Читать книгу The Adventurers - Ernest Haycox - Страница 6

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BOGART and Sheridan rode away from the hotel at seven, threaded the stumpy clearings at the edge of town and struck a road which promptly climbed into a solid stand of fir.

It was a muddy and sunless ride through very rough hills. They met an occasional farm wagon, bound into Portland; at the summit of the ridge stood a gray farm house on the porch of which a very old woman sat paring a bucket of apples, a leathery brown toothless woman with black bright eyes who stopped her work to watch the wagon approach and did not resume work until it had dropped downgrade toward the valley beyond. From this viewpoint, when the trees occasionally broke, the valley lay nicely checkerboarded below, held in by hills to either side and running off into the western haze where other hills vaguely lay.

Bogart pointed westward. "That's the Coast Range—roughest, heaviest, darkest patch of country on the continent, I do think."

They left the hills behind them and moved into the valley flatness with its fields, its clumps of fir and oak, and its occasional farm yards. "Just about twenty years old—all of this settlement," remarked Bogart. "It's beginning to catch its second wind. Considerable building going on. That's why the mill will do good. A couple of towns off there—Hillsboro and Forest Grove—and some general stores scattered here and there that might grow into towns." He gave Sheridan an oblique cheerful glance.

"In a country like this you never know which way a thing's going to jump. Don't buy a farm. Don't buy property in these little towns. Find out what people want most. Then you go into the business of supplying that stuff to them. But don't stay in any business too long. If you're doing well, somebody will start competition, and pretty soon there's too many in the business. In a new country you hunt for chances that people don't see. You work it up for a while. Then you sell out before the cream's been skimmed from the pan."

They turned from the main road and took a lesser pair of ruts northward toward rolling timbered ridges five or six miles distant.

"There's plenty of chances still open," Bogart continued, "but a man's got to be clever. He's got to see when to jump in. Then, he's got to watch out that the big men with money don't freeze him out. Those fellows have the power. If you can get strong enough financially before they catch on to what you're doing, then they can't run you out. But if they do see what you're doing and move in before you're big enough to fight back, you'd better join 'em or take the offer they make you."

"Ought to be enough here for everybody," commented Sheridan.

"Business is business anywhere, and power's power. Same as poker. The big stack wins. If you're a smart player you can run a few chips into a fortune. If you're not smart, you'll end up broke." Bogart adjusted himself more comfortably on the buggy's seat. "The truth is, not many men can play the business game. Most men end up working for somebody else."

"There's some luck to it," said Sheridan.

"Oh, sure. If a man is in the right place at the right time, he's made. Otherwise he can work like a fool and get nowhere. But even with the time right, no man will amount to much unless there's something rough in him. If you've got too much tenderness in you, you'll go around in rags, preaching the brotherhood of man. The rest of the failures and misfits will think you're a fine, Christian soul and you'll convert them—as don't need converting. But the big ones, the tough ones, will drop just enough small change on your collection plate to keep you happy and they'll go right along getting richer. You'll save no souls there." He fell silent and he was quite thoughtful. Somewhat later he shook his head. "Every man will fall according to his own particular weakness. We've all got to defend ourselves against that."

Around noon the rig passed from the main valley to a narrow meadow lying cramped between timbered hills and arrived at a mill which sat close to one of the ridges. The side of the ridge showed earlier logging and a rough road came down this ridge to a log platform which, in turn fed a carriage and a pair of big saws. Behind these saws was another saw for trimming, a small conveyor to carry away scrap, a deck for piling the cut lumber, a boiler and engine. All this, except the log deck, was roofed over. "This is it," said Bogart. He pointed toward a house farther down the meadow. "That's Murdock's place. He will be your saw filer. You can board there."

The Murdock place was a ragged, hard-scrabble sort of place. A bed stood in the yard for summer sleeping; a pair of hogs rooted through the small orchard, and chickens ducked under the house foundation and stirred up the dust. A woman came from the house at the sound of the rig—a young woman in a short-sleeved dress, with a darkly sunbrowned skin. She had pretty features turned heavy; her lips were long and her face had a lazy, bold insolence on it. She wore no shoes and suddenly was conscious of that, and looked down at her feet and raised her glance to Sheridan. She watched him quite closely.

"Your father here, Liza?" asked Bogart.

