“‘hello!’”
PLANTATION STORIES
BY GRACE MacGOWAN COOKE
I.—MRS. PRAIRIE-DOG’S BOARDERS
Texas is a near-by land to the dwellers in the Southern States. Many of the poorer white people go there to mend their fortunes; and not a few of them come back from its plains, homesick for the mountains, and with these fortunes unmended. Daddy Laban, the half-breed, son of an Indian father and a negro mother, who sometimes visited Broadlands plantation, had been a wanderer; and his travels had carried him as far afield as the plains of southwestern Texas. The Randolph children liked, almost better than any others, the stories he brought home from these extensive travels.
“De prairie-dog a mighty cur’ous somebody,” he began one day, when they asked him for a tale. “Hit lives in de ground, more samer dan a ground-hog. But dey ain’t come out for wood nor water; an’ some folks thinks dey goes plumb down to de springs what feeds wells. I has knowed dem what say dey go fur enough down to find a place to warm dey hands—but dat ain’t de tale I’m tellin’.
“A long time ago, dey was a prairie-dog what was left a widder, an’ she had a big fambly to keep up. ‘Oh, landy!’ she say to dem dat come to visit her in her ’fliction, ‘what I gwine do to feed my chillen?’
“De most o’ de varmints tell Miz. Prairie-Dog dat de onliest way for her to git along was to keep boarders. ‘You got a good home, an’ you is a good manager,’ dey say; ‘you bound to do well wid a boardin’-house.’