Ben was standing beside the bed, with the open grape-basket in his hand, looking down intently upon the child. His one eye flashed past Tess in its blindness, while the watery one with the red veins running through it distorted itself into a squint, and brought its evil gaze upon her. The fat chin, covered with a stubby growth of hair, shook with malicious pleasure, the dark teeth set grimly through the brown, tobacco-stained lips.
"It air a brat!" he said at last, Tess standing paralyzed. "Air its Pappy the--"
He did not finish. Tess snatched the basket from his hand, and covered the whining babe.
"Ye be allers snoopin' yer nose in some one's else's business," she said darkly, her fear of him growing with each minute. "Ye can't keep from my hut any day, and ye ain't no right here nuther."
"I telled ye and the student that the time'd come when I'd get even with ye both--and it air here!... It air here, I say!"
"The student ain't nothin' to do with this here brat," retorted Tess. "Ye thinks as how ye knows a heap.... Well, ye don't.... And it air time for ye to be a-goin' now, Ben Letts!"
"I air a-goin' to stay," said he, "Daddy's" stool creaking under his weight.
From a tree near the forest Tess could hear the screech of a night-owl die away in smothered laughter. The scraping of the willow on the tin roof came dimly to her in the silence. If some other squatter would only come along! God had always saved her from Ben Letts.--Dared she pray? Her eyes sought the window. If she could only see the pine-tree God!--send Him a little petition--He would forgive and save her. Dominie Graves had gone completely from her mind; only a wish, a desperate wish, came to escape the man who had constantly thrown his menacing shadow across the path of her life. Suddenly her bosom heaved. A verse was thrown bomb-like into her mind. Tess opened her lips and muttered, keeping her eyes upon the fisherman.
"If ye have faith as the grain of mustard-seed, ye shall say unto this mountain--"
The time between the present and that night the student had left her in bitter sorrow faded. In her imagination she was alone in the rain, with the child upon her hands, offering it up to the dark God for a blessing. The same uplifting faith was upon her. The Crucified Savior would protect her.