A second woman, middle-aged and heavy, came from the house. She made a dashing gesture toward the loose hair over her forehead. "Mr. Bogart—well now! You've come again. Startin' the mill?" She turned and sent a ringing cry toward the barn. "Murdock—it's Mr. Bogart." In a moment a man put his head around the barn, looked at the newcomers a long interval, and slowly moved forward, nothing but thin legs and thin arms and thin body. He seemed suspicious, or perhaps nearsighted; as he got into the yard the darkness of his face broke. "Oh, Bogart." Then he looked immediately toward his wife. "Dinner ready?"

"It is," she said.

"Well, then," said Murdock to the men, "get down and don't be strange."

"This is Mark Sheridan," said Bogart. His finger ticked off the people in the yard for Sheridan's information. "That's Murdock, that's Emma Murdock, that's Liza Murdock."

Sheridan nodded and dropped from the rig. The three Murdocks gave him a close regard, an exceptionally solemn and personal study, and the girl suddenly turned back into the house. Murdock said: "Whut for you're here, Bogart? Startin' the mill again?"

"That's right. Sheridan's the new boss."

Murdock let his head sag downward on its thin neck—a head which seemed too small on his long frame—and owlishly considered his boots. It was a sly mannerism which he completed by jerking up his head, as though to catch Bogart off guard. "He'll have to see Kerby first."

Bogart said, "You look fine. Everything been all right?" He nodded toward the bed in the yard. "You'll have to move that thing inside. Fall's here. Rain's comin'."

Out of his solemnness Murdock unexpectedly delivered a whooping laugh and a sharp slap of his hand against his side. "Woman and I got wetter'n hell in it last night. Come in to eat."

Sheridan stepped into a kitchen which occupied half the house and whose walls were covered by newspapers, laid on with some sort of home-made paste. It was not an unclean room, but it was untidy. At one end stood an open fireplace with its crane and kettle of an earlier day and now obviously not used. A heavy iron stove took its place—something new and something ugly. The heat of it filled the kitchen and the smell of baking bread was very sweet in Sheridan's throat. A long row of tomato vines, loaded with half-green fruit, hung along the ceiling joists to ripen; a cot, with the quilts scrambled from former sleeping, stood in a corner; a side doorway gave Sheridan view of a pantry built around a well.

The table had been set for dinner and the girl, coming out of a bedroom with her hair in better order and shoes on her feet, silently added two more plates. Mrs. Murdock let the conversation flow on while she moved from stove to table. "It's been awful hot this summer. Murdock was sick a lot. I'll never pitch hay like I did this year—I'll get another husband first. Not that anybody wants me. That's the wrong of it, Mr. Bogart. A man can marry again, but who wants a woman forty years old? Sit right down. It ain't much of a meal but it'll hold you."

They sat down before Mrs. Murdock's idea of not much of a meal: steaks pounded and floured and fried and drenched in gravy, an enormous bowl of red beans laced with onions, green peppers and tomatoes seasoned hot enough to scald Sheridan's throat, potatoes boiled until their fluffy interiors burst out of their jackets, hot blackberry pie gently steaming through its openwork crust, sliced cucumbers soaked in vinegar and cream, spongy-fresh bread with a thick golden crust, a chunk of butter out of an oak-leaf mold, and all the accessories of corn relish, pickled beets, huckleberry jam, and a jug of milk on which the yellow cream lay an inch thick.

Mrs. Murdock said: "For just the three of us around now, it don't pay to cook. I've lost the knack of it. When the boys were all here it did me good to see the food go." She sat next to Sheridan, a fat and perspiring woman with her odors, a crude and slack woman with the brightest eyes and the reddest mouth and a full face that scarcely had a wrinkle in it.

Murdock sat stooped and he fed himself in glum silence. He appeared to be a gloomy man, yet out of this gloom came odd slivers of humor.

"When I marry next," he said, "it'll be a woman that don't talk."

Mrs. Murdock spoke promptly. "There's got to be some sound around here—and I got to make all of it. You're a mouse for quiet. And somebody's got to stand up for your rights, which you don't do. Anybody could run over you."

"Never did like to get roused," said Murdock. "Man never knows what his temper will lead him to."

"Well," said Mrs. Murdock, "it's certain you don't know. You ain't got one."

"And when I get my next woman," said Murdock, "she'll be young."

"I'm young enough," said Mrs. Murdock promptly. "You've got nothing to complain of." She planted her elbows on the table and looked over at her husband with a good-natured suspicion. "Who'd you see when you went to Forest Grove the other day?"

"Ain't sayin'," said Murdock. "Pass the beans, Emmy."

Mrs. Murdock said to Sheridan: "It makes him feel proud when I think he's seen another woman. If he saw one he'd run."

