She gathered her skirts tightly and high above her ankles with both hands, letting the green parasol tumble, head foremost, to the ground, and screeched as if she had trod upon a yellow-jacket's nest. She was going to have Nerves again, with no hartshorn, or burnt feathers, or turkey-tail fan, or Cousin 'Ratio near. I started to run to the house for help, but she grabbed my frock frantically.
"If you budge one inch you are a dead child!" she wheezed, her pale eyes bulging from the sockets. "Cap'n Gates and the overseer came out here last night and just sowed all this patch with side-blades!" (Scythe-blades.) "Edges up! Sharp as razors and thick as thieves! Hundreds of them! To keep the negroes from stealing any more of them! I heard Cap'n Gates tell them he was going to do it, and the overseer told them this morning that they had done it. And I haven't an atom of an idea where a solitary one of the murderous things is! We are as good as dead if we try to get out. We might tread upon one, at the first step! How could I forget it? Oh, how could I?"
I felt the blood drain away from my face, and I trembled as violently as she. Then a thought came to me, and I got it out between chattering teeth.
"We didn't tread on any of them coming into the patch."
"That was sheer providence, honey. We might have been cut in two before we had gone ten yards."
"But, Cousin Nancy!" catching at her hands as she began to wring them again, and to sob and squeal as she had done in the morning. "Listen! I am sure I could go out by the very same path! Let's try! We can't stay here always."
"Path! There isn't a sign of a path! Look!"
She pointed a bony finger in the direction we had come. The leaves and blossoms disturbed by our feet and skirts were as still as the hundreds and thousands of other leaves on all sides of us. We had not bruised a vine, or left a footprint, that we could see. The sun poured down upon us like fire from heaven; we were in the middle of the patch that seemed, to my horrified eyes, miles and miles in extent, and not another creature was in sight.
"Our only hope is to scream as loud as ever we can," said Cousin Nancy. "Nobody knows where we are; the hands are all in the tobacco, a mile on the other side of the house, and Cap'n Gates and Mr. Owen may be even farther off, for all I know. If we can't make anybody hear us, the Lord have mercy upon our souls! We shall have sunstroke inside of an hour."
I picked up the green parasol, and with clumsy, shaking fingers opened it, and stood on tiptoe to hold it over her head, crying, meantime, as piteously as she, such was the contagion of hysterical terror. Then, with one accord, we lifted up our voices, weak with weeping, in a thin screech. I said "Help! help! help!" she cried, "Murder! murder!" and "Cap'n Ga-a-tes!" We made enough noise to startle the dogs in the house-yard and at the stables, and brought from the nearer "quarters" and corn-field a gang of negroes, of all sizes and ages, all running at the top of their speed, and the faster as they descried us. It would have been excruciatingly funny at any other time, and to one that was not an actor in the drama, to observe that not one man, woman, or pickaninny of the excited crowd offered to pass the confines of the melon patch. Each one was mindful of the hundreds of buried side-blades with their edges uppermost, and almost all were bare-footed.