"I tell you, you've set all the niggers agin me, and I can't get hands to work the crops." "That's your lookout, of course," replied a voice, which he associated at once with young Blake. "I told you I'd work three days because I wanted the ready money; I've got it, and my time is my own again." "But I say my tobacco's got to get into the ground this week--it's too big for the plant-bed a'ready, and with three days of this sun the earth'll be dried as hard as a rock." "There's no doubt of it, I think." "And it's all your blamed fault," burst out the other angrily; "you've gone and turned them all agin me--white and black alike. Why, it's as much as I can do to get a stroke of honest labour in this nigger-ridden country." Christopher laughed shortly. "There is no use blaming the Negroes," he said, and his pronunciation of the single word would have stamped him in Virginia as of a different class from Fletcher; "they're usually ready enough to work if you treat them decently." "Treat them!" began Fletcher, and Carraway was about to fling open the shutters, when light steps passed quickly along the hall and he heard the rustle of a woman's silk dress against the wainscoting. "There's a stranger to see you, grandfather," called a girl's even voice from the house; "finish paying off the hands and come in at once." "Well, of all the impudence!" exclaimed the young man, with a saving dash of humour. Then, without so much as a parting word, he ran quickly down the steps and started rapidly in the direction of the darkening road, while the silk dress rustled upon the porch and at the garden gate as the latch was lifted. "Go in, grandfather!" called the girl's voice from the garden, to which Fletcher responded as decisively. "For Heaven's sake, let me manage my own affairs, Maria. You seem to have inherited your poor mother's pesky habit of meddling." "Well, I told you a gentleman was waiting," returned the girl stubbornly. "You didn't let us know he was coming, either, and Lindy says there isn't a thing fit to eat for supper." Fletcher snorted, and then, before entering the house, stopped to haggle with an old Negro woman for a pair of spring chickens hanging dejectedly from her outstretched hand, their feet tied together with a strip of faded calico. "How much you gwine gimme fer dese, marster?" she inquired anxiously, deftly twirling them about until they swung with heads aloft. Rising to the huckster's instinct, Fletcher poked the offerings suspiciously beneath their flapping wings. "Thirty cents for the pair--not a copper more," he responded promptly; "they're as poor as Job's turkey, both of 'em." "Lawdy, marster, you know better'n dat." "They're skin and bones, I tell you; feel 'em yourself. Well, take it or leave it, thirty cents is all I'll give."