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Then Pettigrass said: "Allowin' ther' might be another man, Tom-Jeff, jest for the sake of argyment, what-all was you aimin' to do if you found him?" It was drawing on to dusk, and the electric lights of Mountain View Avenue and the colonial houses were twinkling starlike in the blue-gray haze of the valley.
Miss Euphrasia thought of her roses, already in leaf, and refused to be enthusiastic over the supernal beauty of the crystalline stage settings. Major Caspar was anxious about the pasturing stock, and was relieved when Japheth Pettigrass came in sight, leading a slipping, sliding cavalcade of terrified horses to shelter in the great stables.
"Is Nan coming back to the dog-keeper's cabin when the family leaves the hotel?" "'Tain't goin' to make any difference to you if she does," said Pettigrass, wondering where he was to be hit next. "It may, if you'll do me a favor. You'll be where you can see and hear. I want to know who visits her besides Miss Ardea." Brother Japheth's smile was more severe than the sharpest reproach.
But his hands shook and the match went out. Pettigrass moved nearer and spoke so that the child should not hear. "If you run me off the place the nex' minute, I'm goin' to tell you you ort to be tolerably 'shamed of yourse'f, Maje' Dabney. That po' little gal is scared out of a year's growin', right now." "I know, Japheth; I know. I'm a damned old heathen!
And this also she remembered: that when these and all the others, including her grandfather and Japheth Pettigrass, were busily leveling all the barriers of restraint for her, she had built some of her own and set herself the task of living within them.
Also, in the outer ranks of skepticism, Major Dabney's foreman and horse-trader, Japheth Pettigrass, found a place. On the opposite bank of the stream were the few negroes owning Major Dabney now as "Majah Boss," as some of them, most of them, in fact had once owned him as "Mawstuh Majah"; and mingling freely with them were the laborers, white and black, from the Gordon iron-furnace.
Whereupon one member of the group got up and addressed himself to the door. It was Japheth Pettigrass; and what he said was said to the starlit night outside. "My Lord! that ther' boy was lyin' to me, after all! I didn't believe hit that night when he r'ared and took on so to me and 'lowed to chunk me with a rock, and I don't want to believe hit now.
Pettigrass came up, patted the hound, and sat down on the flat stone to look on curiously while the dog coursed back and forth among the dead leaves. "Find him, Cæsar; find him, boy!" encouraged Japheth; and finally the hound pointed a sensitive nose toward the rift in the side of the great boulder and yelped conclusively. "D'ye reckon he climm up thar', Cæsar?"
"Well, your hawss is waitin' for ye down yonder at the gate, and I don't b'lieve the Major is allowin' to ask ye to stay to supper." The railroad man scowled and recovered his dignity, or some portion of it. "You're a hospitable lot," he said, moving off toward the driveway. "You can tell the old maniac he'll hear from us later." Pettigrass stooped with his back to the portico and patted the dog.
It was an added proof that there was no redeeming drop of the sang azure in the Gordon veins and Major Caspar was as scrupulously polite to Caleb Gordon's wife as he would have been, and was, to the helpmate of Tike Bryerson, mountaineer and distiller of illicit whisky. Thomas Jefferson was vaguely indignant when Pettigrass came to ask his father to go forthwith to the manor-house.
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