Half laughing, half crying, she stretched her hand across the cot. Jessica grasped it. The pledge of sisterhood was made and ratified upon the heart of a dumb child.
CHAPTER VII
MARY-JANE PEG
Mary-Jane Peg was munching a green apple. Green apples had never swamped her. To her they were the prize and the poetry of existence.
Other things were well enough in their way, such as a daily mess that had as many flavors in it as there were airs in a musical medley or scents in a pot-pourri. A succulent cabbage or young turnip weren’t bad. Indeed, so far as satisfying hunger went, all was grist that came to the mill of her astounding digestion, roots, leaves, land-turtle’s eggs found among potato rows, anything, everything went, from a lately hatched chicken killed by herself to an old shoe of her owner’s.
But the real greens of life, that which lent to it a bitter-sweet rapture, were the hard windfall apples of July, shaken by the orchard breeze from a tree whose fruit would not ripen until fall; she preferred them even to a red astrachan, with the early bloom of maturity upon its cheek.
“Ungh! Ung-gh!” muttered Mary-Jane, closing her white eyelashes until her little grey-green eye almost vanished into her head over which two quivering upright ears stood sentinel. “Ungh! Ungh!” That apple tasted uncommonly good. She nodded over it like a hungry child over his bread and milk when it exactly hits his taste. As its tart juices slid down her capacious throat she said a grunting grace to the universe and started upon a rooting search for another.
“Oh! Mary-Jane Peg, how—how everlastingly happy you are! You haven’t a thing to worry you!”
As the envious human voice fell upon Mary-Jane’s now slanting ears, coming from the edge of a shabby, swaying hammock slung between two orchard trees, the muncher of green apples raised her head and, happening at that moment to be in the vicinity of that hammock, rubbed her white-haired side against a pair of small muslin knees drooping over its edge. “Ungh! Ungh!” she vouchsafed in a snort of semi-intelligent sympathy. “Ungh! Un-ngh!” her conversation, except in some squealing emergency, being monotonously limited to this monosyllable.
“Oh, Mary-Jane! Oh, Mary-Jane Peg, I don’t want to die—to die before you do—I don’t want to die young!”