Presently in the course of his eating the old gentleman required another biscuit, and he wanted a hot one.  Three mildly heated disks lay on a plate before him, but they had been out of the oven for five minutes and had been reduced to an unappetizing tepidity.

A little hand-bell sat beside the Captain’s plate whose special use was to summon hot biscuits.  Now, the old lawyer looked at its worn handle speculatively.  He was not at all sure Rose would answer the bell.  She would say she hadn’t heard it.  He felt faintly disgruntled at not foreseeing this exigency and buttering two biscuits while they were hot, or even three.

He considered momentarily a project of going after a hot biscuit for himself, but eventually put it by.  South of the Mason-Dixon Line, self-help is half-scandal.  At last, quite dubiously, he did pick up the bell and gave it a gentle ring, so if old Rose chose not to hear it, she probably wouldn’t:  thus he could believe her and not lose his temper and so widen an already uncomfortable breach.

To the Captain’s surprise, the old creature not only brought the biscuits, but she did it promptly.  No sooner had she served them, however, than the Captain saw she really had returned with a new line of defense.

She mumbled it out as usual, so that her employer was forced to guess at a number of words:  “Dat nigger, Peter, mus’ ‘a’ busted yo’ gl—­”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Mus’ uv.”

“No, he didn’t.  I asked him, and he said he didn’t.”

The old harridan stared, and her speech suddenly became clear-cut: 

“Well, ‘fo’ Gawd, I says I didn’t, too!”

At this point the Captain made an unintelligible sound and spread the butter on his hot biscuit.

“He’s jes a nigger, lak I is,” stated the cook, warmly.

The Captain buttered a second hot biscuit.

“We’s jes two niggers.”

The Captain hoped she would presently sputter herself out.

“Now look heah,” cried the crone, growing angrier and angrier as the reaches of the insult spread itself before her, “is you gwine to put one o’ us niggers befo’ de udder?  Ca’se ef you is, I mus’ say, it’s Kady-lock-a-do’ wid me.”

The Captain looked up satirically.

“What do you mean by Katie-lock-the-door with you?” he asked, though he had an uneasy feeling that he knew.

“You know whut I means.  I means I ’s gwine to leab dis place.”

“Now look here, Rose,” protested the lawyer, with dignity, “Peter Siner occupies almost a fiduciary relation to me.”

The old negress stared with a slack jaw.  “A relation o’ yo’s!”

The lawyer hesitated some seconds, looking at the hag.  His high-bred old face was quite inscrutable, but presently he said in a serious voice: 

“Peter occupies a position of trust with me, Rose.”

“Yeah,” mumbled Rose; “I see you trus’ him.”