There was a tone in his voice which more than one among them had now and again noticed with some slow bewilderment during the last few weeks—a tone new to them, but which in time they grew used to, though they never understood its meaning.
“Kinder,” they used to say, “as ef he wus mad or—ruffed up, though it warn’t that exactly, either.”
“Black eyes, h’ain’t she?” inquired the man on the barrel.
“Yes.”
“An har. That’s my kind er women, black eyes an’ har, and kinder spirity. They’ve more devil to ’em ‘n’ is better able to take care of ’emselves.”
“She’s got some one to take care of her,” answered Tom. “That’s my business.”
“You’ve got her mightily fixed up, Tom,” remarked Mr. Doty, who had just entered. “You’ll hev all the women in the country flocking up. She sorter makes me think o’ the Queen o’ Sheby. Sheby, she wus great on fixin’.”
Every man who entered, seeing her as she lay in state in Tom’s lap, was drawn towards her to stand and wonder at her vaguely. There developed a tendency to form small and rather silent groups about her. Infancy was no novelty in this region of numerous progenies, but the fine softness of raiment and delicate sumptuousness of infancy were. More than one man, having looked at her and wandered away, was unable to resist the temptation to wander back again and finally to settle in some seat or box upon a barrel, that he might the better indulge his curiosity and interest.
“Ye must hev spent a heap on her, Tom,” was said respectfully again and again.
The fact that “a heap had been spent on her” inspired the audience with a sense of her importance, which amounted to reverence. That she represented an apparently unaccountable expenditure, was considered to reflect credit upon her, however vaguely, and to give her a value not to be lightly regarded. To Mr. Doty the idea of the “Queen of Sheby” appeared to recur persistently, all his imaginings of the poetic, the dramatic, and luxurious being drawn from Scriptural sources.