FullReads

The weather was still threatening on the succeeding day, and a sort of dogged determination or characteristic desire to see his undertakings carried to a satisfactory completion urged Ozème to continue his efforts to drag Aunt Tildy out of the mire into which circumstances seemed to have thrust her.

One night the rain did come, and began to beat softly on the roof of the old cabin. Sandy opened his eyes, which were no longer brilliant with the fever flame. "Granny," he whispered, "de rain!Des listen, granny; de rain a-comin’, an’ I ain’ pick dat cotton yit. W’at time it is?Gi’ me my pants—I got to go—"

"You lay whar you is, chile alive. Dat cotton put aside clean and dry. Me an’ de Lord an’ Mista Ozème done pick dat cotton. "

Ozème drove away in the morning looking quite as spick and span as the day he left home in his blue suit and his light felt drawn a little over his eyes.

"You want to take care o’ that boy," he instructed Aunt Tildy at parting, "an’ get ‘im on his feet. An’, let me tell you, the nex’ time I start out to broad, if you see me passin’ in this yere cut-off, put on yo’ specs an’ look at me good, because it won’t be me; it’ll be my ghos’, ol’ woman. "

Indeed, Ozème, for some reason or other, felt quite shamefaced as he drove back to the plantation. When he emerged from the lane which he had entered the week before, and turned into the river road, Lamérie, standing in the store door, shouted out:

"He, Ozème!you had good times yonda?I bet you danced holes in the sole of them new boots. "

"Don’t talk, Lamérie!" was Ozème’s rather ambiguous reply, as he flourished the remainder of a whip over the old gray mare’s sway-back, urging her to a gentle trot.

When he reached home, Bode, one of Padue’s boys, who was assisting him to unhitch, remarked:

"How come you didn’ go yonda down de coas’ like you said, Mista Ozème?Nobody didn’ see you in Cloutierville, an’ Mailitt say you neva cross’ de twenty-fo’-mile ferry, an’ nobody didn’ see you no place. "

Ozème returned, after his customary moment of reflection:

"You see, it’s ‘mos’ always the same thing on Cane riva, my boy; a man gets tired o that a la fin. This time I went back in the woods, ‘way yonda in the Fédeau cut-off kin’ o’ campin’ an’ roughin’ like, you might say. I tell you, it was sport, Bode. "