polluted their blood. And knowing this, something in each of them turned away in grievous shame.
Gant added this to his tirades against Eliza; all that was bad in the boy his mother had given him.
“Mountain Blood! Mountain Blood!” he yelled. “He’s Greeley Pentland all over again. Mark my words,” he continued, after striding feverishly about the house, muttering to himself and bursting finally into the kitchen, “mark my words, he’ll wind up in the penitentiary.”
And, her nose reddened by the spitting grease, she would purse her lips, saying little, save, when goaded, to make some return calculated to infuriate and antagonize him.
“Well, maybe if he hadn’t been sent to every dive in town to pull his daddy out, he would turn out better.”
“You lie, Woman! By God, you lie!” he thundered magnificently but illogically.
Gant drank less: save for a terrifying spree every six or eight weeks, which bound them all in fear for two or three days, Eliza had little to complain of on this score. But her enormous patience was wearing very thin because of the daily cycle of abuse. They slept now in separate rooms upstairs: he rose at six or six-thirty, dressed and went down to build the fires. As he kindled a blaze in the range, and a roaring fire in the sitting-room, he muttered constantly to himself, with an occasional oratorical rise and fall of his voice. In this way he composed and polished the flood of his invective: when the demands of fluency and emphasis had been satisfied he would appear suddenly before her in the kitchen, and deliver himself without preliminary, as the grocer’s negro entered with pork chops or a thick steak:
“Woman, would you have had a roof to shelter you to-day if it hadn’t been for me? Could you have depended on your worthless old father, Tom Pentland, to give you one? Would Brother Will, or Brother Jim give you one? Did you ever hear of them giving any one anything? Did you ever hear of them caring for anything but their own miserable hides? DID you? Would any of them give a starving beggar a crust of bread? By God,
