Now that chest contained, besides a meagre store of quilts and comforts, her own and her mother’s clothes, the fewer garments of the boys of the family being alternately suspended on the clothes-line and their own frames.  She resented the sacrilege of Rufe’s invasion of that chest.  She turned on the saddle and looked around with an air of appeal.  Her mother, however, was down the hill beside the spring, busy boiling soap, and quite out of hearing.  Tennessee gazed vaguely for a moment at the great kettle with the red and yellow flames curling around it, and her mother’s figure hovering over it.  Then she looked back at Rufe.

He continued industriously churning up the contents of the chest, the lid still poised upon that head that served so many other useful purposes—­for the gymnastic exhibition involved in standing on it; for his extraordinary mental processes; for a lodgment for his old wool hat, and a field for his crop of flaxen hair.

All the instinct of the proprietor was roused within Tennessee.  She found her voice, a hoarse, infantile wheeze.

“Tum out’n chist!” she exclaimed, gutturally.  “Tum out’n chist!”

Rufe turned his tow-head slowly, that he might not disturb the poise of the lid of the chest resting upon it.  He fixed a solemn stare on Tennessee, and drawing one hand from the depths of the chest, he silently shook his fist.  And then he resumed his researches.

Tennessee, alarmed by this impressive demonstration, dismounted hastily from the saddle as soon as his threatening gaze was withdrawn.  She tangled her feet in the stirrups and her hands in the reins, and lost more time in scrambling off the floor of the passage and down upon the ground; but at last she was fairly on her way to the spring to convey an account to her mother of the outlaw in the chest.  In fact, she was not far from the scene of the soap-boiling when she heard her name shouted in stentorian tones, and pausing to look back, she saw Rufe gleefully capering about in the passage, the headstall on his own head, the bit hanging on his breast, and the reins dangling at his heels.

Now this beguilement the little girl could never withstand, and indeed few people ever had the opportunity to drive so frisky and high-spirited a horse as Rufe was when he consented to assume the bit and bridle.  He was rarely so accommodating, as he preferred the role of driver, with what he called “a pop-lashEE!” at command.  She forgot her tell-tale mission.  She turned with a gurgle of delight and began to toddle up the hill again.  And presently Mrs. Dicey, glancing toward the house, saw them playing together in great amity, and rejoiced that they gave her so little trouble.

They were still at it when Birt came home, but then Tennessee was tired of driving, and he let her go with him to the wood-pile and sit on a log while he swung the axe.  No one took special notice of Rufe’s movements in the interval before supper.  He disappeared for a time, but when the circle gathered around the table he was in his place and by no means a non-combatant in the general onslaught on the corn-dodgers.  Afterward he came out in the passage and sat quietly among the others.