"Nothin'--nothin'. Hadn't you better go to see Armindy?"
"Me an' Armindy understand one another," he said roughly.
Ephraim rode on, his guilty conscience forbidding any more conversation. He longed to give Elisha a hint of approaching danger--to say carelessly, "I hear the raiders'll be out tonight;" but he knew that he could not without betraying the whole truth.
Breakfast awaited him, and his mother sat in the doorway, smoking, when he arrived at home--a homely woman, yellow as saffron, wrinkled as parchment, and without a tooth in her mouth. Her face lighted up at the sight of her son, and she knocked the ashes from her pipe. He had been a good son, a steady boy, and his absence alarmed her.
"Law! but this is a relief!" she cried as he came in after caring for the mule. "I didn't know you 'lowed to stay out all night."
"I was pestered, thinkin' o' the raiders. Anythin' happened to you?"
She watched him silently while he ate sparingly of the breakfast. His dull eyes, his haggard face made her anxious. He had no appetite; he plainly did not care to talk. Her suspicions fell on Armindy Hudgins as the cause of his dejection. She began to question him about the party. She mentioned Armindy and Elisha Cole several times, and each time he betrayed some feeling. She felt resentful toward the girl.
"I s'pose Armindy had things her own way las' night?"
"I don't, for the life o' me, see why you all should be crazy about that girl. Now 'Mandy or Sary Ann Wood, or Betsey--"
"Well, they may n't be as purty as pictur's, but they are a sight better than Armindy Hudgins," she retorted, indignantly.
"No; I s'pose they ain't, for work," said Mrs. Hurd, reluctantly; "but principles count for somethin', Eph'um--you'll 'low that."
"Yes; yes," he cried, and hastily left the table. Who could show less principle than he had?
He went out to work, hoeing and thinning the young corn in a field he had cleared on the mountain-side, but the vigor had gone out of him with hope and courage. The sunlight dazed him, and after a while he stopped and leaned upon his hoe, looking down into the valley, his eyes following the cloud-shadows sweeping silently over the fields, blotting out the silvery gleam of Beaver Creek. It was a day of strange, conflicting thoughts. He had never passed through such an experience in all his simple, primitive life. The impressions of the morning lingered in his memory through the heat of the languid noon and the soft decline of the evening. He had brought upon himself a great question of right and wrong--at least it seemed great to him; so great he could scarcely grapple with it, or settle it with wisdom and justice.