“Naw, sir!” exclaimed the youthful Grinnell, more insistently than before. He did not continue, for suddenly there came running down the road a boy of his own size, out of breath, and red and angry—the pursuer, evidently, that the hereditary enemy had feared, for she crouched up against the fence with a whimper.
“Kem along away from thar, ye miser'ble little stack o' bones!” he cried, seizing his sister by one hand and giving her a jerk—“a-foolin' round them Grinnells' fence an' a-hankerin' arter thar old baby!”
He felt that the pride of the Purdee family was involved in this admission of envy.
“I jes wanter pat it on the head wunst,” she sighed.
“Waal, ye won't now,” said the Grinnell boys in chorus.
The Purdee grasp was gentler on the little girl's arm. This was due not to fraternal feeling so much as to loyalty to the clan; “stack o' bones” though she was, they were Purdee bones.
“Kem along,” Ab Purdee exhorted her. “A baby ain't nuthin' extry, nohow”—he glanced scoffingly at the infantile Grinnell. “The mountings air fairly a-roamin' with 'em.”
“We-uns 'ain't got none at our house,” whined the sun-bonnet, droopingly, moving off slowly on its legs, which, indeed, seemed borrowed, so unsteady, and loath to go they were.
The Grinnell boys laughed aloud, jeeringly and ostentatiously, and the Purdee blood was moved to retort: “We-uns don't want none sech ez that. Nary tooth in her head!”
And indeed the widely stretched babbling lips displayed a vast vacuity of gum.