“Think you got ahead of me? No, not you,” he exclaimed at last, in reply to some version of his own of my ideas, which I carefully made a nonentity under the scrutiny of his keen blue eyes. “No, no, missy; you wait a bit. Uncle Sam was not hatched yesterday, and it takes fifty young ladies to go round him.”
“Is that from your size, Uncle Sam, or your depth?”
“Well, a mixture of both, I do believe. Now the last thing you ever would think of, if you lived to be older than Washington's nurse, is the very thing I mean to put to you. Only you must please to take it well, according to my meaning. You see our Firm going to a shadow, don't you? Very well; the fault of that is all yourn. Why not up and speak to him?”
“I speak to him every day, Uncle Sam, and I spare no efforts to fatten him. I am sure I never dreamed of becoming such a cook. But soon he will have Suan Isco.”
“Old Injun be darned! It's not the stomach, it's the heart as wants nourishment with yon poor lad. He looketh that pitiful at you sometimes, my faith, I can hardly tell whether to laugh at his newings or cry at the lean face that does it.”
“You are not talking like yourself, Uncle Sam. And he never does any thing of the kind. I am sure there is nothing to laugh at.”
“No, no; to be sure not. I made a mistake. Heroic is the word, of course—every thing is heroic.”
“It is heroic,” I answered, with some vexation at his lightness. “If you can not see it, I am sorry for you. I like large things; and I know of nothing larger than the way poor Firm is going on.”
“You to stand up for him!” Colonel Gundry answered, as if he could scarcely look at me. “You to talk large of him, my Lady Castlewood, while you are doing of his heart into small wittles! Well, I did believe, if no one else, that you were a straightforward one.”
“And what am I doing that is crooked now?”