Jensie was the critic. And a very expert critic she turned out to be.
“No. He would never say that, your old Jud who lives at the foot of Big Black Mountain. He would not say, ‘Those horses are fast travelers.’ He’d say, ‘Them’s the travelin’est hosses I ever most seed.’ He wouldn’t say, ‘It’s done.’ He’d say, ‘I done done it.’”
“But Jensie,” Jeanne protested, “if we change all this, how are the people going to know what it’s all about? Might as well have him talk German.”
“W-e-l-l, you asked me.” Jensie puckered her fair brow. “That’s the way we talk down there. We don’t say ‘rifle,’ but ‘rifle-gun.’ We say ‘we-uns’ and ‘you-all.’”
“Well,” said Tom after a moment’s thought, “a great deal of that is easy enough to understand. It does make the whole thing seem a lot more real. And if we find old Jud talking too much, why, we’ll just shut him up and make him talk with his hands and his feet.”
“And his pistol-gun,” Jensie added. “Pistol-guns talk a heap down there in the mountings.”
They all had a good laugh, and once more the work moved on smoothly.
“To-morrow,” Jeanne said to Jensie before bidding her good-bye, “to-morrow morning we will go out to that so beautiful college you have been telling me about. What do you say?”
“That,” Jensie laughed joyfully, “that’s a right smart clever idea.”
“Then we shall go.” Jeanne gave her hand a squeeze. “I am tired. There are trees, you say, and grass, very much grass. Good! We shall sit upon the grass beneath those spreading elms and forget this noisy city.”