Then more
footsteps. This time some one was taking no trouble to walk lightly.
"Quietly now," the woman's voice cautioned.
"Ye said it was a boy?" This was Mr. Darton's voice, unmistakable now.
"I didn't say," the woman's whisper floated down to me as a door creaked
open. "But it _is_--a girl. You must be ver--"
Her words were cut off by the report of a door banging shut. There was
the sibilant sound of a breath being drawn in and, at the same moment,
Mr. Darton's voice again.
"What the hell made ye think I'd want to see another _girl_ for?" he
growled.
A pause followed, the emptier for the preceding stridor of his voice.
Then--"You c'n get along now--we ain't got no more call fur neighbors."
With that he came stamping down the stairs and slouched into the front
room, where, upon his catching sight of me, a frightened look crossed
his face, followed, almost instantly, by a queer expression, a mixture
of relief and cunning that gave his face a grotesqueness that I can
recall to this very day.
"Well, boy," he said in that low drawl and wavelike inflection of the
voice that I was to learn to know so well, "yer father sent ye, did he?"
I proffered the note and the pills, and he frowned at them a second
before pocketing them.
"Come--_he-re_.
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