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"Did great wicked girls come and plague sister's own little precious?" said Maria. But now she had to reckon with Gladys's mother, who had recovered her equilibrium, lost for a second by her daughter's manoeuvre. She seized in her turn the handle of the baby-carriage, and gave Maria a strong push aside. Then she looked at all three combatants, like a poor-white Solomon.
Lichfield felt that only showed what came of treating poor-white trash as your equals, and gloried in the salutary moral. Meanwhile the two originators of so much Lichfieldian diversion were not unhappy. But indeed it were irreverent even to try to express the happiness of their earlier married life ...
I doubt if they would have been put back even then, but that Mammy dreaded criticism, from maids and carriage drivers visiting kinfolk brought with them. Big yawning cracks in cold weather were in a way the hall-mark of poor-white cabins. It would have half broken Mammy's heart to give anybody room to say she belonged to less than real quality.
Then Roger Stapylton said, more truculently: "Yes, sir! on account of a boy-and-girl affair five years ago, this half-strainer, this poor-white trash, has actually had the presumption, sir, but I don't doubt that Pat has told you all about it?" "Why, no," said Colonel Musgrave. "She did not mention it this afternoon. She was not feeling very well. A slight headache.
"The 'movers. They lease, clean out and gut a place in several years, and then move on. They're not like the foreigners, the Chinese, and Japanese, and the rest. In the main they're a lazy, vagabond, poor-white sort, who do nothing else but skin the soil and move, skin the soil and move. Now take the Portuguese and Italians in our country. They are different.
We see true sportsmen beside ordinary gunners, game-hogs and meat hunters; handsome setter dogs are mixed up with coyotes, cats, foxes and skunks; and well-gowned women and ladies' maids are jostled by half-naked "poor-white" and black-negro "plume hunters." Verily, the destruction of wild life makes strange companions.
His fat, waddling wife, in a greasy black gown, followed with bare feet, and, arms akimbo, listened in the open door. A coal company owns the rocky river front, here and at many places below, and lets these cabins to the poor-white element, so numerous on the Ohio's banks.
The "poor-white" neighbor rode away, little dreaming that the colored man had estimated him aright, and accounted him only an emissary of his foes, nor did he comprehend the importance of the information he had given. Mollie Ainslie had been absent from Red Wing more than a month. It was nearly midnight. The gibbous moon hung over the western tree-tops.
I learn he has been indicted once or twice, and the general belief is that he set the church on fire, and, with a crowd of his understrappers, fixed up to represent Ku Klux, attacked his own house, abused his wife and took Eliab off and killed him, in order to make the North believe that the people of Horsford are only a set of savages, and so get the Government to send soldiers here to carry the election, in order that a filthy negro and a low-down, dirty, no-account poor-white man may misrepresent this grand old county in the Legislature again.
I doan min' w'at dem kinder folks does," he added, looking contemptuously after the retreating figure of the poor-white woman, "but w'eneber I sees black folks eat'n' clay of'n dat partic'lar clay-bank, it alluz sets me ter studyin' 'bout po' lonesome Ben." "What was the matter with Ben?" asked my wife. "You can tell us while we're waiting for Mabel."
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