-house steps, then inhaled a long breath, and began to roar out to the icy air the name of a witness wanted within.
And indeed it might have seemed that the Quimbeys must have long sought a choice Kittredge infant for adoption, so far did their bewailings discount Rachel's mourning. "Don't cry, Eveliny," they said, ever and anon. "We-uns 'll git him back fur ye." But she had not shed a tear. She sat speechless, motionless, as if turned to stone.
The infantile Kittredge, who was evidently not born to blush unseen, seemed to realize that he had failed to attract the attention of the three absorbed Quimbeys who sat about the fire. He blithely addressed himself to another effort.
He went and fastened the shutter, while his mother tremulously mended the fire. The absence of the baby was not noticed for some time, and when the father's hasty and angry questions elicited the reluctant facts, the outcry for his loss was hardly less bitter among the Kittredges than among the Quimbeys.
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