“Hod zickety!” he exclaimed. “I bound dem rapscallions is pesticatin’ my Ca’lline plum’ to death!”
He turned away from the gate and hurried as rapidly as his feeble legs would carry him down the road.
When at last he reached the cabin, he sat down upon the big stone step completely exhausted.
A big pecan tree stood in front of the house, its wide-spreading branches completely shading the front yard. Under this tree three of Popsy’s piccaninnies had romped, and countless generations of hound puppies had rolled in the dust, and scratched in the sand at its roots.
To Popsy’s left was the big stone spring-house, the roof entirely gone, and leaves and branches had blown into the four walls and choked the stream which flowed from the hillside.
“I been aimin’ to fix dat roof,” Popsy murmured. “It ’pears like I cain’t hardly find time to do nothin’, I got to wuck fer de white folks so hard.”
Two doors opened out upon the front porch, and the two rooms visible to him were furnished. Having seen the furniture in Scootie’s cabin, he recognized it now, and thought it was the furniture of his old home fifty years before.
Then one of the bizarre conceits of second childhood knocked upon the crumbling portals of his brain and found admittance. He thought that he was a young man again, and that the buxom negro girl whom he had married in the presence of the white folks up yonder on the hill in the drawing-room of the Gaitskill home, was still alive, and occupied this cabin with him.
But Caroline, sleeping in her narrow, silent chamber under a scrub-oak tree on a hillside in Alabama, made no answer.
“Ca’lline!” he called again, in a voice which he tried to make loud, but which failed through weakness. “Ca’lline! Cain’t you hear me callin’ you?”
The old man stood up in perplexity. His fuddled brain could not grasp the reason for this silence and loneliness. He climbed feebly, with the aid of his staff, up the stone steps, and pounded loudly upon the crumbling floor of the porch.
“Oh, Ca’lline! Whar in dumnation is you gone at?”
He entered the room where Scootie had prepared his bed with the idea that he might want to lie down and rest after his trip to the cabin, and he took his seat in the comfortable rocking-chair, placing his stove-pipe hat beside him on the floor.