Here, to a gaping audience, he recounted breathlessly his narrow escape.
“You darn fool,” said his sire, when Pomp had finished his narration, incredulous of others, because conscious of his own habit of romancing, “do you tink your ole farder’ll believe dat pack of lies? You neber saw anything, but made it all up.”
“De chile didn’t,” said Dinah. “Dar! What you say to dis?”
She exposed to view, as she spoke, the damaged seat of Pomp’s breeches, which afforded unmistakable proof of his having come into contact with an enemy of some kind, even if not a supernatural one. But the sire was still incredulous.
“He’s gone done tore it a purpose,” was all the stubborn skeptic said.
But the next day he professed to solve the enigma. He came in from the barn, where he had been giving Arab an early feed, and, laughing, said—
“De black bull was loose all night, and went way up de road, past de meetin’-house, ‘zactly whar dis darn fool of a Pomp says he met de debbil. It’s lucky his breeches tore, or de critter might have killed him, deed he might. I told you de chile was lyin’. Lor’ Amighty, to get skeered dat way, at nuffin at all!” and he laughed till the tears ran out of his eyes.
But Dinah as well as her son persisted in their original version of the story, and thereafter two distinct accounts of interviews with the Arch Enemy were told in the kitchen at Sweetwater, neither party, however, believing a word that the other said.
CHAPTER XXVII.
THE ABDUCTION
And many an old man’s sigh, and many a widow’s,
And many an orphan’s water-standing eye—
Men for their sons’, wives for their husbands’ fate,
And orphans for their parents’ timeless death—
Shall rue the hour that ever thou wert born. —Shakespeare.