Jim, with his own color and on a capital made up of a dried snake's head, the smoke-cured cud of a cow, and the several feet of a rabbit—“a graveyard rabbit, cotched in d'dark of d'moon,” was Jim's description—set up, you should understand, for a seer. In a compliant spirit of fun, I was wont to countenance Jim in these weird assumptions.
“Tell me what they do in Tennessee,” I repeated.
“Jim's afeerd to try, Marse Major,” said Jim, shaking his head as one who distrusts his powers. “You-all can see yourse'f, that camped yere as we-all be, millions an' millions of miles away, tellin' what goes on in Tennessee aint easy. Under d'most fav'ble conditions, it's what Jim would call a long shot an' a limb in d'way. An' you hyar Jim! thar aint been no fav'ble conditions cirklin' round him since ever you turns d'key on that demijohn. Jim aint got over thinkin' you-all acts plumb hasty about that demijohn, Marse Major.”
“Well, perhaps I did,” said I, “and so far as a dollar will go”—here I tossed Jim a Mexican—“towards repairing the injury, I am ready to make amends. Meanwhile you are to take this note where you take the flowers.”
Jim's confidence in Peg had long ago been established, and he was no more ploughed of those fears which arose to furrow him during our earlier days at the Indian Queen. He promptly took my note—one which employed the General's name—and with it the Mexican coin, and went about his errand.
“It's monstrous remark'ble, Marse Major,” said Jim, as he pocketed the silver, “how money does 'liven an' limber a man up. Now that dollar shore makes Jim feel as spry as a gray squirrel; it mos' certainly do!”
I was not without my alarms for Peg's coming; but when she tripped in upon the General and myself, it was as balm to my bruised nature to feel on her part some quick leniency towards me, and a certain tacit sweetness—somewhat sorrowful, but none the less good—to which I had been alien since the day I laid those witless strictures upon Eaton for that he was conceived without a soul. This gentle attitude of Peg's came upon me like summer weather, touching everything with sunshine, and the hour took on a sudden pleasant value. Peg could not fail to see the change; and even the General would be aware of that improvement.
“Now you must have brought June in your apron,” said the General, playing with Peg. “In any event, you have thawed our frigid friend here. He has been frozen for days, and now you see his face glows like harvest-home.”
“If that be true,” laughed Peg—quite her old beautiful laugh, too, and not a laugh contrived solely for the General, but with a share for me—“if that be true, I must show more pains to come often, and not make my stay so short as has been my wont. I did not know that I was such a blessing.”
The General would make Peg have her old chair by my desk, which showed me—and I wondered over it not a little—how he was observant beyond what I had supposed, to be thus sharp on that small point of where Peg would sit when in confab with me. When Peg was throned in her old place—and, to my eyes, she filled the room with a kind of glory—the General drew up his own chair so as to put us three to be the corners of a triangle.