"Not too far," said Murdock, "and not too fast, either. I been thinkin' about that. I'm gettin' to be an old man and I ain't sowed no wild oats. It don't seem right."

"Ah," said his wife, "what woman wants you now, Murdock?"

Murdock pushed away his plate and dropped back against his chair, a born-tired man of unknown quantity and of fugitive wishes unexpressed. "Well," he said, "that's probably true. I looked good once. Don't seem long ago that I was chasin' gals Liza's age—and they was willing enough to be chased. Always hard for a man to understand he gets past lookin' good. He gets twisted and he works too much and his teeth go to hell and then he's old and not agreeable to look at. Beasts are different. There's that old Curly horse. He's twenty-two, but he's as good-lookin' now as he was when he was a colt. One day he'll lie down and he won't get up. But he'll look good right to the end. Ain't that way with men. I wonder why?"

Mrs. Murdock watched Murdock, and a kind of loose emotion came out of her and she said to him: "That's all right, Murdock. You look good to me."

"But," said Murdock, still with the other thought on his mind, "I wonder why?"

"Murdock," said his wife, "you think too much. Just take what comes."

"Why," said Murdock, "I guess that's what we all do. Maybe there's a man now and then who can make things suit himself. The rest of us ain't got that power. I suppose if I was a city man with money, I wouldn't look like I do. I think of that. But, hell, it's thinkin' that makes people feel bad. Might be better if a man wasn't born to think much."

Bogart said, "Where's the boys?"

"Gone," said Mrs. Murdock. "Tip's up in Montana. Ed, last we heard, was on a ranch in eastern Oregon. Reeves went down the valley a year ago. I don't know where. Ben, he left this spring to work in Portland, but we heard through some people that he took a sailin' ship out." She was thoughtful as she spoke; her glance went through a window and looked into the distance and saw something. But she shrugged her shoulders and brought herself back. "Well, they're gone."

"Ed," said Bogart, "I'm trying to remember him. He was pretty young."

"Fifteen," said Mrs. Murdock. "That's old enough. He licked everybody around here, so he can take care of himself." The group rose. Murdock stretched his arms over his head and gave out a great belch and walked, loose-legged and weary, toward the door. The girl, who had remained silent throughout the meal, now began to clear the table. She seemed shy; she was conscious of her hands and of her appearance. She kept her head down as she collected the dishes but when Sheridan left the room, she paused and followed him with her glance. Mrs. Murdock whispered: "Put on your other dress tonight—the tight one."

Murdock laid himself out on the bed in the yard for a nap while Bogart and Sheridan got back in the rig and rode as far as the mill to inspect it.

"Who was your woods boss?"

"Sampson—at the end of this meadow," said Bogart.

"What've you been paying these people?"

Bogart brought a list from his pocket and handed it over. Sheridan considered it. "Higher than Michigan."

"We get more for lumber," said Bogart. "Other side of the sheet is the price list. When a man drives up here for lumber, let him show his money. You'll have to sell green until you can lay by something to dry. Same price though!"

Sheridan said: "Be sure you're here every Saturday night with money for the payroll—until I've got some money laid by from sales. We'll settle between ourselves the first of every month. What about this head sawyer? You've left something out."

"Just a sorehead. We had an argument. But he's had all summer to lay around and think about it. He'll come back." He brought out a cigar and lighted it and returned to the rig. "One thing more. You've got to push these fellows or they'll slack off. That mill ought to do ten thousand feet a day."

Sheridan said: "That's what you didn't say in the beginning. Your last foreman couldn't handle the crew. He got run off, didn't he?"

Bogart's great white teeth were exposed in his sudden smile. "Well, it was like that. The boy didn't know much about men. I can see that you'll do better."

"You said the sawyer's name was Kerby?"

Bogart gathered the reins. "You can handle him. The main thing is to push. You'll get along." He was friendly; he was taking the time to leave the best impression behind him. He clucked at the team and went away.

Sheridan closed the boiler valve and fed in enough water to make a quick head of steam. He started a fire and, waiting for his steam, he located a can of grease and filled the pulley boxes. He checked the lacings on the drive belts; he cleaned out the junk which had fallen around the saws and the track of the log carriage. He gave Kerby a moment's thought while he worked; there was always one bully boy in every settlement, and probably Kerby had pecked away at the former mill boss until the latter had lost control of his crew. No crew had any respect for a man who couldn't run the show. A boss did the bossing and if he couldn't do it, he took a walk down the road.

