Tess of the Storm Country | Page 7

both and like the birds of the air she used them.
The girl had not moved from beside the stone near which she had fallen. The night was so strange, so different from any night Tessibel had ever known. Her whole idea of life had been altered that day by the word of a fisherman, and the woman's heart grew larger and larger, until the squatter girl felt that it was going to burst. Something crawled over her bare foot and brought her to her senses. Leaning over she drew to her lap a long, slimy lizard, which she held caressingly in her fingers. She lifted him high up and looked at him through the moonlight.
"Green," she said slowly, "ain't he a dandy. But I don't dare carry him even a little way for fear he'll lose his house. I bet he has a pile of green babies."
Dropping the lizard beside the rock, she sped away.
Just before reaching the Longman cabin, she raised her voice and sang again,
"Rescue the perishin', Care for the dyin'."
Some one opened the door and she bounded in.
"Glad ye come, Tessibel," said Mrs. Longman, a small wizened old woman. "The brat air sick to-day. He does nothin' but squall so that my head air a bustin' the hours through. Give him to Tessibel, Myry."
"After she air rested a spell," replied Myra, who resembled her mother, but was smaller and thinner. "He seems to have a pain, Tess."
"Mebbe he has," responded Tessibel, "give him to me."
The wee boy stopped his tears immediately. His back grew limp and his fists opened out as Tessibel began to sing. This time the song was, "Did ye ever go into an Irishman's shanty?"
The child fell asleep and Tessibel laid him gently in the box prepared for him. Bed room was scarce in the huts of the fishermen and the small members of the family slept on rope beds, let down from the ceiling. But Myra's child, still too tender and always sick, slept in a box which his grandfather, "Satisfied" Longman, had made for him as soon as he was born.
"It air a seemly night for the men to fish," commented Myra when Tessibel had seated herself again. "I air always a hopin' that nothin' will happen to none of them."
"The hull bunch air cute," assured Tessibel, "and Daddy can row faster than any man on this here lake."
"But when them game men gets after 'em with the permit to shoot, that's what I fears," complained Mrs. Longman--and she sighed.
The fisherwoman's life she had led had been harder than most women bore, for Ezra was going a crooked path, while Myra, well--the brat slept in the cradle. Both girls saw her glance toward it and read her thoughts.
Myra's face deepened in color, Tessibel hummed a tune.
"'Taint no use to try to bring up children anywheres decent," the woman broke in sharply, after a silent moment. "God! but to see one's own--"
"Ma," Myra's voice was pleading, "it air over and ye said--"
"I knows I did, and so did yer Daddy. But I ain't thinkin' only of ye to-night, Myra, look at the mess that Ezry's a makin' of things, and just 'cause ye won't marry him, Tessibel."
"I ain't never goin' to marry no one," said Tess sullenly; "goin' to stay with Daddy."
"Yer Daddy won't live allers," interposed Mrs. Longman, "and what's more, yer better off with a man what will look after ye as Ezy will. Be ye a thinkin' of it at all, Tessibel?"
The girl shook her head.
"Nope, 'taint no use; don't like Ezy anyway."
"Ezry ain't the worst boy in the world," defended the mother; "if the right woman gets him, Tess, he'll make her a good man. Ye couldn't think of tryin' him, could ye?"
Tessibel shook her head again. She shuddered perceptibly, and Myra thought she realized the feeling in the girl's heart.
"Don't bother her, ma, don't bother--"
"If ye'd a bothered a little yerself, Myra," broke in the woman pettishly, "we might all been better off. It ain't 'cause of the brat, air it, Tessibel?"
She shot a glance at the infant's box.
"Why 'cause of the brat," asked Tessibel sharply, "why 'cause of the brat?"
"He air a come-be-chance, ye know--"
"That ain't no fault of his'n, air it," demanded Tessibel. "Nope, 'tain't nothin' to do with the brat. I loves him, I does, come-be-chance or no. It don't make no difference to me."
Myra pressed Tessibel's bare toe with hers in loving fellowship.
"Ye allers was a funny gal, Tessibel," ruminated Mrs. Longman. "Now Ezy says that yer takin' a likin' to such things as toads, lizards and snakes, shows as how ye needs some one to help ye. God'll make ye a happy mother if ye'll keep yer nose low in the air, and not think too much of yer betters."
Ezra, then, had told