"Thar—you see now, Flent," said Little Liza tragically, as she encountered her brother when they turned from watching Lance away. "You've lost her. Oh, law! I always thought if I could call Callisty Gentry sister, it would make me the happiest critter in the world."
"You may have a chance so to call her yet," said Hands, who showed any emotion the announcement may have roused in him only by an added tightening of lip and eye. "Wednesday ain't come yet—and hit ain't gone."
"Well, hit'll come and hit'll go," said Ellen heavily. "Lance Cleaverage gits what he starts after, and that's the fact."
"Yes," agreed Little Liza, "he shore does. I don't reckon I could have said no to him myself."
"Lance Cleaverage!" echoed her brother. "Well, he's born—but he ain't buried. I never did yet give up a thing that I'd set my mind on. I ain't said I've given up Callista Gentry."
The three looked at him rather wildly. Talk of this sort is unknown among the mountain people. Yet they could but feel the woman's admiration for his masculine high-handedness of speech.
At the Cleaverage place they were making ready for the noonday meal when Lance brought his news home. The table, with its 85 cloth of six flour-sacks sewed end to end, was set in the cool entry. The Dutch oven, half buried in ashes, was full of buttermilk-dodgers, keeping hot. At the other side of the broad hearthstone, Roxy Griever bent above a dinner-pot dishing up white beans and dumplings. Beside her Mary Ann Martha held a small yellow bowl and made futile dabs with a spoon she had herself whittled from a bit of shingle, trying to get beans into it. Her mother's reproofs dropped upon her tousled and incorrigible head with the regularity of clockwork.
"You, Mary Ann Marthy, I do know in my soul you' the worst child the Lord ever made: Where do you expect to go to when you die? Look at that thar good victuals all splattered out in the ashes. That's yo' doin'. You' jest adzackly like yo' uncle Lance."
Then Sylvane, who was shaping an axe-helve in the doorway, looked up and said, "Here comes Lance himself." And Kimbro Cleaverage pushed another chair towards the table.
"Well," said the bridegroom expectant, looking about on the shadowed interior of the cabin, dim to his eyes after the glare outside, "I've got a invite for you-all to a weddin'."