"We ain't got no money," replied Bill Stillman, the smallest but readiest-tongued.
"You got money, Bill," retorted Leonard Price, a parchment-colored wisp of nineteen who had recently become a widower.
"I got to git clo'es with it if I hev'. There's Mallston: git him to set for his picter."
Mallston was hooted for as he came across the dewy grass on feet of brawn, shaming puny rustics by his huge physique. The photographer mentally limned him: a bushy, low-browed head and dark, reddish, full-lipped face, bearded; muscle massed upon his arms and tatter-clothed legs; a deep, prominent chest; hands large, black, powerful; the whole man advancing with a lightness which in some barbaric conqueror would have been called dignified grace.
Mallston had nothing to answer for himself. He stood folding his arms and looking in. It was said he had African blood in his veins—barely enough to stain the red of his skin, pinch up his children's hair and give them those mournful, passionate black eyes through which the tragedy of the race always looks. But so vague, so mere a hearsay, was this negro stain, if it existed at all, that he had married a white wife, and moved in society unchallenged by these very fastidious descendants of Carolina and Tennessee.
Mallston's wife had lately added a son to his family. He had two sons before, also two daughters. From any standpoint it seemed an unnecessary addition when the economist considers that he had no means of support except his big-fingered paws, and these, though very willing, depended on chance jobs and days' works given him by other men. In face of these facts the youngest was there as well as the oldest—scarcely seven; the second, scarcely five; and the third and fourth, aged three and a half and two—in his rented house of one room, containing beds in opposite corners, a table and a cooking-stove in front of the fireplace. A generous family and scant provision for it being the mode in Fairfield, however, Mallston may not have seen his desperate position, especially with summer and harvest wages coming. Just now he was out of a job, having finished a ditching contract, and his black, speculative eyes looked anxiously at the photographer.
"Come, clear now!" exclaimed that young man with some authority to his loafers: "I am going to have some sitters."
The landlady and her grandchild were already coming to take advantage of morning sunlight and the domestic lull before dinner. With them came a curious neighbor in ill-made, trailing calico and dejected sun-bonnet, who walked with her hands on her hips and puckered her upper lip, with consciousness of the loss of two front teeth, when she laughed. As they proceeded at a pace regulated by the toddling child, they encountered an old woman with no teeth at all, whose nose and chin leaned very much toward each other: her grizzled hair curled under a still more dejected sun-bonnet, and, setting down a basket of clothes, she stood panting from exertion and wiping her wan face on the bonnet cape.
"I'm a-garn to hick'ry that Bill," she exclaimed weakly. "I tole him to carry me wash-water, and here he is stannin' round thish yer car! George and John's just out, too, and so's Foster. Soon's they git the'r vittles they up and leave me to do the best I kin. Laws! who's garn to pay out money fer fortygraphs? If folks all had to work as hard as I do, they wouldn't have no money fer no such things, so they wouldn't. It 'ud stan' 'em in hand to be savin'."
"Why don't you drive off some yer good-fer-nothin' boys and make 'em do somethin', Mis' Stillman?" bantered the neighbor.