Laurence piteously entreated them to call Hossifer away; but the latter was cold to their rather sketchy attempts to gain his attention. However, they succeeded in making him more excited, and he began to bark furiously, in a bass voice. Having begun, he barked without intermission, so that with Hossifer’s barking, Willamilla’s relentless wailing, and the joyous shouting of Daisy and Elsie, Laurence might well despair of making himself heard. He seemed to rave in a pantomime of oral gestures, his arms and hands being occupied. A man wearing soiled overalls, with a trowel in his hand, came from behind a house near by and walking crossly over the lawn, arrived at the picket fence beside which stood the abandoned wagon. “Gosh, I never _did_!” he said, bellowing to be audible. “Git away from here! Don’t you s’pose nobody’s got no _ears_? There’s a sick lady in this house right here, and she don’t propose to have you kill her! Go on git away from here now! Go on! I never _did_!” Annoyed by this labourer’s coarseness, Elsie and Daisy paused to stare at him in as aristocratic a manner as they could, but he was little impressed. “_Gosh_, I never did!” he repeated. “Git on out the neighbourhood and go where you b’long; you don’t b’long around here!” “I should think _not_,” Daisy agreed crushingly. “Where _we_ live, if there’s any sick ladies, they take ’em out an’ bury ’em!” Just what she meant by this, if indeed she meant anything, it is difficult to imagine, but she felt no doubt that she had put the man in his ignoble and proper place. Tossing her head, she picked up the handle of the wagon and moved haughtily away, her remarkably small nose in the air. Elsie went with her in a similar attitude. “Go on! You hear me?” The man motioned fiercely with his trowel at Laurence. “Did you hear me tell you to take that noise away from here? How many more times I got to——” “My gracious!” Laurence interrupted thickly. “_I_ doe’ want to stay here!” He feared to move; he was apprehensive that Hossifer might not like it, but upon the man’s threatening to vault over the fence and hurry him with the trowel, he ventured some steps; whereupon Hossifer stopped barking and followed closely, but did nothing worse. Laurence therefore went on, and presently made another attempt to place Willamilla upon the pavement—and again Hossifer supported the ladies’ theory that he wanted Laurence to keep Willamilla. “_Listen!_” Laurence said passionately to Hossifer. “_I_ never did anything to you! What’s got the matter of you, anyway? How long I got to keep all this _up_?” Then he called to Elsie and Daisy, who were hurrying ahead and increasing the distance between him and them, for Willamilla’s weight made his progress slow and sometimes uncertain. “Wait!” he called. “Can’ chu _wait_? What’s the _matter_ of you? Can’ chu even _wait_ for me?”