"Now, hold on," said Blount, "you don't say a word against that young man while I'm around. I want to tell you that fellow has showed me a heap. He's a square, hard-working man, as honest as the day is long, straight as a string, square as they make 'em, and not afraid of nothing on earth. I ask him to come down here and go b'ah hunting. He always says he has to work—works harder than any nigger I ever had on the place. Now that's what he done showed me. I reckon he'd be a good sort of model for this whole southern country to-day. He's proof enough to my mind that a man can work, and do his own work, and still be a gentleman. I've been right lazy in my time, I reckon, b'ah hunting and that sort of thing, but now I come to think it all over, I don't know but what Jack Eddring is as near right as anybody I know of. He allows he's got something to do in this world, and he's starting out to do it. He sort of showed me that maybe that's about the best thing a man can do with himself—just work.
"Besides, Miss Lady,"—and here Blount turned upon her suddenly, "that man's done a heap for you."
"Oh, well—" began Miss Lady.
"And he thinks a heap of you. That is,"—and here Blount undertook to save himself from what he swiftly fancied might be indiscretion— "he's like all of us people down in here, you know. Now they tell me that up North, in the big cities where I've never been at, there's so many women that folks think they're right common. I don't believe that, nohow, for it don't stand to reason. Now we-all know that a woman is something a good ways off, and high up and hard to reach. That's the way we-all feel. But now even if we allow it that way, I want to say that Jack Eddring has done a heap for you, Miss Lady, that maybe you don't know about. He didn't have to do it, either."
"I never asked him to do anything—I never told him."
"No, you didn't," said Cal Blount, gravely. "You sort of allowed that he was a meddling sneak-thief, Miss Lady. I want to say right here that I allow a lot different from that. Now, if I know that man at all, he ain't going to come around you and make any sort of talk. You'll have to go to him."
"I'll not!" said Miss Lady, again eliciting a yelp from one of the puppies in her lap.
"There, there, now," said Blount, gently. "Just you hold on a minute.
Don't say you will or you won't. I just want to ask you one thing,
Miss Lady. Who do you reckon you are? I know you're Miss Lady, and
that's all I want to know. But who do you think you are?"
The kindness of the keen gray eye disarmed Miss Lady. In the sheer instinct of youth and vitality she spread out her arms wide, her face turned up halfway toward the sky, her lips half-parted: "Oh, don't ask me, Colonel Cal," said she. "I'm alive, and it's spring. I danced in the big room this morning, Colonel Cal! Isn't it enough, just to be alive?" Thus she evaded that question, which she had so long shunned as impossible of answer.
"Yes, it's enough, Miss Lady," said the old planter, gravely. "It's enough for you. But now, we men who are your friends have got to take care of you. We've got to do the thinking. Now, I'm saying that Jack Eddring has done a heap of thinking for you that you don't know anything about."