"Gwine to do?" said James, "I'm agwine to be a lyer, so I kin set in de kote house und sass de jedge." And thus the farce went on day after day under the shadow of Ingleside.
Clarissa caught a depredating urchin trying to stand upon his head in a half-filled barrel of crushed sugar in the pantry and said to herself "You stays dar twell I get me er plank," and creeping like a cat back again, and taking a fresh purchase on the board, she came down upon "de middle ships of dat dar ar yungun lak er buzzum of struction; pend upon it, Miss Alice, dat ar niggar is er flying twill yit wid sweetnin nuff to last twell de July flies cum agin."
"This nest of dirt-daubers," as Colonel Seymour fitly described the school, became a nuisance that must be abated by hook or crook. The law was nothing more than a great stalking shadow. "If I could only secure the services of Jake Flowers the regulator, thought the old man, "he and I shall be a law unto ourselves."
This was the man whom Colonel Seymour desired as his file leader upon the drill ground when the stalking shadow of the law failed to keep time to the music, a law unto himself, whose forum should be "thar or tharabouts" on the Ingleside plantation.
Jake Flowers the regulator had violated a law of the Sabbath by working out some devilish invention, which, he observed with satisfaction, to his wife, would keep the coroner sitting upon corpses until "the craps were smartly out of the grass." The regulator stood in the open door, looking out upon the great sheets of water that were falling from the clouds. As he stood in his muddy boots, with both hands deep down into his pockets, his carrotty hair in great shocks standing out of a crownless hat as if an electric current had just passed through it, he was picturesque in the extreme.
"Sally Ann!" he exclaimed "I am thinking."
"Well, think agen," Sally Ann answered tartly, "That mout fetch back old Nance and the biddies." Sally Ann had been pouting ever since Jake went to jail for the loss of her setting hen and the chicks.
"You haint got no call to go back on me, on the occasion of the old hen and the nigger," said Jake seriously. "Hit wus providence or hit wus the guvement, and twixt the two they has got a mighty prejudy agen a poor man; when hit comes ter shullikin and pilferen they is hard to hender. Weuns haint no more than dandy-lions in the path of the harrycane; leastwise weuns kaint hit back.
"Nor hit haint providence; nor hit haint the guvement, nor hit haint prejudy," Sally Ann replied angrily "Hit are pine blank cussedness. Some folks is onnery Jake, and it is like the swamp-ager, hit is powerful raging when the crap is knee-deep in the grass. I shouldn't wonder nary bit and grain if Andy's crap aint in the yallers same as ourn." This was said very provokingly, and Jake felt the sting of the reproof.
"Jeminy-cracky!" he exclaimed in a passion, "Harkee Sally, hit is tit fur tat; be ye a pinin fur another fellow?"