“Please, sir, where is Aunt Alsidia?” asked the child.

Yancy balanced the rifle on his great palm and his eyes assumed a speculative cast.

“I wonder what’s to hinder us from loading this old gun, and firing this old gun, and hearing this old gun go-bang!  Eh?”

The child’s blue eyes grew wide.

“Like the guns off in the woods?” he asked, in a breathless whisper.

“Like the guns a body hears off in the woods, only louder—­heaps louder,” said Yancy.  “You fetch out his plunder, Mr. John,” he added in a lower tone.

“Do it now, please,” the child cried, slipping off the bench.

“I was expectin’ fo’ to hear you name me Uncle Bob, sonny; my little nevvies get almost anything they want out of me when they call me that-a-ways.”

“Please, Uncle Bob, make it go bang!”

“You come along, then,” and Mr. Yancy moved off in the direction of his mule, the child following.  “Powder’s what we want fo’ to make this old spo’tiu’ rifle talk up, and I reckon we’ll find some in a horn flask in the bottom of my cart.”  His expectations in this particular were realized, and he loaded the rifle with a small blank charge.  ’Now,” he said, shaking the powder into the pan by a succession of smart taps on the breech, “sometimes these old pieces go off and sometimes they don’t; it depends on the flint, but you stand back of your Uncle Bob, sonny, and keep yo’ fingers out of yo’ ears, and when you say—­bang!—­ off she goes.”

There was a moment of delightful expectancy, and then—­

“Bang!” cried the child, and on the instant the rifle cracked.  “Do it againQ Please, Uncle Bob!” he cried, wild with delight.

“Now if you was to help yo’ Uncle Bob hook up that old mule of hisn and ride home with him, fo’ he’s going pretty shortly, you and Uncle Bob could do right much shootin’ with this old rifle.”  Mr. Crenshaw had appeared with a bundle, which he tossed into the cart.  Yancy turned to him.  “If you meet any inquiring friends, Mr. John, I reckon you may say that my nevvy’s gone fo’ to pay me a visit.  Most of his time will be agreeably spent shootin’ with this rifle at a mark, and me holdin’ him so he won’t get kicked clean off his feet.”

Thereafter beguiling speech flowed steadily from Mr. Yancy’s bearded lips, in the midst of which relations were established between the mule and cart, and the boy quitted the Barony for a new world.

“Do you reckon if Uncle Bob was to let you, you could drive, sonny?”

“Can she gallop?” asked the boy.

Mr. Yancy gave him a hurt glance.

“She’s too much of a lady to do that,” he said.  “No, I ’low this ain’t ’so fast as running or walking, but it’s a heap quicker than standing stock-still.”  The afternoon sun waned as they went deeper and deeper into the pine woods, but at last they came to their journey’s end, a widely scattered settlement on a hill above a branch.