As he anticipated, his father spoke suddenly: “Ye jes keep away from thar,” he said, sternly. “I trest them folks no furder 'n a rattlesnake.”
“I ain't consortin' along o' 'em,” declared the boy. “But I actially hed ter take Eunice by the scalp o' her head an' lug her off one day when she hung on thar fence a-stare-gazin' Grinnell's baby like 'twar fatten ter eat.”
The child's mother, a cadaverous, pale woman, was listlessly stringing the warping-bars with hanks of variegated yarn. The grandmother, who conserved a much more active and youthful interest in life, took down a brown gourd used as a scrap-basket that was on a protruding lath of the clay-and-stick chimney, and hunted among the scraps of homespun and bits of yarn stowed within it. The room was much like the gourd in its aged brown tint; its indigenous aspect, as if it had not been made with hands, but was some spontaneous production of the soil; with its bits of bright color—the peppers hanging from the rafters, the rainbow-hued yarn festooning the warping-bars, the red coals of the fire, the blue and yellow ware ranged on the shelf, the brown puncheon floor and walls and ceiling and chimney—it might have seemed the interior of a similar gourd of gigantic proportions. She dressed a twig from the pile of wood in a gay scrap of cloth, casting glances the while at the little girl, and handed it to her.
“I hain't never seen ez good a baby ez this,” she said, with the convincing coercive mendacity of a grandmother.
The little girl accepted it humbly; it was a good baby doubtless of its sort, but it was not alive, which could not be denied of the Grinnell baby, Grinnell though it was.
“An' Job Grinnell he kem down ter the fence, an' 'lowed he'd slit our ears, an' named us shoats,” continued her brother. Purdee lifted his head. “An' sent a word ter dad,” said the boy, tremulously.
“What word did he send ter—me?” cried Purdee.
The boy quailed to tell him. “He tole me ter ax ye ef ye ever read sech ez this on Moses' tables in the mountings—' An' ye shell claim sech ez be yer own, an' yer neighbors' belongings shell ye in no wise boastfully medjure fur yourn, nor look upon it fur covetiousness, nor yit git a big name up in the kentry fur ownin' sech ez be another's,'” faltered the sturdy Abner.