“No, you cayn’t. Nobody can. They ain’t any good times for anybody any more.”
“What a lot of ‘anys’! Seems as if out of so many there might be one good time for somebody. I was in hopes you were having such just now. What can I do to make it pleasanter for you?”
“Sit right down and let me speak. Your name’s Calvert, ain’t it?”
“Why, of course. I thought you knew;” answered the girl, reluctantly resuming her seat.
“Never take anything for granted. I cayn’t do it, you cayn’t do it. Something’ll always go wrong. It did with your great-grandfather’s brother that time when he hid—Ah! hum! It ought to be yours, but it won’t be. There couldn’t be any such luck in this world. Is Billy lookin’ comf’table?”
Billy answered for himself by a most doleful bray. Indeed, he was resenting the lads’ endeavors to remove his harness. Jim fancied he could fix it better for the purpose of hauling the Water Lily, but the animal objected, because that harness had never been taken from his back since it was put on early in the spring. Then the more ambitious of the negroes who managed the Colonel’s truck-farm had equipped Billy for ploughing the melon-patch. After each day’s work the beast had seemed tired and the gentleman-farmer had suggested:
“Don’t fret him takin’ it off. You’ll only have to put it on again, to-morrow.”
This saved labor and suited all around; and Billy was trying to explain to these tormenting lads how ill-at-ease and undressed he would feel, if he were stripped of his regalia.
“Sounds like he was in trouble, poor Billy. But, of course, he is. Everybody is. You are. If you had that buried—Pshaw! What’s the use! You ain’t, you cayn’t, nobody could find it, else things wouldn’t have happened the way they did; and your great-grandfather wouldn’t have forgot where he buried it; and it wouldn’t have gone out the family; and since your great-grandfather’s brother married my great-grandmother’s sister we’d all have shared and shared alike. It’s sad to think any man would be so careless for his descendants as to go and do what your great-grandfather’s brother did and then forget it. But—it’s the way things always go in this lop-sided world. Ah! um.”
The Colonel’s breakfast had made him more talkative than had seemed possible and because she could do no better for her own amusement, Dorothy inquired: