"I reckon it's because you had the headache," he said.
"I speck so," answered Big Sal. "It looked like my head'd bust when you hollered at me, but de pain all done gone now."
"I'm glad," replied Little Crotchet. "I hope my head will quit aching presently. Sometimes it aches all night long."
"Well, suh!" exclaimed Big Sal. It was all she could say.
Finally, when she had lifted Little Crotchet to his saddle (which was easy enough to do, he was so small and frail) and returned, Uncle Turin, foreman of the hoe hands, remarked:—
"You'll be feelin' mighty biggity now, I speck."
"Who? Me?" cried Big Sal. "God knows, I feel so little an' mean I could t'ar my ha'r out by de han'ful."
Uncle Turin, simple and kindly old soul, never knew then nor later what Big Sal meant, but ever afterwards, whenever the woman had one of her tantrums, she went straight to her Little Master, and if she sometimes came away from him crying it was not his fault. If she was crying it was because she was comforted, and it all seemed so simple and natural to her that she never failed to express a deep desire to tear her hair out if anybody asked her where she had been or where she was going.
It was not such an easy matter to reach the plow hands. The fields were wide and the furrows were long on that plantation, and some of the mules were nimbler than the others, and some of the hands were quicker. So that it rarely happened that they all came down the furrows abreast. But what difference did that make? Let them come one by one, or two by two, or twenty abreast, it was all the same when the Little Master was in sight. It was hats off and "howdy," with "Gee, Beck!" and "Haw, Rhody!" and "Whar you been, Little Marster, dat we ain't seed you sence day 'fo' yistiddy?" And so until they had all saluted the child on the Gray Pony.