Flea looked at her with owl-like seriousness, and laid her finger upon her lip.
"Don't be a fool!" returned the other, contemptuously. "Pa can't hear us."
Whereupon the newly made heroine lifted her hand and pointed upward, rebukingly.
"God can hear you," was what she meant.
"Bah!" sneered Bea. "You needn't preach to your betters. Keep your old story to yourself. I ain't a-going to put up with your airs. Mother ain't, neither. Any runaway nigger can go to sleep in the woods and wake up with a snake lyin' 'longside o' him. 'Tain't as if you had done anything."
This was rough talk, but Flea was, in her own opinion, so high above her sister's level that she could afford to despise it. Long after Bea had fallen asleep the younger girl lay listening to the drip, drop, drip, of the rain overhead, her cheeks on fire, her brain in a whirl, and her eyelids feeling as if they were buttoned back and would not shut.
She was a heroine. The former life had slipped off and away from her as her friend the moccasin had shed his skin last spring. She must recast her thoughts and her manners, make them over through and through in order to live up to her new character. She hoped the rain would hold up by morning, so that she could go to church.
In imagination she saw how every head would turn toward her when she should walk up the aisle. How people would stare and nudge one another during the service, and crowd around her when it was over! Perhaps—and she thrilled all over with merely thinking of it—Mr. Slaughter, the rector, would return thanks publicly for her deliverance. It would be just like Major Duncombe to ask him to do it. A church prayer, said in a white surplice, with all the congregation saying "Amen" at the end, was not too great an honor for a girl who had had an adventure.
That was what the Major had said—"an adventure." She went carefully over every word of his speech, remembering each word.
"We are only too thankful to an overruling Providence that our little heroine's adventure was not also a catastrophe, Mr. Grigsby."