“It were a tree squirrel and three little just-hatched ones in a bunch,” Stonie answered with due dramatic weight at Rose Mary’s plea.  “Mis’ Rucker thought it were a rat and jumped on the bed and hollowed for Tobe to ketch it, and Peg and Jennie acted just like her, too, after Tobe and me had ketched that mouse in the barn just last week and tied it to a string and let it run at ’em all day to get ’em used to rats and things just like boys.”  And the General cast a look of disappointed scorn at the two pigtailed heads, downcast at this failure of theirs to respond to the General’s effort to inoculate their feminine natures with masculine courage.

“I hollered ’fore I knewed what at,” answered the abashed Jennie in a very small voice, unconsciously making further display of the force of her hopeless feminine heredity.  But Peggy switched her small skirts in an entirely different phase of femininity.

“You never heard me holler,” she said in a tone that was skilful admixture of defiance and tentative propitiation.

“’Cause you had your head hid in Jennie’s back,” answered the General coolly unbeguiled.  “Here is the letter we comed to bring you, Rose Mamie, and me and Tobe must go back to help Mis’ Rucker some more clean Mr. Crabtree up.  I don’t reckon she needs Peg and Jennie, but they can come if they want to,” with which Stonie and Tobe, the henchman, departed, and not at all abashed the humble small women trailing respectfully behind them.

“That women folks are the touch-off to the whole explosion of life is a hard lesson to learn for some men, and Stonie Jackson is one of that kind,” observed Uncle Tucker as he looked with a quizzical expression after the small procession.  “Want me to read that letter and tell you what’s in it?” he further remarked, shifting both expression and attention on to Rose Mary, who stood at his side.

“No, I’ll read it myself and tell you what’s in it,” answered Rose Mary with a blush and a smile.  “I haven’t written him about our troubles, because—­because he hasn’t got a position yet and I don’t want to trouble him while he is lonely and discouraged.”

“Well, I reckon that’s right,” answered Uncle Tucker still in a bantering frame of mind that it delighted Rose Mary to see him maintain under the situation.  “Come trouble, some women like to blind a man with cotton wool while they wade through the high water and only holler for help when their petticoats are down around their ankles on the far bank.  We’ll wait and send Everett a photagraf of me and you dishing out molasses and lard as grocer clerks.  And glad to do it, too!” he added with a sudden fervor of thankfulness rising in his voice and great gray eyes.

“Yes, Uncle Tucker, glad and proud to do it,” answered Rose Mary quickly.  “Oh, don’t you know that if you hadn’t seen and understood because you loved me so, I would have felt it was right to do—­to do what was so horrible to me?  I will—­I will make up to you and them for keeping me from—­it.  What do you suppose Mr. Newsome will do when he finds out that you have moved and are ready to turn the place over to him, even without any foreclosure?”