So he kept right on whistling and she kept right on sewing, till they had the wound all bandaged up and Alvin was laying back sleeping like a baby. They all three stood up to go. Pa laid a hand on the boy’s forehead, as gentle as you please.

“I think his fever’s gone,” he said.

Measure’s tune got downright jaunty as they slipped on out the door.

Chapter Fourteen—Chastisement

As soon as Elly saw him, she was sweet as could be, brushing snow off him, helping with his cloak, and never so much as whispering a question of how it happened.

Didn’t make no difference how kindly she might be.

He was shamed afore his own wife, cause sooner or later she’d hear the tale from one of those children. Soon enough the tale would be all up and down the Wobbish. How Armor-of-God Weaver, storekeeper for the western country, future governor, got throwed right off a porch into the snow by his old father-in-law. They’d be laughing behind their hands, all right. They’d laugh him up and down. Never to his face, of course, cause there was hardly a soul between Lake Canada and the Noisy River who didn’t owe him money or need his maps to prove their claims. Come the time when the Wobbish country was made a state, they’d tell that story at every polling place. They might like a man they laughed at, but they wouldn’t respect him, and they wouldn’t vote for him.

It was the death of his plans he was facing, and his wife just had too much of that Miller family look about her. She was pretty enough, for a frontier woman, but he didn’t care about pretty right now. He didn’t care about sweet nights and gentle mornings. He didn’t care about her working alongside him in the store. All he cared about was shame and rage.

“Don’t do that.”

“You got to get that wet shirt off. How’d you get snow clear down your shirt?”

“I said get your hands off me!”

She stepped back, surprised. “I was just—“

“I know what you ‘was just.’ Poor little Armor, you just pat him like a little boy and he’ll feel better.”

“You could catch your death—“

“Tell that to your pa! If I cough my guts out, you tell him what it means to throw a man in the snow!”

“Oh no!” she cried. “I can’t believe Papa would—“

“See? You don’t even believe your own husband.”

“I do believe you, it just ain’t like Pa—“

“No ma’am, it’s like the devil himself, that’s what it’s like! That’s what fills that house of yours up there! The spirit of evil! And when a body tries to speak the words of God in that house, they throw him fight out in the snow!”