Tess of the Storm Country

"You have a Bible, I see?"

His words sounded strained and his voice foreign to his own.

"Yep."

"Can you read it?"

"I spells at it," Tess replied in tones a little surly.

"Where did you get it?" asked Frederick presently.

She waited a moment before answering, straightening up from the oven where she had placed the cold bacon left from her breakfast to heat.

"Where did I get what?" she demanded.

"The Bible," replied Frederick.

He had asked about the book in the first place for something to talk of, for the roaring of the wind through the hut's rafters distracted him. He desired to hear the squatter say something--it all seemed so much like a dream that he feared to awaken only to find himself in the empty house with the sophomore's revolver staring at him.

"I cribbed it from the mission," answered the girl, pronouncing her words plainly. She leaned toward him and finished abruptly. "I took it from the place that comed from."

She was pointing toward the warm red altar-cloth bound about Frederick's head. Alas, Tess had needed a Bible and had stolen it; he had needed warm covering and had accepted it. There was no difference between the minister's son and the squatter's daughter. Vicissitude had forced each into a like position, and somehow Frederick lost his sense of right and wrong, for he could not sit in judgment upon either action. Never before in all of his short young life had he really needed anything for personal comfort--but the altar-cloth. Tess saw the struggle going on in his mind; she bent toward him, reasoning: "I needed the Bible, didn't I? Didn't ye say that to save Daddy Skinner's life I had to have it? Ye needed that red rag what ye got round yer head. There air only one way in this world--" She was moving toward him inch by inch, the soles of the fisherman's boots dragging the bread crumbs and fish bones beneath them. "Ye takes what ye need to save yer life, or the life of yer Daddy. Folks mostly never steals what they ain't needin'."

The message went straight home to Frederick. He could not combat such reasoning. He knew well that he would have frozen but for the timely stealing of the altar-cloth--also, he knew that the Bible was as necessary to Tess as the altar-cloth was to him. He mentally lashed himself into a state of unrest. Why had he not thought of a Bible and given Tess one? It would have been so easy for him to have supplied her small needs!