“I’ll tell you all about it presently, Polly. And when I got to the run of the creek, then—”
“Oh, the devil!” ejaculated Captain Peablossom, “stalled again!”
“Be still, honey, let the child tell it his own way—he always would have his way, you know, since we had to humour him so when he had the measles,” interposed the old lady.
Daniel Newnan Peablossom, at this juncture, facetiously lay down on the ground, with the root of an old oak for his pillow, and called out yawningly to his pa, to “wake him when brother Floyd had crossed over the run of the creek and arrived safely at the parson’s.” This caused loud laughter.
Floyd simply noticed it by observing to his brother, “Yes, you think you’re mighty smart before all these folks!” and resumed his tedious route to Parson Gympsey’s, with as little prospect of reaching the end of his story as ever.
Mrs. Peablossom tried to coax him to “jist” say if the parson was coming or not. Polly begged him, and all the bridesmaids implored. But Floyd “went on his way rejoicing.”
“When I came to the Piney-flat,” he continued, “old Snip seed something white over in the bay-gall, and shy’d clean out o’ the road, and—” where he would have stopped, would be hard to say, if the impatient captain had not interfered.
That gentleman, with a peculiar glint of the eye, remarked, “Well, there’s one way I can bring him to a showing,” as he took a large horn from between the logs, and rung a “wood-note wild” that set a pack of hounds to yelping. A few more notes as loud as those that issued from “Roland’s horn at Roncesvalles” was sufficient invitation to every hound, foist, and “cut of low degree,” that followed the guests, to join in the chorus. The captain was a man of good lungs, and “the way he did blow was the way,” as Squire Tomkins afterwards very happily described it; and as there were in the canine choir some thirty voices of every key, the music may be imagined better than described. Miss Tabitha Tidwell, the first bridesmaid, put her hands to her ears and cried out:
“My stars! we shall all git blow’d away!”
The desired effect of abbreviating the messenger’s story was produced, as that prolix personage in copperas pants, was seen to take Polly aside, and whisper something in her ear.