When the gauge showed him pressure he turned on the steam and watched the big wheel roll over. He got an oil can and went around to fill the oil holes, to lubricate the noisy crevices of turning parts. He boarded the log carriage and threw it into gear and rode it back and forth. He let the machinery run for half an hour, listening to the sounds which came in with an ear which had heard such sounds before. Then he turned off the machinery, stoked the firebox and watched the steam gauge creep up. When the safety valve popped, he noted the pressure, and opened the firebox door to spread the fire. He fed in a little more water and waited for the pressure to drop. The safety valve, he decided, could be set a little higher. Absorbed in his job, he didn't see the man with the huge legs and black felt hat come out of the road into the mill. The man stood by and watched him a full five minutes. Then he said:

"You the new boss?"

Sheridan looked at him. "You Kerby?"

"No, I'm Sampson."

"Can you get a crew for this outfit?"

"Sure," said Sampson. He came forward to lean against the carriage.

"We'll have to build up a week's logs before we start the mill," said Sheridan.

"We got a lot of logs down and bucked," said Sampson. "Never brought 'em in because the mill shut down quick." He was near fifty, with gray short whiskers and steady, staring eyes. He had enormous hands.

"All right," said Sheridan. "We'll start in the woods Monday and work the mill Tuesday. I don't want Kerby. Can you find another sawyer?"

"George Weed," said Sampson. He slid his hand into his pocket and came out with pipe and tobacco. He made a long-drawn ceremony of the pipe filling. He said in a mild it's-none-of-my-business voice: "Sure you don't want Kerby?"

Sheridan shook his head, and changed the subject. "Where are we getting these logs?"

Sampson pointed up the scarred hill. "Back there a mile. Bogart still runnin' this shebang?"

"Yes."

Sampson evidently had a comment to make, but he thought about it at some length and only said: "Likes things to move fast, don't he? I'll get your mill crew here Tuesday and you'll have logs till hell won't have 'em." He turned and went down the road at a chopping walk.

When the fire had died well down, Sheridan climbed the hill and followed the logging road back through an area of stumps, splintered fragments, silvered snags and wind-blown deadfalls; the quick fireweed grew here and salal and huckleberry and Oregon grape—and the humbly relentless wild blackberry. Clumps of vine maple flashed out a rich fall scarlet; the water-greedy alders stood in brushy thickness along the foot of the ridge where a creek ran. Beyond this logged land a thin trail took out into the silence and the never-ending shadows of a forest which had covered these hills since time began. The giant-standing trunks rose around him, broken by barricades of fallen trees interlaced like matchsticks and he looked down into a ravine of salmon-berry and devilstock where the deer should be drinking.

He sat on a log and felt the pull of those sweeping-away forest deeps; he smoked his pipe and rested with his lonely contentment, and at last rose and started home. After supper he sat down on the porch floor and smoked his cigar with a wonderfully sluggish nerveless feeling of well-being. The crickets were singing along the meadow, and in the evening twilight the hills showed their ragged silhouette.

The girl walked from the kitchen and went on into the yard, traveling without direction. He heard Mrs. Murdock let go with her little-girl giggle and he turned his head to look through the door. Murdock had a towel and a dish in his hand and Mrs. Murdock, swinging from her pan, dug into his ribs with her forefinger. Murdock made his irritable protest. "Quit it—quit it, Emmy." Mrs. Murdock's face, so smooth in its fatness, was reddened by the stove's heat and her hair was a strewn untidiness across her forehead. She put her wet hand on Murdock's face and swung back to her pan. Murdock finished his dish and laid it down; he stepped behind his wife with idle slyness. He seized her around the arms and stuffed the towel inside her dress, down against her breasts. She broke his grip by the simple mass of her weight. She giggled and bore him backward, pushing her fingers into his ribs. He said: "Stop it, Emmy—dammit, quit."

The girl returned to the porch and sat down on the steps near him. She had avoided him, but now she wanted his measure and took it frankly. She was restless. Her arms were round, her hands were square and strong for a woman; there was a padded firmness and an insistent vitality about her, and his guard went up against the sensations she drove into him.

"I wish we were on a main road," she said. "People would go by. Nothing happens here."

"Where's the dances?"

"Down at Blossom Hill School. That's not enough. The other foreman went to Portland once in a while. You will too, I guess. Take me when you go. I like to eat in restaurants."

"Where's your friends?"

Her mind jumped across the things he said and went directly to what she thought he meant. "Oh, he comes around. You married?"

