“Howdy?” he said to Rupert. “Ye hain’t seen me afore, but I seen you when I was to Delisleville. It wuz me as told yer nigger ye’d be a fool if ye didn’t get Tom ter help yer to look up thet thar claim. Ye showed horse sense by comin’. Wish ye luck.”
“Uncle Tom,” said Sheba, as they sat at their dinner and Mornin walked backwards and forwards from the kitchen stove to the dining-room with chicken fried in cream, hot biscuits, and baked yams, “we saw Mr. Stamps and he wished us luck.”
“He has a claim himself, hasn’t he?” said Rupert. “He told Matt it was for a yoke of oxen.”
Tom broke into a melodious roar of laughter.
“Well,” he said, “if we can do as well by ours as Stamps will do by his, we shall be in luck. That yoke of oxen has grown from a small beginning. If it thrives as it goes on, the Government’s in for a big thing.”
“It has grown from a calf,” said Sheba, “and it wasn’t six weeks old.”
“A Government mule kicked it and broke its leg,” said Tom. “Stamps made veal of it, and in two months it was ‘Thet heifer o’ mine’—in six months it was a young steer——”
“Now it’s a yoke of oxen,” said Rupert; “and they were the pride of the county.”
“Lord! Lord!” said Tom, “the United States has got something to engineer.”