"I believe Dr. Allison is right, Dee," said Dum very solemnly, "and when we are unruly with Zebedee I know it is not the fault of our early training that we love to lay it on, but just plain lack of sense."
"Well, I'm going to try to be mighty good, then," exclaimed Dee. "If there is anything in the world I hate, it's stupidity."
CHAPTER XVII.
DEER HUNTING.
It was a glorious morning. Of course we had to get up before the sun thought of such a thing. Indeed, there was a crazy, old, lop-sided, dissipated-looking, gibbous moon still hanging on to life when we came piling out of the warm, lighted house and climbed into the two vehicles waiting for us. Father and Mr. Tucker were to go in Father's buggy, and the girls and I were very snug, three on the seat of the runabout, with the lunch and coffee pot bouncing around in the back, and the Tuckers' guns carefully stowed under the seat.
Jo Winn joined us at Milton, the New York cousin in the buggy with him. We were curious to see the cousin, whom Father had reported as being "quite likely." Jo was as good as gold and perfectly intelligent with a keen sense of humor, but he was as silent as the tomb. His sister Sally was the greatest chatterbox in the world, I am sure. She simply never stopped talking except on those occasions when she was doing her best to "shuffle off this mortal coil," and then she seemed to be not able to stop talking long enough to die thoroughly. Just when the grave was yawning for her (or maybe because of her) she would think of something she simply had to talk about and come back to life.
The Winns were F. F. V.'s, in that they were among the first families in Virginia, if not of Virginia. They were not aristocrats, certainly. They came of good pioneer stock who were tillers of the soil in the seventeenth century and still were in the twentieth. They had lived on the same tract of land for two centuries and a half, and in America that should stand for aristocracy, but somehow with the Winns it never had. They had no desire to be considered great folk and so they never were. The war between the states had left them as it had found them, in fairly prosperous circumstances. Never having owned slaves, the emancipation of the negroes did not affect them one way or the other. Having always done their own sowing and reaping, they could still do it. The family had never been much on marrying, and now there were none left but the hypochondriacal old maid Sally and her younger brother Jo.
I had given the twins a history of the Winns as we spun over to Milton. Pegasus was in fine feather, which seems a strange thing to say of a horse, but of one whose name suggests wings, perhaps it is appropriate.