The Town by Conrad Richter

Author:Conrad Richter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-02-16T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

THE BLUE STOCKING

Know him? I’d know his hide if I saw it in the tanyard.

EARLY SAYING

IT was a winter’s day and bitter cold, Sayward thought, for such a poor old man to be out in the wind without a heavy coat. She was upstairs sewing by the window when she saw him. Now who could he be looking in at the house, as he went by? He had on a battered slouch roaram hat and corduroy jacket like an old hunting coat. His leggins were snowy to his knees. Just the same, he held himself mighty straight, like an old poking stick that had been used a long time, worn thin and soon to be thrown on the fire.

Hardly had he passed till he turned and tramped slowly back, looking at the house again. Why, he was turning in! She couldn’t hear his rap from the stairs but she could his boots stamp off the snow on the back porch. Chancey and Massey were at their schools, Dezia at the seminary. When Sayward opened the back door, the old man stood there with a drop froze at the end of his nose, his cheeks crossed and criss-crossed with a mess of wrinkles like scrub apples still a hanging to some wild tree in the snow.

“Is this Judge Wheeler’s place?” he wanted to know.

“Step in the warm,” Sayward bid him kindly. At the same time she was thinking, now where did I hear that voice before and see those eyes running back in his head?

“Are you his woman?” he asked, holding back. And when she nodded. “Then you must be Saird. Don’t you know me any more?”

Sayward stared at him a moment. Then she took the broom and swept the snow from his legs and boots.

“I know you but I can’t name you,” she complained. Something in the way he said “Saird” touched off a queer notion in her and when he came in and stood there in the kitchen with his hat on, a storm of feeling ran over her. It couldn’t be. No, it couldn’t possibly be. Why, all the old folks thought her father dead this long time. The last they heard, he was skinning wild bulls beyond the Mississippi, and that was thirty-five years ago. One of those wild bulls, Portius allowed, must have killed him. Hardly an Indian would, for Worth had Indian in his blood and could get along with them if anybody could. Genny thought that a Spanishman must have cut his throat for his gold. He had sent word how well off he was, but this old bushnipple in her kitchen today didn’t look like he ever had a shilling to his name.

“Is it you, Pap?” Sayward asked. “I never expected to see you again!”

“You know me now!” he called out, pleased. “It took you a good while. But I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t a knowed you from Adam’s ox. You’re married to the lawyer, they tell me. I knowed him before I went but I never looked for you to get hitched to him.

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