“Ten dollars!” repeated Godfrey, opening his eyes. “Is that what yer goin’ to get fur it? It’s a heap of money fur a boy like you to make so easy, an’ that’s just what makes me ’spise them Gordons so. They’ve got ten dollars to pay fur breakin’ a pup that haint wuth his salt, an’ I haint got ten cents to buy grub with. Just look at this yere!”
Godfrey went on moving his jack-knife over the table which was supplied with nothing but corn bread, fat bacon and buttermilk in the way of eatables and drinkables.
“Now aint this a purty mess for a white man an’ a gentleman to set down to? If I couldn’t remember the time when things was different, it wouldn’t be nigh so hard; but I can. ’Taint so very long ago that we had fresh meat, an’ coffee, an’ pies, an’ cakes, an’ light bread fur grub, an’ I had a pipe of store tobacker to smoke arter eatin’ it; but now—dog-gone sich luck!” cried Godfrey, striking the table such a blow with his open hand that the dishes jumped into the air, and the cracked pitcher, which held what was left of the buttermilk, fell in pieces, allowing its contents to run out among the plates.
“Thar’s something else gone up,” said Godfrey, his anger appeased for the moment by the sight of the ruins of the pitcher. “An’ I haint got no stamps to buy another. Dave, I don’t keer if ye be goin’ to get ten dollars fur it, don’t ye tech that pinter pup ’ceptin’ to tote him back where he belongs. Do ye hear?”
“I reckon I do,” replied David.
“Wal, be ye goin’ to mind what I say to ye?”
“No, I aint.”
“Ye haint? I say to ye, boy,” exclaimed Godfrey, raising his hand over the table again, “boy, I say to ye——”
“Now, pop, don’t break no more dishes,” interrupted Dan, “’kase if ye do, we’ll have to eat off’n bark plates purty soon, an’ drink out’n gourds. Let Dave break the pinter pup if he wants to. What odds does it make to you?”
“It makes a heap of odds, the fust thing ye know,” replied his father. “Kase they’s ’ristocrats, an’ we’ve got just as good a right to have ten dollars to pay somebody fur breakin’ our huntin’ dogs, as they have. An’ ’sides, don’t they make things wuss fur poor folks like us nor they’d oughter? They do, an’ this is the way they go about it: Look at them pack of hound dogs they brought down from Kaintuck last summer! I don’t say nothing about the money they throwed away when they bought ’em, an’ which was more’n enough to keep all our jaws a waggin’ fur one good year, I bet ye, an’ on good grub too, but I jest axes ye, what’s them hound dogs fur? Why just as soon as the leaves begin to fall, them youngsters will take to the swamps, an’ them hound dogs will go a tearin’ an’ a yelpin’ through these woods at sich a rate, that the fust thing we know the game will all be done drove out of the country, an’ we can’t get nu deer nor bar meat fur grub. That’s what makes me ’spise them hound dogs so.”