And I breaks in:
"You both got another guess coming," I says.
"She ain't buried anywheres. She ain't even dead.
She's living in a little town in Indiany called Athens
--or she was about eighteen months ago."
They both looks at me like they thinks I am crazy.
"What do you know about it?" says Doctor
Kirby.
"Are you David Armstrong?" says I.
"Yes," says he.
"Well," I says, "you spent four or five days within
a stone's throw of her a year ago last summer,
and she knowed it was you and hid herself away
from you."
Then I tells them about how I first happened to
hear of David Armstrong, and all I had hearn from
Martha. And how I had stayed at the Davises in
Tennessee and got some more of the same story
from George, the old nigger there.
"But, Danny," says the doctor, "why didn't you
tell me all this?"
I was jest going to say that not knowing he was
that there David Armstrong I didn't think it any
of his business, when Colonel Tom, he says to
Doctor Kirby--I mean to David Armstrong:
"Why should you be concerned as to her where-
abouts? You ruined her life and then deserted her."
Doctor Kirby--I mean David Armstrong--
stands there with the blood going up his face into
his forehead slow and red.
"Tom," he says, "you and I seem to be working
at cross purposes.
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