“Gee, that’s a pretty girl!” exclaimed the necktie drummer.
“I reckon she is,” grunted Colonel Crutcher, “pretty and good and sharp as a briar and quick as greased lightning. There isn’t a girl like her anywhere around these parts. I don’t see what the young folks of the county are thinking about, leaving her out of all their frolics.”
“Well, you see—” put in another old man.
“Yes, I see the best-looking gal of the bunch and the spunkiest and the equal of any of them and the superior of most as far as manners and brains are concerned, just because she comes of plain folks—”
“A little worse than plain, Crutcher,” put in Judge Middleton. “Those Bucks—”
“Oh, then she lives at Buck Hill?” asked the drummer.
“Buck Hill! Heavens man! The Bucknors live at Buck Hill and are about the swellest folk in Kentucky. The Bucks live in a little place this side of Buck Hill. There’s nobody left but this Judy gal and her mother. I reckon their place would have gone for debt if it hadn’t so happened that the trolley line from Louisville cut through it and they sold the right of way 19 for enough to lift the mortgage. They do say that the Bucknors and Bucks were the same folks originally but that was in the early days and somehow the Bucks got down and the Bucknors staid up. Now the Bucknors would no more acknowledge the relationship to the Bucks than the Bucks would expect them to.”
“I should think anybody would be proud to claim kin with a peach like that girl,” said Major Fitch. “Her mother is a pretty good sort too, but slow. I reckon when they get cousinly inclined they always think of old Dick Buck, Judy’s grandfather, who was enough to cool the warmest feelings of kinship.”
Nodding assent to the Major’s remark, the veterans lapsed into sleepy silence.