Sadie Reed laughed shortly. “You needn’t
trouble,” she said, “I was fooled.
I thought they were expensive quills. I wanted
them for a twenty-dollar velvet toque to match my
new suit. If they are gathered from the ground,
really, I couldn’t use them.”
“Only in spots!” said Elnora. “They
don’t just cover the earth. Phoebe Simms’s
peacocks are the only ones within miles of Onabasha,
and they moult but once a year. If your hat cost
only twenty dollars, it’s scarcely good enough
for those quills. You see, the Almighty made and
coloured those Himself; and He puts the same kind on
Phoebe Simms’s peacocks that He put on the head
of the family in the forests of Ceylon, away back
in the beginning. Any old manufactured quill from
New York or Chicago will do for your little twenty-dollar
hat. You should have something infinitely better
than that to be worthy of quills that are made by
the Creator.”
How those girls did laugh! One of them walked
with Elnora to the auditorium, sat beside her during
exercises, and tried to talk whenever she dared, to
keep Elnora from seeing the curious and admiring looks
bent upon her.
For the brown-eyed boy whistled, and there was pantomime
of all sorts going on behind Elnora’s back that
day. Happy with her books, no one knew how much
she saw, and from her absorption in her studies it
was evident she cared too little to notice.
After school she went again to the home of the Bird
Woman, and together they visited the swamp and carried
away more specimens. This time Elnora asked the
Bird Woman to keep the money until noon of the next
day, when she would call for it and have it added
to her bank account. She slowly walked home,
for the visit to the swamp had brought back full force
the experience of the morning. Again and again
she examined the crude little note, for she did not
know what it meant, yet it bred vague fear. The
only thing of which Elnora knew herself afraid was
her mother; when with wild eyes and ears deaf to childish
pleading, she sometimes lost control of herself in
the night and visited the pool where her husband had
sunk before her, calling his name in unearthly tones
and begging of the swamp to give back its dead.
WHEREIN MRS. COMSTOCK INDULGES IN “FRILLS,” AND BILLY REAPPEARS
It was Wesley Sinton who really wrestled with Elnora’s
problem while he drove about his business. He
was not forced to ask himself what it meant; he knew.
The old Corson gang was still holding together.
Elder members who had escaped the law had been joined
by a younger brother of Jack’s, and they met
in the thickest of the few remaining fast places of
the swamp to drink, gamble, and loaf. Then suddenly,
there would be a robbery in some country house where
a farmer that day had sold his wheat or corn and not
paid a visit to the bank; or in some neighbouring
village.
