Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/316

304 The cook studied a moment on the tone of that "No;" and then, taking up the chopper, she attacked the meat in the wooden chopping-bowl with vicious blows. She had the arm of a butcher—short but powerful—and a body of the same build; her hair was a greasy gray; her face was the flat-nosed type of Irish, that is so pathetically like an ape's.

Annie went out with the empty basket, but this time she met the man's eyes with a look of inquiry that held him until she could ask: "Where 's Mr. Boland now?"

He grinned. "Jack? Oh, he 's quit. He 's got married. I don't know where he is."

She released her hold of the basket, her face as blank as a bewildered child's.

"Jack 'd sooner marry than work," he laughed. He added over his shoulder as he went, "Hot, ain't it?"

She shut the basement door, and stood for a long time with her fingers in the iron lattice, gazing out at the area with set eyes. When she turned back to the dining-room, she groped her way blindly through the dark hall. And when she sat down to her work again, her hands went about it mechanically under the fixed mask of her face. "Is 't the heat that 's worryin' yeh?" the cook asked at their luncheon. "Sure I know it is," she persisted, at the girl's listless denial. "It 's bad weather fer young blood. Me own ould skull's splittin' like the shell of a hard-boiled egg. Phew! Go in an' lay yersilf down, that's a good child. It's out 'n the fields