"No."

"I didn't think so. There's a married look. Even when a married man comes here and says he's not, I can tell."

He said: "Sounds like you've spent a lot of time on it."

Her answer was quicker and more rebellious. "It's not wrong to think about things like that. I'm alive. I've got to look out for myself. The preacher comes through here once in a while, talking about being happy. He's an old man. He's married. He doesn't have to worry about being young and losing out. He just doesn't know what it's like. It's all right for old people to go to church. It makes them feel good. It doesn't make me feel good. It makes me feel dead. I want to get out of here. If I were a man I could. What could I do in Portland?"

"I don't know. Maybe you could get housework. Or work in a hotel."

"The hotel would be fine," she said. She was silent a short while, darkened and embittered by her thinking. Her eyes regarded him with a closer interest; she sat still, yet her thoughts moved her against him. "If I had been born in town I'd had the chances other girls have. I wouldn't have to work in a home or a hotel. But that's all the chance I've got—to take the cheap and dirty work. Well, it's better than nothing. You don't know what I'm talking about, do you?"

"I don't know," he said. "Maybe I do."

"You won't like it here. There's just old people around here. The young ones get away—most of them. The ones that stay haven't any spunk. It makes me feel queer, like I'm lost. I want something to happen. I'd like nice clothes I could wear without getting them full of mud or dust. I want to get married. I want some fun. I want things nice." She bent forward to read his face in the growing dusk, and he saw the recklessness flash up. "Anything's better than nothing!"

"Maybe your folks wouldn't want you to leave."

She gave him a surprised stare. "Them? They don't care."

Murdock and his wife came out to the porch and sat side by side, Mrs. Murdock laying a gross arm around her husband's shoulders. He sat still, covered by his mild gloom. Mrs. Murdock's glance touched her daughter and Sheridan and a sly warmth flickered over her face.

"It's a relief," she said, "to sit down. There was a time when I didn't mind bein' on my feet. Lots of times I danced till the music just quit, and rode a long way home, and worked all next day and never felt tired."

"It wasn't a long way home," said Murdock. "You and your men just took a long time gettin' home."

"You ought to know," said Mrs. Murdock pointedly.

"Well, I guess I do."

"I never," said Mrs. Murdock in a melancholy tone, "got enough of it. I had lots of fun—but never enough. Ain't it odd? Folks never do. I wonder why."

"Well," said Murdock, "we live and we die. That's all. We live and we die."

Mrs. Murdock's dreaming voice went on toward the expression of something so heavily felt. "I was a crazy girl, like all girls. I wanted to get married, because I was afraid I wouldn't. I wanted to get married and have children. So I did. Now I'm an old woman and the children are mostly gone, and what's left for us? It don't seem right. The kids will get married and they'll do the same thing we did, and they'll get old, and their children will leave, and what have they got then?"

Murdock said comfortably, "You got a cryin' spell comin' on. I can tell. Your damned arm's heavy, Emmy. Somebody's comin' up the road."

It was a horse and rider jogging through the gathered blackness. The rider sent a shouted "Hello there!" ahead of him, and turned into the yard.

"Why," said Murdock in his strengthless voice, "it's Tom Bush. Get down, Tom. Had supper?"

"At Sampson's," said the man and dropped from the horse. "Ain't going to stay. Only wanted to say hello." He advanced to the porch. He bent forward to see this group and he said "Hello" to the Murdock girl, and stared at Sheridan. "I don't know you."

"That's Sheridan," said Murdock. "Bogart brought him out. He's goin' to run the mill. That's Bush, the sheriff."

Bush put out a firm hand, shook Sheridan's fist, and drew back. He was one of those elderly men who retain physical youth. He had a vital push in his voice.

"What brought you this way?" asked Murdock.

"Couple Indians got off the reservation. Supposed to be up here with a jug of whiskey."

"Now you know better," said Murdock, mildly. "If they had a jug when they left the Siletz, they ain't got it now. They drank it quick. Just go back near the reservation and you'll find 'em sicker'n dogs in the brush. Anyhow, let 'em travel. I don't like to hear of people herded into one place."

"Well," said Bush, "the government says they got to stay there."

"I don't believe in government," said Murdock, with a rare flash of conviction. "It ain't got the right to tell people what to do."

"Maybe you're right. How's things' been?"

"We got the wild man back again. Came out of the brush last month, scared hell out of a girl, and went back to the brush."

