"Eh b'en? Have you found him?" she cried.
"Not a finger of him!" snapped Julie savagely, tired out with her
fruitless labours.
"Then he's come to some ill, ba su. And if he has--ma fe, it's
you!--it's you!" The old lady's scream of denunciation choked itself
with its own excess, and the neighbours came running out to learn the
news.
Stolid minds travel in grooves, and old Mrs. Guille's had been groping
along possibilities of all kinds, clinging at the same time to the hope
that Peter would still turn up all right.
Now that her hope was shattered her mind dropped naturally into a grim
groove, along which it had taken a tentative trip during the morning and
had recoiled from with a shudder.
The last time Mrs. Tom Hamon had come seeking a man who was missing,
that man had been found under the Coupee, and so old Mrs. Guille set oft
for the Coupee as fast as her old legs and her want of breath and
general agitation would let her.
"Nom de Dieu! What--?" began Julie, with twisted black brows, and then
drifted on with the rest in Mrs. Guille's wake--all except one or two
housewives whose men were due for dinner, and knew they must be fed
whatever had come to Peter Mauger.
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