A VIEW OF THE WOODS
491
"Nobody's ever beat me in my life," she said, "and if anybody
did, I'd kill him."
A man seventy-nine years of age cannot let himself be run over
by a child of nine. His face set in a look that was just as determined
as hers. "Are you a Fortune," he said, "or are you a Pitts? Make up
your mind."
Her voice was loud and positive and belligerent. "I'm Mary–
Fortune-Pitts," she said.
"Well I," he shouted, "am PURE Fortune!"
There was nothing she could say to this and she showed it. For
an instant she looked completely defeated, and the old man saw
with a disturbing clearness that this was the Pitts look. What he saw
was the Pitts look, pure and simple, and he felt personally stained
by it, as if it had been found on his own face. He turned in disgust
and backed the car out and drove straight to the courthouse.
The courthouse was a red and white blaze-faced building set in
the center of a square from which most of the grass had been worn
off. He parked in front of
it
and said, "Stay here," in an imperious
tone and got out and slammed the car door.
It took him a half-hour to get the deed and have the sale paper
drawn up and when he returned to the car, she was sitting on the
back seat in the corner. The expression on that part of her face
that he could see was foreboding and withdrawn. The sky had
darkened also and there was a hot sluggish tide in the air, the kind
felt when a tornado is possible.
"We better get on before we get caught in a storm," he said
and added emphatically, "because I got one more place to stop at
on the way home," but he might have been chauffeuring a small
dead body for all the answer he got.
On the way to Tilman's he reviewed once more the many just
reasons that were leading him to his present action and he could
not locate a flaw in any of them. He decided that while this attitude
of hers would not be permanent, he was permanently disappointed in
her and that when she came around she would have to apologize;
and that there would be no boat. He was coming to realize slowly
that his trouble with her had always been that he had not shown
