"'Member yer sacurd wordy honor," said the woman. "Ye promersed me, ye know."
He got up and tramped aimlessly around the room. Presently he took down his long flint-lock rifle from its rack over the door, and blew into its muzzle.
"Ye'll not brek yer wordy honor?" she insisted.
He put the gun back and came and sat down by her again. Just then Milly opened the door and entered the room carrying her coarse sun-bonnet in her hand. The exercise of fetching the ox down from his browsing place on the mountain side had put a bright color in her cheeks, and the wind had been tossing her pale, straw-gold hair so that it hung in elfish tangles about her neck and shoulders. She scarcely glanced at her father and mother.
"I hitched 'im out ther'," she said, referring to the ox, and passing on into the kitchen, went by that round-about way into Reynolds' room. She was very sly, but they heard her moving about, and knew she was once more re-arranging his things.
They looked at each other with something of that hopeless, dazed expression often observed in the eyes of the lower animals when hurt to death. Milly had left the outer door open and the cool mountain air poured in, rustling vaguely such loose articles as its current could stir.
Little more was said between the man and his wife, for there seemed nothing to say. A cloud had settled over their compressed, barren lives. Nothing in their natures was ready or flexible. They stared at fate, as they stared at each other, with the hopelessness of utter bewilderment.
Days went by, days of that languid, cloudless weather which comes to those mountains in early February, and the little household of the cabin went through the dry, spiritless round of duties, as if some spell had fallen upon them. True there was no marked visible change in their way of life; that was impossible. The limitations of human action nowhere else are set with such rigid immutability as they are, and perhaps always will be, in those cramped, unfertile, almost barren mountain regions of the South. No advance, no retrogression (save where here and there a railroad brings its little whisky centers), all is stagnant, dull, dry, hopeless poverty. Illiteracy, sterility, and that stubborn conservatism which is born of them, rest like an atmosphere around those poor people. They move and breathe and are stolidly content.