“Dis heah’s fo’ yo’ to war tuh-night. Marse Gawge he don’ war no night-shuts, and dey am none o’ th’ other Englishers lef’ none; so I jess stole you one o’ Miss Faginny’s. Don’ say nothin’ ’bout it, please, sur, ’case ef dar is one thing Miss Faginny’s ’tic’lar ’bout, ’tis her clo’es.”
Roden took the long white garment gingerly, as men lift a young baby, bade Aunt Tishy good-night, and closed the door. He then went to the fire and began to examine what that colossal personage had inferred to be “Miss Faginny’s night-shut.”
It was a capacious arrangement of very thin linen, and superfine little frills of a like material—hardly the garment in which an overseer’s daughter would have wooed repose. The young man looked at it carefully and gravely from all points of view, then went and hung it over the mirror, and returning to bed, regarded it with the mute attention which he had before bestowed on the drab-colored Madonna. It was a dainty thing, probably a relic of some previous Englishman’s wife or daughter, and the rosy light from the handful of fresh cones which he had thrown on the fire stole in and out of its sheer folds caressingly.
He left it hanging there, and the last thing he remembered that night was its gleam, as of a pretty ghost in the firelit dusk of the big room.
II.
He could have sworn that he had slept but a moment when a terrific squeaking and squealing, yelping and growling, under his windows, aroused him with sufficient abruptness.
His first idea was that the “’coons and things” were “killin’ each other clean out,” after the fashion of Miss Virginia’s supposition in regard to the Scriptural beasts in the story of the ark.
Looking out, however, he saw that a large black and white hog was being chased, nipped, barked at, and otherwise maltreated by the mastiff and the collie. The frightened beast rushed hither and thither, squealing and grunting, and the two dogs followed, falling over each other in the eagerness of pursuit. After a while the mad trio disappeared to the farther end of the long terrace.