Here Dot spoke up. “I ‘spect I know where it is, Unc’ Rufus,” she said.
“Wal! I ‘spected some ob yo’ chillen done had it.”
“You know,” said Dot, seriously, “my Alice-doll is real weakly. The doctors don’t give me much ’couragement about her. Her lungs are weak—they have been, you know, ever since that awful Trouble girl buried her with the dried apples.”
“Dat Lillie Treble. Ah ‘members hit—sho!” chuckled Uncle Rufus, the Corner House girls’ chief factotum, who was a tall, thin, brown old negro, round shouldered with age, but “spry and pert,” as he said himself.
“And the doctors,” went on Dot, waxing serious, and her imagination “working over time,” as Neale O’Neil would have said, “say it’s best for folks with weak lungs to sleep out of doors. So Neale’s built her a sleeping porch outside one of the windows in our bedroom—Tess’ and mine—and—and I used your napkin bag, Unc’ Rufus, for a sleeping-bag for my Alice-doll! I couldn’t find anything else that fitted her,” confessed the smallest Corner House girl.
“Well! of all the children!” cried Agnes, having taken her hands down from her ears to hear this.
“You shouldn’t have taken the bag without permission,” Ruth gravely told Dot.
But Uncle Rufus chuckled over it to a great extent. “Nebber did see de beat of dese young-uns!” he gasped finally. “If yo’ Uncle Peter was alive he sartain sho’ would ha’ laffed hisself up out’n hes sick-bed. Ma soul an’ body! W’y didn’t he know enough t’ hab yo’uns yere in de ol’ Corner House w’ile he was alive, ‘stid o’ waitin’ till he was daid t’ gib it t’ yo’?”
He would have gone out chuckling, only Ruth called after him: “Unc’ Rufus! Do you know if there are any more candlesticks around the house? Nice, heavy ones, I mean—good enough to put in the dining room here, and for company to see.”
“Candlesticks, missie? I ’spect dere is,” said the old negro man.