" Yet it struck him, that being pressed for further
explanation, she did NOT specify why. This was "girls' meanness!"
Howbeit he lingered late in the road that evening, hearing his father
discuss with the search-party that had followed the banks of the creek,
vainly looking for further traces of the missing 'Lige, the possibility
of his being living or dead, of the body having been carried away by the
current to the bay or turning up later in some distant marsh when the
spring came with low water. One who had been to his cabin beside the
embarcadero reported that it was, as had been long suspected, barely
habitable, and contained neither books, papers, nor records which would
indicate his family or friends. It was a God-forsaken, dreary, worthless
place; he wondered how a white man could ever expect to make a living
there. If Elijah never turned up again it certainly would be a long time
before any squatter would think of taking possession of it. John Milton
knew instinctively, without looking up, that his father's eyes were
fixed upon him, and he felt himself constrained to appear to be
abstracted in gazing down the darkening road. Then he heard his father
say, with what he felt was an equal assumption of carelessness: "Yes, I
reckon I've got somewhere a bill of sale of that land that I had to take
from 'Lige for an old bill, but I kalkilate that's all I'll ever see of
it.
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