But later he felt so sorry for poor Ozzie B. because he could not lie on his back at all, that he gave him one of his beautiful coins to go to sleep.
CHAPTER XXVI
BEN BUTLER'S LAST RACE
It was the last afternoon of the fair, and the great race was to come off at three o'clock.
There is nothing so typical as a fair in the Tennessee Valley. It is the one time in the year when everybody meets everybody else. Besides being the harvest time of crops, of friendships, of happy interchange of thought and feeling, it is also the harvest time of perfected horseflesh.
The forenoon had been given to social intercourse, the display of livestock, the exhibits of deft women fingers, of housewife skill, of the tradesman, of the merchant, of cotton—cotton, in every form and shape.
At noon, under the trees, lunch had been spread—a bountiful lunch, spreading as it did from the soft grass of one tree to that of another—as family after family spread their linen—an almost unbroken line of fried chicken, flanked with pickles and salad, and all the rich profusion of the country wife's pantry.