Then came a night of rainless
darkness through which past augmentations of water still thundered. Nature
rested for some hours before her final, shattering deluge, but the brief
peace was more tremendous than rain or wind, for a mighty foreboding
permeated it, and all men felt the end was not yet, though none could say
why they feared the silence more than storm.
It happened upon this black night that Joan was alone in the kitchen.
Supper had been but a scrambling meal and her uncle with Amos Bartlett and
all the men on the farm were now somewhere in the valley under the darkness
fighting for the hay with rising water. Where Mary was just then, Joan did
not know. Her thoughts were occupied with her own affairs, and in the
oppressive silence she sat watching some little moving threadlike concerns
which hung in a row through a crack below the mantelpiece above the open
fire. They were the tails of mice which often here congregated nigh the
warmth and sat in a row, themselves invisible. The tails moved, and Joan
noted some shorter tails beside long ones, telling of infant vermin at
their mothers' sides. In the silence she could hear the squeaking of them,
and now and then she talked to them very softly.
"Thank God, you lil mice, as you abbun got no brains in your heads an' no
call to look far in the future. I lay you'm happier than us, wi' nort to
fear 'bout 'cept crumbs an' a lew snug spot to live in.
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