"You better git here quick, A' Roxy," Polly urged. "She's just a wipin' her spoon on em'."
"Ain't," protested the infant, appearing suddenly in the doorway, a "trying spoon" in her hand, over which she was running her tongue with gusto. "I thest give a lick o' long-sweetnin' to Eads," thus she named the first of womankind. "Po' old Eads looked so-o-o hongry."
"She's done a heap more'n that," Polly maintained. Mary Ann Martha's mouth began to work piteously.
"Give Eads some," she pursued in a husky, explanatory voice. "An'—th'—ol' snake licked out his tongue, and I must put a teenchy-weenchy bit on it. 'Nen Adams, he's mad 'caze he don't git none; an'—Mammy," with a burst of tears, "is I thest like my uncle Lance?"
She had heard this formula of reproof so often; she knew so well that it befitted the gravest crimes.
"You air that!" said Roxy wrathfully. "You little dickens! I don't know of anybody in this world that would have done sech a trick—but you or Lance Cleaverage."
She wheeled from the furnace toward the house, and set a swift foot in the middle of the sorghum-stalk pavement Mary Ann Martha had laid over the skimming pit. The stalks gave. She attempted 178 to recover herself and have back the foot, but her momentum was too great. On she plunged, pitching and rolling, descending by degrees and with ejaculatory whoops among the sticky sweetness, part of which was still uncomfortably warm.
There was a treble chorus of dismay from the women. Sylvane leaped to his feet, and ran to the pit's edge. Buck Fuson held his sides and roared with mirth, and Flenton Hands stopped the crusher by tying up his horse so that he too, might go to their assistance.
"Oh land!" gasped the widow, coming to the surface, yellow and gummy of countenance, smudged and smeared, crowned with a tipsy wreath of greenery, like a sorghumnal bacchante. "I believe in my soul that little sinner aimed to do this. She's jest adzactly like her Uncle Lance—that's what she is! I mind—ow!" The rotten branch under her foot had snapped, letting her down into a squelching pool of skimmings.
"Take hold of my hand, Sis' Roxy," cried Sylvane. "No, I don't reckon the baby aimed to make trouble; chaps is always doin' things like this, an' meanin' no harm. There—now I've got you."