“I ain’t blamin’ ’em,” said Uncle Ranz. “I’m sayin’ they wuz mighty hard on Ann. Angie Sue said she wuz goin’ to tell her father he had to turn Ann off the place. I never heard her tell him, but I seen her go into the room where he wuz. When she come out she looked like she wuz fallin’ to pieces, an’ milk couldn’t be whiter. As fur as I know that wuz the only time she ever named Ann to her daddy. Nathe wuzn’t bothered about Angie Sue, but he walked mighty keerful on Ann’s account. He kept goin’ to church right along, an’ travelled over to Carson faithful to his lodge meetin’s, an’ acted a little more’n fair in his tradin’, an’ kept his name right up. He wuz gittin’ to be wuth something too. I reckon his farm, an’ stock, an’ what he had in the Carson bank, would ’a’ come to more’n anybody else in Silver Valley could ’a’ spelt. So the deacons let him alone, as they ort, with no more proof than what me an’ Rosie saw, an’ him behavin’ right an’ payin’ the preacher reg’lar, besides givin’ him a suit o’ clothes an’ a fine pair o’ shoes at Christmas. “Folks sort o’ made it easy fer Ann too, fer ever’body thought a sight of her.” Here Aunt Lizy gave the narrator a glance that drove him to an emendation. “Barrin’ a few o’ the women that wuz so good they didn’t have no use fer the New Testament. Most o’ the folks would go to the mill, like they’d been doin’, an’ act frien’ly, an’ make a heap over little Bake. Ever’body knowed that Ann had had an awful time with Curt, an’ Nathe wuz twenty years older’n her an’ could talk water up-hill. Nobody could prove nothin’ anyway, ’cause walkin’ in the woods one time wuzn’t no proof, not what the law could handle anyhow. “Lu had been dead runnin’ onto a year, an’ the talk had died clean out, when Nathe told me to go to Mis’ Baker an’ tell her to take Ann to Carson an’ git a paper from the judge sayin’ she wuzn’t Curt’s wife. It wuz the law in them days that if a man an’ his wife didn’t live together fer three year they wuz nachally divorced ’thout goin’ inter court. I b’lieve they’ve changed it to five year now, but it wuz three then, an’ Curt had been gone four year an’ up’ards. I found Ann all in a trimmle an’ cryin’ hersef to death. She showed me a letter she’d got from Curt sayin’ he wuz comin’ back to settle with Nathe--that he’d heard whose boy Bake wuz, an’ he reckoned Nathe wouldn’t be so spry about havin’ him arrested ef he come back. She said she wouldn’t marry Nathe, fer Curt would be shore to slip in an’ kill him. That’s what Curt said he would do in the letter, an’ she didn’t have no more sense than to believe it. I went home an’ told Nathe, an’ he swore like no human bein’ ort to, an’ went straight off to Ann’s. When he come back, I knowed from his looks as fur as I could see him that his tongue hadn’t hepped him fer onct.