nts.

"Mr. Jones!" Alaire called. She repeated Blaze's name several times;
then something stirred. The door of a harness closet opened cautiously,
and out of the blackness peered Paloma's father. He looked more owlish
than ever behind his big, gold-rimmed spectacles. "What in the world
are you doing in there?" she cried.

Blaze emerged, blinking. He was dusty and perspiring.

"Hello, Miz Austin!" he saluted her with a poor assumption of
breeziness. "I was fixin' some harness, but I'm right glad to see you."

Alaire regarded him quizzically. "What made you hide?" she asked.

"Hide? Who, me?"

"I saw you dodge in here like a--gopher."

Blaze confessed. "I reckon I've got the willies. Every woman I see
looks like that dam' dressmaker."

"Paloma was telling me about you. Why do you hate her so?"

"I don't know's I hate her, but her and her husband have put a jinx on
me. They're the worst people I ever see, Miz Austin."

"You don't really believe in such things?"

Blaze dusted off a seat for his visitor, saying: "I never did till
lately, but now I'm worse than a plantation nigger. I tell you there's
things in this world we don't sabe. I wish you'd get Paloma to fire
her. I've tried and failed. I wish you'd tell her those dresses are
rotten."

"But they're very nice; they're lovely; and I've just been
complimenting her. Now what has this woman done to you?"

It seemed impossible that a man of Blaze Jones's character could
actually harbor crude superstitions, and yet there was no mistaking his
earnestness when he said:

"I ain't sure whether she's to blame, or her husband, but misfortune
has folded me to herself."

"How?"

"Well, I'm sick."

"You don't look it."

"I don't exactly feel it, either, but I am. I don't sleep good, my
heart's actin' up, I've got rheumatism, my stomach feels like I'd
swallowed something alive--"

"You're smoking too much," Alaire affirmed, with conviction.

But skepticism aroused Blaze's indignation. With elaborate sarcasm he
retorted: "I reckon that's why my best team of mules run away and
dragged me through a ten-acre patch of grass burrs--on my belly, eh?
It's a wonder I wasn't killed. I reckon I smoked so much that I give a
tobacco heart to the best three-year-old bull in my pasture! Well, I
smoked him to death, all right. Probably it was nicotine poisonin' that
killed twenty acres of my cotton, too; and maybe if I'd cut out Bull
Durham I'd have floated that bond issue