She turned again suddenly and applied her thin, freckled little face to the crack between the rails. She smiled upon the baby, who smiled in response, and gave a little bounce that might be accounted a courtesy. The younger of the boys left the cane pile and ran up to his brother at the mill, which was close to the fence. “Don't ye let her do it,” he said, venomously. “That thar gal is one of the Purdee fambly. I know her. Don't let her in.” And he ran back to the cane. Grinnell had seemed pleased by this homage at the shrine of the family idol; but at the very mention of the “Purdee fambly” his face hardened, an angry light sprang into his eyes, and his gesture in skimming with the perforated gourd the scum from the boiling sorghum was as energetic as if with the action he were dashing the “Purdee fambly” from off the face of the earth. It was an ancient feud; his grandfather and some contemporary Purdee had fallen out about the ownership of certain vagrant cattle; there had been blows and bloodshed; other members of the connection had been dragged into the controversy; summary reprisals were followed by counter-reprisals. Barns were mysteriously fired, hen-roosts robbed, horses unaccountably lamed, sheep feloniously sheared by unknown parties; the feeling widened and deepened, and had been handed down to the present generation with now and then a fresh provocation, on the part of one or the other, to renew and continue the rankling old grudges. And here stood the hereditary enemy, wanting to pat their baby on the head. “Naw, sir, ye won't!” exclaimed the boy at the mill, greatly incensed at the boldness of this proposition, glaring at the lean, tender, wistful little face between the rails of the fence. But the baby, who had not sense enough to know anything about hereditary enemies, bounced and laughed and gurgled and sputtered with glee, and waved her hands, and had never looked fatter or more beguiling. “I jes wanter pat it wunst,” sighed the hereditary enemy, with a lithe writhing of her thin little anatomy in the anguish of denial--“_jes wunst!_ “Naw, sir!” exclaimed the youthful Grinnell, more insistently than before. He did not continue, for suddenly there came running down the road a boy of his own size, out of breath, and red and angry--the pursuer, evidently, that the hereditary enemy had feared, for she crouched up against the fence with a whimper. “Kem along away from thar, ye miser'ble little stack o' bones!” he cried, seizing his sister by one hand and giving her a jerk--“a-foolin' round them Grinnells' fence an' a-hankerin' arter thar old baby!” He felt that the pride of the Purdee family was involved in this admission of envy. “I jes wanter pat it on the head _wunst_,” she sighed. “Waal, ye won't now,” said the Grinnell boys in chorus.