The loungers in the store had strolled out on the porch. “Mis' Cullum cert'n'y is a sister in Zion,” remarked Mr. Trimble, gazing admiringly at her retreating figure.
“M-m-m—y-e-e-s,” admitted Mr. Pinson. “But,” he added, darkly, after a meditative pause, “Sissy Cullum is a wife, an' the women o' Jim-Nez, ez wives, air liable to conniptions.”
Mrs. Cullum jogged slowly along the brown, wheel-rifted road which followed the windings of the creek. It was late in November. A brisk little norther was blowing, and the nuts dropping from the pecan-trees in the hollows filled the dusky stillness with a continuous rattling sound. There was a sprinkling of belated cotton-bolls on the stubbly fields to the right of the road; a few ragged sunflowers were still abloom in the fence corners, where the pokeberries were red-ripe on their tall stalks.
“I must lay in some poke-root for Tobe's knee-j'ints,” mused Mrs. Cullum, as she turned into the lane which led to her own door-yard. “Pore Tobe! them j'ints o' his'n is mighty uncertain. Why, Tobe!” she exclaimed, aloud, as her nag stopped and neighed a friendly greeting to the object of her own solicitude, “where air you bound for?”
Mr. Cullum laid an arm across the horse's neck. He was a big, loose-jointed man, with iron-gray hair, square jaws, and keen, steady, dark eyes. “Well, ma,” he said, with a touch of reluctance in his dragging tones, “there's a lodge meetin' at Ebenezer Church to-night, an' I got Mintry to give me my supper early, so's I could go. I—”
“All right, Tobe,” interrupted his wife, cheerfully; “a passel of men prancin' around with a goat oncet a month ain't much harm, I reckon. You go 'long, honey; I'll set up for you.”
“Sissy is that soft an' innercent an' mild,” muttered Mr. Cullum, striding away in the gathering twilight, “that a suckin' baby could wrop her aroun' its finger—much lessen me!”
About ten o'clock the same night Granny Carnes, peeping through a chink in the wall beside her bed, saw a squad of men hurrying afoot down the road from the direction of Ebenezer Church. “Them boys is up to some devilmint, Uncle Dick,” she remarked, placidly, to her rheumatic old husband.
Uncle Dick laughed, a soft, toothless laugh. “I ain't begrudgin' 'em the fun,” he sighed, turning on his pillow, “but I wisht to the Lord I was along!”
The “boys” crossed the creek below Bishop's and entered the shinn-oak prairie on the farther side.