“I hope you wasn’t cruel, Mr. Pelham,” said Mrs. Pelham, who had just come in. “Henry’s so good-hearted—”
“Oh, he ’ll git over it,” replied the planter, ambiguously. “But, as I was goin’ on to say, I had to fix another plan. I have set him a sort o’ task to do while I’m away, an’ I believe he ’ll do it, Brother Cobb. So all you ’ll have to do will be to look after the other niggers.” The plan suited Cobb exactly; but when Mr. Pelham came home the following summer it was hard to hear him say that Uncle Henry had accomplished more than any three of the other negroes.
A FILIAL IMPULSE
Y o’ ‘re purty well fixed, Jim; I wish I had yore business.”
Big Jim Bradley glanced slowly around his store. The heaps of flour-sacks, coffee-bags, sugar-barrels, piles of bacon, crates of hams, kits of mackerel, and the long rows of well-filled shelves brought a flush of satisfaction into his rugged face.
“Hain’t no reason to complain, Bob,” he said; “you’ve been in Georgia, an’ you know how blamed hard it is fer a feller to make his salt back thar.”
“Now yo’ ‘re a-talkin’—yo’ ‘re a-sayin’ some ‘n’ now!” Bob Lash was sitting on the head of a potato-barrel, eating cheese and crackers, and his spirited words were interspersed with little snowy puffs from the corners of his mouth. “Jim,” he continued, in a muffled tone, as he eased his feet down to the floor, “I’m a-goin’ to wash this dry truck down with a glass o’ yore cider; I’m about to choke. Thar’s yore nickel. You needn’t rise; I can wait on myse’f.”
“I’d keep my eye open while he was behind the counter, Jim,” put in Henry Webb, jestingly. “Bob’s got a swallow like a mill-race. He may take a notion to drink out of yore half-gallon measure.”