Mrs. Doggett, a large, spare, and comely woman, with high cheek bones and olive skin, lifted the battered zinc buckets she was filling with chips.
"Well, Eph," she vouchsafed, "ef that's the truth, I dunno but what we'd better move to Texas. Ef anybody's any worse needin' a betterin' o' their condition than us, I dunno who ner what hit is! Look at the house we have to live in, will you, front and back! It'd be mighty late when Mr. Castle'd durst offer to put you in sech a house, wouldn't hit, Mr. Brock? He knows better. He couldn't put hit off on none his terbaccer men but Eph!"
The house, had it been a thing of feeling, would have shrunk before the scrutiny of the five pairs of eyes lifted to it, so disreputable was its aspect. Panes were dropping from the time and weather-gnawed sash in the windows of the two rooms below; rags stopped the holes in the one window above that had a sash in it, and the lank old pine leaning over the stone-paved walk that led to the little hingeless gate assisted a wide board to keep the wind out of the other window.
"Seems to me, Ephriam, Castle ort to pervide a better house fer ye, er make out to fix up this un," quavered the old man.
"He ort now, he ort," assented his son, "though he's been a promisin'—"
"Promisin'll be all!" broke in Mrs. Doggett. "He's never kept nary promise yit, about the house, ner nothin' else! But Eph, he'll jest stay here and put in another three years a grubbin' canes and choppin' roots—a clearin' up a thicket, and then git jest half the terbaccer he raises on hit, like ever'body else does on ready-cleared land!"
"The old lady, she's a poppin' hit to me and Mr. Castle, hain't she?" Mr. Doggett smiled indulgently in the direction of Mrs. Doggett as she went across the rotting planks that served for a back porch floor, with her chips. "Although," he went on, "hit's might' night' the truth. Mr. Castle is mighty close.
"'Doggett,' he says, 'don't bring in nothin' but one cow and a horse er two on me to pastur fer you,' and that's the way he talks, and me a lookin' after his mar's and colts, and fixin' up his water-gaps, and all sech like work outside the terbaccer crop, all the time, both afore and sence he tuck to livin' in town.
"I says to him one day—I says, 'Mr. Castle, here you are a gittin' rich offen our work, able to have a conquick mansion, with burssels cyarpetin', and a brick hin-house, and me and the boys is a workin' our finger nails off, and in the house I have to live in I can't hardly find a dry place to hang my hoe!' (And hit's the truth, yes, sir, though Mr. Castle says sence terbaccer is so low, he has to make a livin' on his other investments.) Mr. Castle, he never said nothin', jest tuck up my hoe and went to lookin' at hit,—my old hoe thar I've used in the terbaccer fer twenty-five year."
Mr. Doggett pointed to where against the side of the patched weather-boarding hung a hand-made hoe, shining like polished silver, its hickory handle worn to the hard glossiness of Japanese lacquer.