"Don't want no other frock," she announced briefly, as she sat down in the dust to begin clearing her hands of skimmings, very like a puppy or a kitten. "Well, I'm a-goin' to put boy clothes on you," declared the mother. "You act as bad as a boy." And she hustled the protesting delinquent away to execute her threat. Five minutes after, burning with wrongs, Mary Ann Martha came stormily forth to rejoin her kind, pent in a tight little jeans suit which had belonged to the babyhood of Sylvane, and from which her solid limbs and fat, tubby body seemed fairly exploding. Humiliated, alienated, and with her hand against every man, she lowered upon them all from under flaxen brows, with Lance's own hazel eyes, darkened almost to black. "You Ma'y-Ann-Marth'," admonished Fuson, as the small marauder raided the cooling pans and licked the spoons and testing sticks so soon as they were laid down, "you got to walk mighty keerful [171] around where I'm at, at least in sawgrum-makin' time." Mary Ann Martha held down her head, and muttered. She was ashamed of her trousers as only a mountain-born girl child could be ashamed. "You let them spoons alone, or I'll fling you plumb into the bilin'-pan, whar you'll git a-plenty o' sawgrum," Fuson threatened. "You hear now? The last man I he'ped Hands make sawgrum for had ten chillen when we begun. They set in to pester me an' old Baldy jest like yo' adoin', and when we got done thar was ten kaigs of sawgrum and nary chap on the place. Yes, that's right. Ef thar wasn't a chap bar'lled up in every kaig we turned out, I don't know sawgrum from good red liquor." Inside the house, Ellen Hands and Little Liza were delaying over an errand. They had brought a piece of turkey red calico as an offering for the gospel quilt. "Don't you trouble to git it out," Little Liza said, rather wistfully. "I know in reason you've got all on yo' hands you want this mornin'; but when you come to workin' it in, Ellen an' me we talked considerable consarning of it, and mebbe we could he'p ye." "Callisty's a-skimmin'," announced the widow, running for a hasty glance toward the sorghum-making activities. "Hit won't take me mo'n a minute to spread the thing here on the bed, and [172] try this agin it. Land! ain't that pretty? Red--I always did love red." The cherished square was lifted from its chest, unrolled, and spread upon the four-poster bed in the corner of the living room. "You been a-workin' on it some sence last I seed it," Ellen Hands remarked with interest. "This here thing with birds a-roostin' on it--I ain't never seed this before." "That thar's Jacob's Ladder, Ellen--don't you see the postes, and the pieces a-goin' acrost?" Roxy explained rather hastily. "Lord, the trouble I had with them angels. I don't wonder you took 'em for birds. Time and again I had a mind to turn 'em into birds. I done fine with Noey's dove; see, here 'tis; an' a ark--well, hit ain't no more than a house with a boat un'neath."