Mrs. Murdock said: "Mrs. Pullman saw him once. He ain't exactly human. His legs are shorter than his arms and his face looks like a wolf."

"Where'd he come from?" asked Sheridan.

"Oh," said the sheriff, "he's probably a white man that likes to live by himself. Maybe sunstruck."

"You're just like any man, trying to make it seem less," stated Mrs. Murdock. "You know what's said about that Spanish ship bein' wrecked off the coast a long time ago, and one man surviving and living in the woods until he was no better than an animal, and him finally marrying a wolf, and this fellow now coming from that family."

"Oh, pshaw," said the sheriff, "such things can't be, Emmy."

"How do you know?" challenged Mrs. Murdock.

"Ain't possible," said the sheriff.

"Why ain't it?" pressed Mrs. Murdock.

Murdock came out of his silence to supply the answer for the sheriff. "Well, Emmy, it'd be awful hard for a man to sleep with a she-wolf."

The sheriff let out his great, gusty laugh, and slapped his knee, and turned back to his horse. He climbed to his saddle; he sat still a moment, keeping the air around him. "First time I came up here was in the fall of 'forty-six, with Joe Meek. Wasn't a thing anywhere in this part of the county."

"You got a good memory for dates," said Murdock.

"I remember that one," said the sheriff. "Joe and I shot a buck and carried the meat along. Well, it turned a little ripe on us, so we got diarrhea. That's how I remember. It was the year of the diarrhea." He sat still, his mind sweetened by those long-ago memories which so readily came to him. "It was a fine country. It was like what a man thinks paradise might be. We were the first ones, and there's only one first time. Nobody will ever see this land like we saw it. Nobody had anything. Everybody shared what he had. Everybody knew everybody. It wasn't a state—it was a family. There wasn't such a thing as a stranger. Everybody belonged. Nobody locked their doors and when a man saw a cabin light down the distance he knew he was comin' home, wherever it was and whoever it was. It made everything mighty close and pleasant. I think there was more fun then than there's been since." Then, after a short silence, his voice faded out: "Or maybe it was because I was younger. Good night, folks."

They sat in silence, listening to his horse clopping down the soft road. Presently Mrs. Murdock heaved herself up from the bench. Murdock rose too, saying: "We goin' to sleep outside?"

"Bed's still damp."

"Why don't we put it in to dry?"

"Oh, the weather will dry it—if it don't rain again. Come on, Murdock."

Sheridan sat with the final fragrant stub of his cigar. The Murdocks were amiably bickering inside and Murdock's voice came out with its monotone protest: "Quit it, Emmy." The girl watched him from her side of the porch. He couldn't see her eyes but he felt them. She said: "It's lonely here. There's nothing to do, nobody to talk to. I hate being alone. I'm nineteen. I'm scared."

"What about that man?"

"I don't want him. It would just be moving to the other end of this valley and being alone there for the rest of my life."

"Where do I sleep?" he asked, and threw away his cigar and got up. She rose and passed into the house. He waited in the darkness, hearing her move around in an adjoining room. She lighted a lamp and came out of the room. "That's yours," she said. She stood near him, looking up. Her lower lip made a heavy, soft shelf against which her upper lip lay; he saw the brightening of her eyes, the rising of a thought—the shifting of an expression from uncertainty toward deliberateness. He walked into the room and closed the makeshift door behind him. He got ready for bed and blew out the light and pulled a blanket over him. The Murdocks were directly beyond the partition to his left. Mrs. Murdock giggled intermittently and Murdock's listless voice kept murmuring..."No, Emmy, Damnation. You're always foolin'." Suddenly the giggling ceased and the woman began to cry in long, snuffling gusts of sound. Murdock comforted her with his gentle exasperation. "I knew you was comin' on a bawling spell."

"Murdock—I'm old—I'm ugly."

"Oh, hell, Emmy, quit it. You ain't ugly, but everybody gets old. People got to take what comes."

"You think we really go to a better place when we die?"

"Preacher says so though I ain't so sure how much he knows about it."

"Oh, him. You know he fooled with the Hobstone girl."

"Far as she's concerned, the preacher got there late."

"Wish I could know I was going to a better place. It'd make this a lot easier. I wouldn't feel so bad for what we've missed."

"Well, think so, Emmy."

"Thinkin' so ain't so."

There was silence, Mrs. Murdock having subsided to a deep breathing. Out of the silence came Murdock's soft voice. "What've we missed, Emmy?"

There was no answer; she was asleep. It was Murdock who lay awake with his wonder, not the woman.