“I dunno what you mean,” she said, still with an effort to fence: “oh, yes, the man jus’ talks in his sleep, that’s all.”
“He’s got secrets,” said her husband, over his shoulder to Binnhart. He paused suddenly with an appalled countenance to extract from his mouth a great spiny section of fishbone, which seemed to have caught on the words. “Tell on, Jesse Jane. I can’t. I’m eatin’.”
It was obviously useless to resist. “Why,” she said, “when the baby had the croup las’ night an’ kep’ me up an’ awake--don’t you dare to look at me an’ laugh, you buzzard!” she broke off to speak to the infant, who was bouncing and crowing jovially at the end of his tether where he was tied in the bunk, “he knows I’m talkin’ about him. Why, what was I saying? Oh, I was in the back room there, an’ the man was sleepin’ in here. An’ he talked, an’ talked in his sleep, loud fur true every wunst in a while. I wonder he didn’t wake up everybody in the house.”
“What did he say?” asked Binnhart with a look of sharp curiosity.
“I didn’t take time to listen much,” replied the woman, fencing anew. “Old ‘Possum thar,” nodding at the baby, “looked like he’d choke every other minute. He’ll smell of turkentine fur a month of Sundays. I fairly soaked his gullet with that an’ coal-oil.”
“A body kin make money out of other folks’ secrets ef they air the right kind of secrets.” Binnhart threw out the suggestion placidly.
The woman hesitated. She noted her father-in-law behind the stove, almost collapsing over his pipe, so inert he might scarcely make shift to fill it; her husband, his younger image, was still at the table, lazily chasing the last morsel of fish about his greasy plate with a bit of cornbread. Little might they hope to metamorphose the babble of a dreamer into discoveries of value. Jasper Binnhart, on the contrary, was a man of force, of action, the leader, the prime mover, in every scheme that had brought to them some measure of success and gain, and then, too, would she not be present, to aid, to hear, invested with the mystery and controlling its preservation.
She took on the air of retrospective pondering as she sank down in a chair on one side of the table, putting her bare elbows on the cloth and supporting her chin in her hands. “Lemme see,” she said, “ef I kin call any of his gabble to mind.” She glanced up to find Binnhart’s eyes, contracted to mere points of light, fixed upon her, and once more she bent her gaze on the pattern of the damask.