"Howdy, Mandy," responded Cyrus. "There's a hot spell coming, I reckon."
Lowering the basket to the floor of the porch, the woman drew a red bandanna handkerchief from her bosom and began slowly to wipe the drops of sweat from her face and neck. The acrid odour of her flesh reached Cyrus, but he made no movement to draw away from her.
"I'se been laid up wid er stitch in my side, Marster, so I'se jes got dese yer close done dis mawnin'. Dar wan' noner de chillen at home ter tote um down yer, so I low I 'uz gwine ter drap by wid um on my way ter church."
As he did not reply, she hesitated an instant and over her features, which looked as if they had been flattened by a blow, there came an expression which was half scornful, half inviting, yet so little personal that it might have been worn by one of her treetop ancestors while he looked down from his sheltering boughs on a superior species of the jungle. The chance effect of light and shadow on a grey rock was hardly less human or more primitive.
"I'se gittin' moughty well along, Marster," she said; "I reckon I'se gittin' on toward a hunnard."
"Nonsense, Mandy, you ain't a day over thirty-five. There's a plenty of life left in you yet."
"Go way f'om yer, Marster; you knows I'se a heap older 'n dat. How long ago was hit I done fust come yer ter you all?"
He thought a moment. A question of calculation always interested him, and he prided himself on his fine memory for dates.
"You came the year our son Henry died, didn't you? That was in '66—eighteen years ago. Why, you couldn't have been over fifteen that summer."
For the first time a look of cunning—of the pathetic cunning of a child pitted against a man—awoke in her face.