“I’s gwine to Ginny Babe Chew’s cabin an’ narrate her all I is found out. Mebbe dat ole hoodoo face kin see mo’ hope dan I kin.”
He passed the Hen-Scratch saloon and peeped into the window, where he saw Pap and Dinner Gaze playing cards at a small table. He passed the Shoofly Church, where he heard the voice of Vinegar Atts bellowing like a lost cow. On the edge of the settlement he entered the yard of Ginny Babe Chew’s home, and found Dainty sitting alone upon the porch.
Ginny Babe was in the hen-house rendering profane ministrations to the same old hen which was still of a mind to brood, whether there was anything to hatch or not.
That hen had entertained Ginny Babe for a week. She had exhausted every known method to break up the fowl’s desire to “set,” dousing it in water, ducking it in ashes, tying a long red trailer of wool to its feet, and other things of that general nature. Now she stood growling profanity, wondering what else she could do to the obstinate old biddy.
Suddenly she thought of the suggestion made by Skeeter Butts: “Pour coal-ile on her tail an’ sot her on fire!”
She picked up an old rag lying in the yard, wrapped it around the squawking hen’s tail, carried the fowl to the back porch, where she found an oil-can, and saturated the rag well with the petroleum.
Then she struck a match and set the rag afire.
The startled hen fluttered out of her arms, ran straight into the hen-house, shed the oil-soaked, blazing rag with most of her tail feathers, and ran out of the hen-house into the high weeds.
But the burning rag left in the hen-house got busy with the loose straw and the other dry trash, and in a moment the whole house was in a blaze!
Ginny was famous for the noise she could make with her throat. Her very name was a perversion of the word for that noisy hen the guinea, and from her earliest childhood this word had been indicative of her chief faculty. But on this occasion she broke all previous records for racket.