“Oh, he’s cut himself!”
The little girl thought she was going to cry.
“Look what they did to me, baby,” he pointed to his wound and whimpered.
Will Pentland, true son of that clan who forgot one another never, and who saw one another only in times of death, pestilence, and terror, came in.
“Good evening, Mr. Pentland,” said Duncan.
“Jus’ tolable,” he said, with his bird-like nod and wink, taking in both men good-naturedly.
He stood in front of the fire, paring meditatively at his blunt nails with a dull knife.
It was his familiar gesture when in company: no one, he felt, could see what you thought about anything, if you pared your nails.
The sight of him drew Gant instantly from his lethargy: he remembered the dissolved partnership; the familiar attitude of Will Pentland, as he stood before the fire, evoked all the markings he so heartily loathed in the clan — its pert complacency, its incessant punning, its success.
“Mountain Grills!” he roared.
“Mountain Grills!
The lowest of the low!
The vilest of the vile!”
“Mr. Gant!
Mr. Gant!” pleaded Jannadeau.
“What’s the matter with you, W.
O.?” asked Will Pentland, looking up innocently from his fingers.
“Had something to eat that didn’t agree with you?”— he winked pertly at Duncan, and went back to his fingers.
“Your miserable old father,” howled Gant, “was horsewhipped on the public square for not paying his debts.”
This was a purely imaginative insult, which had secured itself as truth, however, in Gant’s mind, as had so many other stock epithets, because it gave him heart-cockle satisfaction.
“Horsewhipped upon his public square, was he?”
Will winked again, unable to resist the opening.
“They kept it mighty quiet, didn’t they?”
But behind the intense good-humored posture of his face, his eyes were hard.
He pursed his lips meditatively as he worked upon his fingers.
“But I’ll tell you something about him, W.
O.,” he continued after a moment, with calm but boding judiciousness.
“He let his wife die a natural death in her own bed.
He didn’t try to kill her.”
“No, by God!” Gant rejoined.
“He let her starve to death.
If the old woman ever got a square meal in her life she got it under my roof.
There’s one thing sure: she could have gone to Hell and back, twice over, before she got it from old Tom Pentland, or any of his sons.”
Will Pentland closed his blunt knife and put it in his pocket.
“Old Major Pentland never did an honest day’s work in his life,” Gant yelled, as a happy afterthought.
“Come now, Mr. Gant!” said Duncan reproachfully.
“Hush!
Hush!” whispered the girl fiercely, coming before him closely with the soup.
She thrust a smoking ladle at his mouth, but he turned his head away to hurl another insult.
She slapped him sharply across the mouth.
“You DRINK this!” she whispered.
And grinning meekly as his eyes rested upon her, he began to swallow soup.
Will Pentland looked at the girl attentively for a moment, then glanced at Duncan and Jannadeau with a nod and wink.
Without saying another word, he left the room, and mounted the stairs.
His sister lay quietly extended on her back.
“How do you feel, Eliza?”
The room was heavy with the rich odor of mellowing pears; an unaccustomed fire of pine sticks burned in the grate: he took up his place before it, and began to pare his nails.
“Nobody knows — nobody knows,” she began, bursting quickly into a rapid flow of tears, “what I’ve been through.”
She wiped her eyes in a moment on a corner of the coverlid: her broad powerful nose, founded redly on her white face, was like flame.
“What you got good to eat?” he said, winking at her with a comic gluttony.