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His cheeks, his chin, had waned to the vanishing point. He opened his lips and mouthed horribly, yet his frightful grimacings conveyed no meaning. Mary called to Mrs. Yellett, but her voice was drowned in the rattle of the wagon, the clatter of four horses’ hoofs, and the continual "Hi-hi-hi-kerat! hi-kerat!" of the driver.
Mary had dismissed her pupils a few minutes before the usual hour, on a particularly bad day, that she might rally her scattered faculties and present something of a countenance to the watchful eye of Mrs. Yellett. Every element of humor had vanished from the situation.
A moment afterwards she and Leander were engaged in rolling the barrels of sheep-dip to the wagon, Mary Carmichael helplessly looking on while Mrs. Yellett looked doubtfully at a "gov’ment" who could not handle barrels. Finally, under the skilful manipulation of Mrs.
The infidel, from his side of the wagon, began to display agitation. His jaws worked, but he said nothing. "You ’ain’t lost them teeth again, have you?" He nodded his head wretchedly. "’And the Lord took away the teeth of his enemy, so that he could neither bite nor talk,’" quoted Mrs. Yellett to the miserable man, who could make no reply.
And having injected the vitriolic drop in her neighbor’s cup of happiness, Old Sally struck a gait on her chair which was the equivalent of a gallop. But Mrs. Yellett was not the sort of antagonist to be left gaping on the road, awed to silence by the action of a rocking-chair, no matter how brilliant.
"This here is what comes of settin’ up your back against God A’mighty and encouragin’ the heathen and the infidel in his idolatry. I might ’a’ knowed somethin’ would happen, takin’ you along! ’And the heathen and the infidel went out, and the Lord God sent a cloud-burst to wet him,’" quoted Mrs. Yellett from the apocryphal Scriptures that never yet failed to furnish her with verse and text.
Mary stood helpless in the wilderness while quilts and pillows were fetched somewhere from the adjacent scenery, and Mrs. Yellett asked her, with the gravity of a Pullman porter interrogating a passenger as to the location of head and foot, if she liked to sleep "light or dark."
It is a luxury that goes a long way towards mitigating the discomfitures caused by the reverse of this unctuous blunder. Yellett, angling for time, "is a book—it do surprise me that it escapes your notice back East. Mary assented.
Yellett, squatting erect on the prairie, crowned by her rabbit-skin cap. Mary and Judith, with bland, impassive expressions, noted the effect of the mandate. There was not the faintest symptom of rebellion; each Brobdingnag accepted the matriarch’s edict without a murmur. With an air of further meditation on the efficacy of brown paper and vinegar at the crucial moment, Mrs.
Yellett blushed a deep copper color through her many coats of tan—"convinced me that I was the heroine thereof. And, nacherally, I turned over to paw the feachers and characteristics of the hero in said book I happened to be enjoyin’ at the time. Paw never knew it, but sometimes he was a dook, and it was plumb hard work.
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