“No, sir.  I ain’t called no cab.  You ain’t never call the word cab.  You mean—­” Moses’s hands dropped limply at his side.  “You mean you’re goin’ away for Christmas?”

“That’s what I mean!” Laine’s voice was exultant, revealing, and he coughed to hide its ring.  “By the way, Moses, why don’t you go home for Christmas?  Didn’t you tell me once you came from Virginia?  What part?”

“Palmyra, sir.  In Fluvanna County, that’s where I come from.  Excuse me, but I bound to set down.  Go home?  Me go home?  I couldn’t git there and back not to save my life for lessen than twenty-five dollars, and till I git that farm paid for what I been buyin’ to go back to and die on I can’t go nowhere.  That I can’t.”

Laine looked up from the collection of collars, cravats, and cuffs he was sorting.  “Is it the money that’s keeping you back, or is it you don’t want to go?”

“Don’t want to go!” The palms of Moses’s hands came together, opened, and came back.  “Yesterday I near ‘bout bus’ open with wantin’ to go.  My mother she’s near ’bout eighty, and she got Miss Lizzie to write me and beg me to come for this here Christmas.  Miss Lizzie is old Major Pleasants’s youngest old-maid daughter.  He’s got three of ’em.  He was my mother’s marster, old Major Pleasants was, and he sold me the land my mother’s livin’ on now.  He didn’t charge nothin’ much for it, but I had to have a house built, and buy some pigs and some furniture and git a cow, and I bought two of them street-car mules what was in Richmond when they put the ’lectric cars on down there.  ’T’was the first city in the United States to have ’em, Richmond was.  They thought them mules was wore out, but there ain’t no friskier ones in the county than they is, I tell you now.  I ain’t been home for four years—­”

“And your mother is eighty?”

“Yes, sir, that’s what they tell me, though she say she don’t know herself ‘ceptin’ she had four chillern which was good size when the war broke out.  I belong to the second crop.  My mother done had nineteen chillern, the triflinest, good-for-nothin’est lot the Lord ever let live on this earth, if I do say it, and ain’t a one of ’em what does a thing for her, savin’ ’tis me and Eliza—­Eliza she’s my sister and lives with her.”

“And you’d like to spend Christmas with your mother, you say?”

In the years of his service Moses had never before mentioned family matters, but, having started, he was not likely to stop, and Laine was forced to interrupt,

“Yes, sir.  This Christmas I would.  Some other Christmases I wouldn’t, ’count of a yaller girl what lived on the next place.  It was in the summer-time, the last time I was home, and, she bein’ a likely-lookin’ girl, I seen right much of her every now and then, and I just talk along and tell her ’bout New York and what a grand, lonely place it was, and how my heart got hongry for my own people, and—­things like that, you know, but I didn’t mean nothin’ serious or have any matrimony ideas, and first thing I know she done had me engaged to her.  She chase me near ’bout to death, that girl did, but Miss Lizzie say she gone away now and I can come in peace.”