The boy laughed and Bob reiterated:
"Oh, I'se gwine—I'se gwine wid you—" Then he stopped short. The turbaned figure of Aunt Keziah loomed from behind the woodpile.
"What dat I heah 'bout you gwine to de wah, nigger, what dat I heah?"
Bob laughed—but it was a laugh of propitiation.
"Law, mammy. I was jes projeckin' wid Young Cap'n."
"Fool nigger, doan know what wah is—doan lemme heah you talk no more 'bout gwine to de wah ur I gwine to w'ar you out wid a hickory—dat's whut I'll do—now you min'." She turned on Basil then; but Basil had retreated, and his laugh rang from the darkening yard. She cried after him:
"An' doan lemme heah you puttin' dis fool nigger up to gittin' hisself killed by dem Cubians neither; no suh!" She was deadly serious now. "I done spanked you heap o' times, an' 'tain't so long ago, an' you ain' too big yit; no, suh." The old woman's wrath was rising higher, and Bob darted into the barn before she could turn back again to him, and a moment later darted his head, like a woodpecker, out again to see if she were gone, and grinned silently after her as she rolled angrily toward the house, scolding both Bob and Basil to herself loudly.
A song rose from the cowpens just then. Full, clear, and quivering, it seemed suddenly to still everything else into silence. In a flash, Bob's grin settled into a look of sullen dejection, and, with his ear cocked and drinking in the song, and with his eye on the corner of the barn, he waited. From the cowpens was coming a sturdy negro girl with a bucket of foaming milk in each hand and a third balanced on her head, singing with all the strength of her lungs. In a moment she passed the corner.
"Molly—say, Molly."
The song stopped short.