Her thought passed beyond fear and rested on pity, abhorrence, sickening loathing. Stiggins, then—she turned no longer from the thought of Stiggins. His mother was the half-wit who lived in the alley behind the jail. She had lived there many years, for the cabin there had been left to her by some white woman. There had once been some litigation over the property; it had been wanted by the county for some purpose and there had been a suit in the court, all the lawyers taking sides, half-jocularly at first. In the end the cabin had not been sold, for Dolly Brown had been adjudged incompetent and her property had been secured from sale or condemnation. The affair had been threshed through several courts and all the lawyers had enlisted, renewing old bitternesses over it. The people of the town had gone to hear the speeches of the lawyers. “They’re a-tryen Dolly Brown’s cabin,” Conway had said. All the town had gone to the court as if it were a show to see, and the lawyers had spoken in turn—eloquence, bitterness, laughter. Horace Bell had been on the side of the half-wit and he had made a long speech in defense of her rights as one of the innocents of the earth, rhetoric flowing richly. People had gone in groups to look at the cabin behind the jail and Dolly Brown had met them with smiles and giggling laughter until these visits had wearied her. Then she had thrown boiling water at groups to drive them off. Theodosia could not remember when Stiggins had not stayed in the livery stable and she had always thought of him as being somehow related to the horses and mules there. She had seen his hand on a mule’s throat to slip the harness over the stubby hair, a yellow hand moving knowingly over the mule’s flesh. He was still as a boy of ten in mind although she knew that he was but a few months younger than herself. He had grown up in the livery stable, sleeping on the straw in the loft, and nobody regarded him as more than a semi-idiot. Ladies never went beyond the door of the stable, but she herself had been far inside once when she was a child. Romping along beside her uncle, the horse dealer, on the way to the candy store, she had gone with him into the half-dark of the stable when he had stopped there to look at a horse. She remembered water dripping from a rotting trough, a hand pump where some workmen bent and lifted to the lilt of an iron handle, the closed stall where the show horse was kept. The earth floor was beaten hard by the feet of the horses, and the stalls went, one after another, far back into a brown darkness. Men came there to relieve themselves in the stalls, and there was a foul odor all about. Stiggins, a link between what men keep and what they throw away, summarized her thought. He breathed the air of the discarded, the foul; he slept in it. She put the scales aside, for their mounting tones no longer reached toward some infinite adjustment, some perpetual promise. Stiggins was her brother. The scales were a weariness.