The Colonel did not turn his head; he gazed with an air of great injury at the tops of the locust trees, clasping his tumbler as it rested on the arm of the rocker.
“Jimpson,” he began, after the culprit had suffered his silence some minutes.
“Now, Cunnel,” began Jimpson nervously. He had evidently rehearsed this scene in the past.
“Just answer my questions,” insisted the Colonel. “Is this my house?”
“Yas, sir, but Carline, she—”
“And are you my nigger?” persisted the Colonel plaintively.
“Yas, sir; but you see, Carline—”
“And haven't I, for twenty years,” persisted the Colonel, “been taking a mint julep at half past two on Sunday afternoons?”
“Yas, sir, I was a comin'—”
“Then you don't regard it as an unreasonable request, that a gentleman should ask his own nigger, in his own house, to bring him a small piece of ice?” The Colonel's sense of injury was becoming so overpowering that the offender might have been crushed by contrition had not a laugh made them both look up.