From the look in her eye when she turned around, Armor kind of wished he hadn’t said it. But dad-gum it, Reverend Thrower as much as said the boy was as bad as the Beast of the Apocalypse.

But beast or boy, he was Elly’s brother, and whereas she might be as quiet as you please most of the time, when she got her dander up she could be a terror.

“Take that back,” she said.

“Now, that’s about as silly a thing as I ever heard. How can I take back what I said?”

“By saying you know it ain’t so.”

“I don’t know it is and I don’t know it ain’t. I said maybe, and if a man can’t say his maybes to his wife then he might as well be dead.”

“I reckon that’s about true,” she said. “And if you don’t take that back you’ll wish you was dead!” And she started coming after him with two chunks of apple, one in each hand.

Now, most times she came for him like that, even if she was really mad, if he let her chase him around the house awhile she usually ended up laughing. But not this time. She mushed one apple in his hair and threw the other one at him, and then just sat down in the upstairs bedroom, crying her eyes out.

She wasn’t one to cry, so Armor figured this had got right out of hand.

“I take it back, Elly,” he said. “He’s a good boy, I know that.”

“Oh, I don’t care what you think,” she said. “You don’t know a thing about it anyway.”

There weren’t many husbands who’d let their wife say such a thing without slapping her upside the head. Armor wished sometimes that Elly’d appreciate how him being a Christian worked to her advantage.

“I know a thing or two,” he said.

“They’re going to send him off,” she said. “Once spring comes, they’re going to prentice him out. He’s none too happy about it, I can tell, but he don’t argue none, he just lies there in his bed, talking real quiet, but looking at me and everybody else like he was saying good-bye all the time.”

“What are they wanting to send him off for?”

“I told you, to prentice him.”

“The way they baby that boy, I can’t hardly believe they’d let him out of their sight.”

“They ain’t talking about nothing close by, neither. Clear back at the east end of Hio Territory, near Fort Dekane. Why, that’s halfway to the ocean.”

“You know, it just makes sense, when you think about it.”

“It does?”

“With Red trouble starting up, they want him plumb gone. The others can all stick around to get an arrow in their face, but not Alvin Junior.”