“Do you like the general plan of the place?”
“Do I like it?” cried John Valiant. “Do I like it!”
A quick pleasure glanced across her face. “It’s nice of you to say it that way. We ask that question so often it’s become mechanical. You see, it’s our great show-place. We exhibit it to strangers as we show them the Natural Bridge and Monticello, and expect them to rhapsodize. Years ago the negroes would never set foot here. The house was supposed to be haunted.”
“I’m not afraid,” he laughed. “I wouldn’t blame any ghost for hanging around. I’m thinking of haunting it myself in a hundred years or so.”
“Oh, the specters are all laid long ago, if there ever were any.”
At that moment a patter of footsteps and shrill shrieks came flying over the last-year’s leaves beyond the lilac bushes. “It’s Rickey Snyder,” she said, peering out smilingly as two children, pursued and pursuer, burst into view. “Hush!” she whispered; “I wonder what they are up to.”
The pair came in a whirl through the bushes. The foremost was a seven-year-old negro girl, in a single short cottonade garment, wizened, barelegged and bareheaded, her black wool parted in little angular patches and tightly wrapped with bits of cord. The other was white and as freckled as a turkey’s egg, with hair cropped like a boy’s. She held a carving-knife cut from a shingle, whose edge had been deeply ensanguined by poke-berry juice. The pursued one stumbled over a root and came to earth in a heap, while the other pounced upon her like a wildcat.
“Hold still, you limb of Satan,” she scolded. “How can I do it when you won’t stay still?”
“Oh, Lawd,” moaned the prostrate one, in simulated terror; “oh, Doctah, good Doctah Snydah, has Ah gotter hab dat operation? Is yo’ sho’ gwineter twitter eroun’ mah insides wid dem knives en saws en things?”
“It won’t hurt,” reassured the would-be operator; “no more than it did Mis’ Poly Gifford. And I’ll put your liver right back again.”