Sadie Reed laughed shortly.  “You needn’t trouble,” she said, “I was fooled.  I thought they were expensive quills.  I wanted them for a twenty-dollar velvet toque to match my new suit.  If they are gathered from the ground, really, I couldn’t use them.”

“Only in spots!” said Elnora.  “They don’t just cover the earth.  Phoebe Simms’s peacocks are the only ones within miles of Onabasha, and they moult but once a year.  If your hat cost only twenty dollars, it’s scarcely good enough for those quills.  You see, the Almighty made and coloured those Himself; and He puts the same kind on Phoebe Simms’s peacocks that He put on the head of the family in the forests of Ceylon, away back in the beginning.  Any old manufactured quill from New York or Chicago will do for your little twenty-dollar hat.  You should have something infinitely better than that to be worthy of quills that are made by the Creator.”

How those girls did laugh!  One of them walked with Elnora to the auditorium, sat beside her during exercises, and tried to talk whenever she dared, to keep Elnora from seeing the curious and admiring looks bent upon her.

For the brown-eyed boy whistled, and there was pantomime of all sorts going on behind Elnora’s back that day.  Happy with her books, no one knew how much she saw, and from her absorption in her studies it was evident she cared too little to notice.

After school she went again to the home of the Bird Woman, and together they visited the swamp and carried away more specimens.  This time Elnora asked the Bird Woman to keep the money until noon of the next day, when she would call for it and have it added to her bank account.  She slowly walked home, for the visit to the swamp had brought back full force the experience of the morning.  Again and again she examined the crude little note, for she did not know what it meant, yet it bred vague fear.  The only thing of which Elnora knew herself afraid was her mother; when with wild eyes and ears deaf to childish pleading, she sometimes lost control of herself in the night and visited the pool where her husband had sunk before her, calling his name in unearthly tones and begging of the swamp to give back its dead.

CHAPTER VI

WHEREIN MRS. COMSTOCK INDULGES IN “FRILLS,” AND BILLY REAPPEARS

It was Wesley Sinton who really wrestled with Elnora’s problem while he drove about his business.  He was not forced to ask himself what it meant; he knew.  The old Corson gang was still holding together.  Elder members who had escaped the law had been joined by a younger brother of Jack’s, and they met in the thickest of the few remaining fast places of the swamp to drink, gamble, and loaf.  Then suddenly, there would be a robbery in some country house where a farmer that day had sold his wheat or corn and not paid a visit to the bank; or in some neighbouring village.