I looked up at her for the first time, my eyes burning in dry sockets.
"I think your doll-baby is nasty, and Rozillah is a nigger name! So there!"
I could command no worse language, for I knew none.
Mary 'Liza looked shocked and terrified. She glanced right and left and upward nervously, as fearing the punishment of heaven upon me.
"I am afraid that you are in a very bad humor," she faltered, her self-possession forsaking her for a moment. "I'd better leave you."
She had gone a dozen paces when she glanced over her shoulder to say, in her most grown-up and judicial manner:—
"I hope you will not make any noise and wake Rozillah up."
I rose and went straight to the cradle as soon as my cousin was out of sight. Cold, deadly fury possessed and filled me, casting out fear of consequences and routing the weakling conscience engendered and nourished by parental counsel. I plucked Rozillah from her downy bed and bore her into the air, cuffing her polished red cheeks soundly on the way. Then I stripped off her gay raiment and knotted the ribbon sash about her smooth neck. I had never tied a knot before, but this held, as did the loop I cast over a projecting branch of the sickly peach-sapling. Naked and forlorn, Rozillah dangled a foot and more from the ground. I fetched my father's riding-whip from the hall table, and the last feeble check upon my fury was released.
The next I knew a pair of cool, white arms closed about me and the whip together, and Cousin Molly Belle's voice, half-laughing, half-horrified, cried through the roaring in my ears:—
"Dear little Namesake! what has got into you?"