It was funny to see his fat hands dabbling in dishwater; he laughed as much about—it as aunt Corinne did.
Grandma Padgett removed the sleeping child from his cart, and after trying vainly to make her eat or arouse herself, put her in the bed in the tent, attired in one of aunt Corinne's gowns.
“She was just as helpless as a young baby,” said Grandma Padgett, sitting down again by the fire. “I'll have a doctor look at that child when we go through Richmond. She acts like she'd been drugged.”
J. D. Matthews having finished—his dishwashing, sat down in the shadow some distance from the outspoken woman in spectacles, and her family.
“Now come up here,” urged aunt Corinne, “and sing it all over—what you was singing before Ma Padgett came.”
J. D. ducked his head and chuckled, but remained in his shadow.
“Awh-come on,” urged Robert Day “Zene'll sing 'Barb'ry Allen' if you'll sing your song again.”
Zene glanced uneasily at Grandma Padgett, and said he must look at the horses. “Barb'ry Allen” was a ballad he had indulged the children with when at a distance from her ears.
But the tea and the hour, and her Virginia memories through which that old sing-song ran like the murmur of bees, made Grandma Padgett propitious, and she laid her gracious commands on Zene first, and J. D. Matthews afterwards. So that not only “Barb'ry Allen” was sung, but J. D.'s ditty, into which he plunged with nasal twanging and much personal enjoyment.
“It's why he didn't ever get married,” explained aunt Corinne, constituting herself prologue.