Page:Emma Speed Sampson--The shorn lamb.djvu/315

Rh it and its occupants with vindictive bitterness.

"All but Betsy and Jo. I ain't got no cuss fer Betsy and Jo. If I had er had the bringin' up er po' lil' Jo I could er made him jes' lak my baby," she chattered. "That there Phup never would er been lak him 'case he got too much er his maw in him—his maw an' some er them ol' picshers.

"If I'm a gonter spunk up enough ter go up in that there lof' I must fill my veins up full er liquor," she declared. She deftly opened the cupboard with a bent kitchen fork and poured out a cup full from the brown jug.

"Now I mus' put on my begalia! I kin conjer better in my begalia."

She slipped from the kitchen to her own room, lighted a tallow candle stuck in a bottle, and pulling from under the bed a strange old rawhide trunk, opened it and began to hunt in the conglomeration of its contents for strings of beads and bunches of feathers. She put the beads around her neck and waist, string after string made of bones and buttons and bits of colored glass tied and wired together. On her palsied head she placed a headdress of feathers. Then she took a staff standing in the corner and carefully greased it with an old bacon rind.

"Now cyarn't nothin' ketch me!" she asserted.