"Well, now, don't bet no money on that fur you'll lose it. He didn't tech me."
"Let us thank the Lord," said Jim.
"All right," Jasper replied; "but thar ain't no hurry; the dog's dead."
CHAPTER VII.
NOT SO FAR OUT OF THE WORLD.
Men with guns came down the road, shouting "mad dog." The cry was taken up and it echoed among the hills. In barbaric Europe, when every village was a principality unto itself, the cry at midnight, summoning men from their beds to butcher or be butchered, could not have been more startling than the noon-tide cry of "mad dog" in rural Tennessee. Mothers seized their children, fathers caught up guns and axes. The cross-roads merchant slammed his door and locked it. Oxen, catching the alarm, bellowed in the fields.
Starbuck went out into the road to meet the men. "Say," he said, in answer to their shout, "if you air lookin' for a mad dog I kin let you have one cheap. He's round thar."
The dog was dragged away and the community returned to the allegiance which it owed to quietude and laziness; the shiftless lout loitered along the road, and the old woman, on the gray mare, followed by the fuzzy mule colt, carried down to the "commercial emporium," "a settin' o' goose aigs" to be swopped for a handful of coffee and a lump of brown sugar.
"Ma'm," said Starbuck to Mrs. Mayfield, as he went back into the house, "you see that we don't live so fur outen the world atter all. Of co'se thar air places that have got mo' l'arnin' than we have, but we kin skeer up a mad dog an' git rid o' him as quick as the best of 'em. An' I reckon by this time you find that our affairs ain't so uneventful as you put it. Young feller," he went on, speaking to Tom, "I like the way you acted under fire. Thar was a time when I believed that a feller with store clothes on was easy skeered, and I laughed when I seed 'em j'inin' the army—'lowed they would w'ar out in a day or two; but they outmarched us fellers that follered the plow an' when the time come they tuck their red medicine an' never whimpered. Ricolleck one little chap that didn't look like he was strong enough to pull up a handful o' white clover—snatched up a flag, butted his way to the front and put his colors on the breastworks o' the inimy."