Drowsily he surveyed the contents of the cups and dishes, his eyes kindling at the sight of the two whole custards. But his pride--it was evidently that--enabled him to manifest a sneer of irreconcilability. “I ain’t a-goin’ t’eat a bite,” was the way he put it, stubbornly. For a moment Mrs. Gill was nonplussed; but she believed in getting at the core of things. “Are you a-complainin’?” she questioned. The big negro’s sneer grew more pronounced, but that was all the answer he gave. “Don’t you think you could stomach a bit o’ this heer custard pie?” Big Joe’s eyes gleamed against his will, but he shook his head. “I tol’ um all ef dey sol’ me to you, I wouldn’t eat a bite. I’m gwine ter starve ter death.” “Oh, that’s yore intention!” Mrs. Gill caught her breath. A sort of superstitious terror seized upon her as she slowly hitched back to the cabin. “He won’t tech a bite,” she informed Gill’s expectant visage; “an’ what’s a sight more, he says he’s vowed he won’t eat our victuals, an’ that he’s laid out to starve. Peter Gill, I’m afeerd this has been sent on us!” “Sent on us!” echoed Gill, who also had his quota of superstition. “Yes, it’s a visitation of the Almighty fer our hoardin’ up that money when so many of our neighbors is in need. I wish now we never had seed it. Ef Big Joe dies on our hands, I ’ll always feel like we have committed the unpardonable sin. We’ve talked ag’in’ slave-holdin’ all our lives tell we had the bag to hold, an’ now we’ve set up reg’lar in the business.” Gill ate his dinner on the new cloth in morose silence. A heavy air of general discontent had settled on him. “Well,” he commented, as he went to the water-shelf in the passage to take his afterdinner drink from the old cedar pail, “ef he refused ‘tater custards like them thar he certainly is in a bad plight. If he persists, I ’ll have to send fer a doctor.” The afternoon passed slowly. The later conduct of the slave was uneventful, beyond the fact that he rose to his full height once, stretched and yawned, without looking toward the cabin, and then reclined at full length on the grass. Another batch of curious neighbors came as near the cabin as the spring. Those who had been ordered away in the forenoon had set afloat a report that Gill had said that, now he was a slave-holder, he would not submit to familiar visits from the poor white trash of the community. And Sid Ruford, the ringleader of the group at the spring, had the boldness to shout out some hints about the one-nigger, log-cabin aristocracy which drove the hot blood to Gill’s tanned face. He sprang up and took down his long-barreled “squirrel gun” from its hooks on the wall. “I ’ll jest step down thar,” he said, “an’ see ef that gab is meant fer me.”