"Me and Lucy together can git them two buckets safe in the milk-house, I reckon, Mr. Lindsay. Ain't no use you a doin' ever'thing," she said, with the handle of each tin pail in a tenacious grasp. "Open the milk-house door, Lucy." Mr. Lindsay, rebuffed, withdrew to the woodpile, defeated for the time, but with purpose undaunted. Under cover of the stone walls of the dairy, Miss Nancy further browbeat her sister. "Lucy, hain't you ashamed o' yourse'f a lettin' Lindsay foller you around all the mornin'?" "He ain't been a follerin' me around, Nancy," faltered Miss Lucy. "He ain't?" Scorn gave Miss Nancy's voice a hoarse note. "I reckon you're green enough to thenk, too, old Zeke's hind feet don't foller his front ones when he's a walkin': but I ain't! See here, Lucy Ann, this foolishness is got to be stopped. You don't want to have folks a talkin' about you, do you?" Nothing to the sisters was more dreaded than to be "talked about." "Then you jest keep yourse'f out o' his way, 'tel he leaves here for good, Wednesday. Termorrer is marketin' day, and the mud'll be dried enough ef the wind keeps up fer you to go, and today you can jest git ready and go up to Becky Willises, and stay all day." "Hit's sorter muddy for walkin', Nancy," objected Miss Lucy. "'Twon't hurt you: you can wear your gum shoes!" spouted Miss Nancy, stamping up the rough stone steps. "I won't go to Becky's a cryin'," thought Miss Lucy, as she neared the yard of Jim Doggett, beyond which, a few hundred yards, lay the house of her cousin: "Becky'd ask so many questions! I believe I'll jest stop here, and see Henrietty and little Katie." Henrietty greeted her with her hands in a bowl of bread-dough. Katie ran to her with a little happy cry: "O Miss Lucy, I's dot somepin' show 'oo! Tome wis me--I's dot somepin' show 'oo in the batter barn!" "Why, Katie, let Miss Lucy have time to take off her thengs!" expostulated her mother. "Hit's puppies she's a talkin' about," she explained: "I'm sortie feerd fer her to go out to the barn by herse'f, a thenkin' a tier pole might fall on her. I've been skeered o' barns ever sence that time Gil Dutton broke his knee all to pieces on account of a tier pole made out of a wind-shook piece of timber a breakin' and lettin' him fall, and she's jest crazy when anybody steps in to git 'em to go with her." Miss Lucy, glad of an excuse to take her red eyes out of range of Henrietty's keen ones, followed the eager child to the great barn on the rise above the house. The heavy sliding doors at the north end refused to move more than eight inches apart under Miss Lucy's nervous hand, but little Katie pressed her fat body through the crevice, darted like a sparrow half the length of the building, and squatted with a squeal of rapture behind a high pile of sticks, heaped in careless fashion, after the tobacco was lifted off them. Here, on the dirt floor, three brown and white puppies crawled aimlessly over each other.