“I bet your smokehouse is full and running over this minute. I know mine is. Well, let them run over in the right channel. We can’t do enough for this young cousin. Gee, man, just to think of our being spared the humiliation of having to go to Cousin Ann and, tell her that we couldn’t look after her any longer! I break out in a cold sweat whenever I think of how near we came to it.
“If Cupid and Puck can’t pull the plough, how about sending your tractor over and getting Cousin Judith’s few acres broken up for her in three shakes of a dead sheep’s tail? I’d do it if I were closer. Why, jiminy crickets! We owe her an everlasting debt of gratitude just for persuading Cousin Ann to step out of her 250 wig and hoops, and another one for making that old Billy trim his beard. I believe his beard was what made the other darkeys hate him so, and I know if it hadn’t have been for Cousin Ann’s hoop skirt and wig she would have been helping the women folk around the house long before this. What they had against her was that she was always company wherever she stayed. I tell you, give me a red-headed girl for managing!”
CHAPTER XXIV
Blessings Begin to Flow
“Well, I say it’s a good thing these cousins of yours didn’t decide sooner to recognize you, Judy, because if they had we wouldn’t have had a single chair with a bottom left in it and the hooked rugs your Grandmother Knight brought to Kentucky would have been nothing but holes,” declared Mrs. Buck. “I never saw so much company in my born days and constant setting wears out chairs and constant rocking wears out rugs.
“I don’t say as it isn’t nice to have company. I’ve been lonesome, in a way, all my life, because my mother and father weren’t much hands at mixing, feeling themselves to be kind of different from the folks here in Kentucky, and then I married young, and trouble came early, and my poor dear husband’s father wasn’t the kind to attract the kind of people my mother felt were our equals—but now, sakes alive, never a day passes but it isn’t cousin this and 252 cousin that, coming to call or ringing the ’phone or sending some kind of present to Miss Ann.
“What do they expect Miss Ann to do with a bushel of winter onions and a barrel of potatoes and a keg of cider and a barrel of flour and six sides of bacon, two jowls and three hams, besides two barrels of apples and a hind quarter of the prettiest mutton I’ve seen for many a day? This morning a truck drove up with enough wood to last us half through the winter—the best kind of oak and pine mixed and all cut stove length ready for splitting. That old Billy is mighty nice about splitting the wood and bringing it in. He’s the most respectful colored person I ever saw and the only one I’d ever have around.”
Mrs. Buck paused for breath and then proceeded: “While you were off teaching to-day somebody Miss Ann called Cousin Betty Throckmorton came to call and brought two daughters and a grandchild. I was mighty sorry for them to miss you and I told them so. I think Mrs. Throckmorton rather thought I ought to have said I was sorry for you to miss her, but being as she had come to see you and not you to see her and being as you are a sight better looking than she is or her daughters or the grandchild, I put it the other way. Anyhow, 253 she was a very fine lady and couldn’t say enough in praise of some of our furniture.