Still playing my part, I says to her I truly hopes there ain't going to be nothing in the message which will put Mr. Dallas in a bad humor with me. But she don't appear to hear my pleading voice. She's already set down over at a little writing-desk in the corner, and she's got a pen in her hand and she's writing away like a house on fire. The pen is squeaking the same as if it was in torment, and them five or six bracelets on her arm is clinking sweet music to my ear. I ain't no seventh son of a seventh gun, which they tells me they has the gift of prophecy laid upon them at birth, nor yet I ain't no mind-reader, but, even so, I says to myself that I don't need but one guess at the true nature of what 'tis she's writing.
She gets through quite soon—there's only just one single sheet of paper, and she folds it up and creases it hard like she's trying to mash it in two, and she jams it in an enveloper and seals the enveloper and shoves it into my waiting hand, and she says to me:
"There! Now you take this note to the man you work for, immediately!"
"Yassum," I says; "is they any answer to come back?"
"Answer?" she says, "No—no—no—NO!"
So I goes right out, leaving her still saying it at the top of her voice. It seems to me it's high time to go, if not higher. Besides, it's mighty hard trying to carry on a conversation with an overwrought-up lady which she has only got one word left in stock, which that one is a little short word like "No."
So I takes my foot in my hand and I marvils thence from there fast as ever my willing legs can take me. And as I goes along on my way, speeding 'cross-town bound for our quarters, I'm trying to think of a stylish word which in times gone by I has heard some of the white folks use as a pet name for a note from one loving soul to another. Pretty soon it comes to me—billet doux!
I stops right still where I is at:
"Bill-Lee do, huh?" I says to myself. "Yas, sometimes Bill-Lee do. But this time—glory, hallelujah, amen!—Bill-Lee do not!"