“Now, what do you think?” asked Ruth, breathlessly, when she had told the story and shown the paper. “Is this Uncle Peter’s handwriting?”
Aunt Sarah peered at the scrawl. “Looks like it,” she admitted. “Pretty trembly. I wouldn’t doubt, on’y it seems too kind a thought for Peter to have. He warn’t given to thinking of that old negro.”
“I suppose Mr. Howbridge would know?”
“That lawyer? Huh!” sniffed Aunt Sarah. “He might. But that wouldn’t bring you anything. If he put the old man out once, he would again. No heart nor soul in a lawyer. I always did hate the whole tribe!”
Aunt Sarah had taken a great dislike to Mr. Howbridge, because the legal gentleman had brought the news of the girls’ legacy, instead of telling her she was the heir of Uncle Peter. On the days when there chanced to be an east wind and Aunt Sarah felt a twinge of rheumatism, she was inclined to rail against Fate for making her a dependent upon the “gals’ charity,” as she called it. But she firmly clung to what she called “her rights.” If Uncle Peter had not left his property to her, he should have done so—that is the way she looked at it.
Such comment as Ruth could wring from Aunt Sarah seemed to bolster up her own resolve to try Uncle Rufus as a retainer, and tell Mr. Howbridge about it afterward.
“We’ll skimp a little in some way, to make his wages,” thought Ruth, her mind naturally dropping into the old groove of economizing. “I don’t think Mr. Howbridge would be very angry. And then—here is the paper,” and she put the crumpled scrap that the old colored man had given her, safely away.
“Take care of Uncle Rufus.”
She found Agnes and explained the situation to her. Aunt Sarah had admitted Uncle Rufus was a “handy negro,” and Agnes at once became enthusiastic over the possibility of having such a serving man.
“Just think of him in a black tail-coat and white vest and spats, waiting on table!” cried the twelve year old, whose mind was full of romantic notions gathered from her miscellaneous reading. “This old house just needs a liveried negro servant shuffling about it—you know it does, Ruth!”