The air was black with ’em, I couldn’t deny it.
“The muskeeters will eat you, more likely,” says I. “Look at your face and hands.”
“Yes, they have eat considerable of a dinner out of me, but I don’t begrech ’em. I haint small enough, I hope, to begrech ’em one meal.”
Miss Bobbet went off in search of her wild turnip, and Josiah whispered to me with a savage look, and a tone sharp as a sharp axe:
“Can’t you bring 40 or 50 more wimmin up here? You couldn’ come here a minute, without a lot of other wimmin tied to your heels!”
I began to see daylight, and after Miss Bobbet got her wild turnip, I made some excuse to send her on ahead, and then Josiah told me.
It seems he had set down on that bottle of raspberry jell. That blue stripe on the side wasn’t hardly finished, as I said, and I hadn’t fastened my thread properly, so when he got to pullin’ at ’em to try to wipe off the jell, the thread started, and bein’ sewed on a machine, that seam jest ripped right open from top to bottom. That was what he walked off sideways toward the woods for. Josiah Allen’s wife haint one to desert a companion in distress. I pinned ’em up as well as I could, and I didn’t say a word to hurt his feelin’s, only I jest said this to him, as I was a fixin’ ’em. I fastened my grey eye firmly and almost sternly onto him, and says I, “Josiah Allen, is this pleasure?” Says I, “You was determined to come.”
“Throw that in my face again, will you? What if I wuz? There goes a pin into my leg. I should think I had suffered enough without your stabin’ of me with pins.”
“Wall, then stand still, and not be a caperin’ round so. How do you suppose I can do anything with you a tossin’ round so?”
“Wall, don’t be so aggravatin’ then.”