ursuer, she looked like an erratic sun-bonnet out for a
stroll on a pair of borrowed legs.

[Illustration: She smiled upon the baby 331]

She turned again suddenly and applied her thin, freckled little face
to the crack between the rails. She smiled upon the baby, who smiled in
response, and gave a little bounce that might be accounted a courtesy.
The younger of the boys left the cane pile and ran up to his brother
at the mill, which was close to the fence. "Don't ye let her do it,"
he said, venomously. "That thar gal is one of the Purdee fambly. I know
her. Don't let her in." And he ran back to the cane.

Grinnell had seemed pleased by this homage at the shrine of the family
idol; but at the very mention of the "Purdee fambly" his face hardened,
an angry light sprang into his eyes, and his gesture in skimming with
the perforated gourd the scum from the boiling sorghum was as energetic
as if with the action he were dashing the "Purdee fambly" from off the
face of the earth. It was an ancient feud; his grandfather and some
contemporary Purdee had fallen out about the ownership of certain
vagrant cattle; there had been blows and bloodshed; other members of the
connection had been dragged into the controversy; summary reprisals were
followed by counter-reprisals. Barns were mysteriously fired, hen-roosts
robbed, horses unaccountably lamed, sheep feloniously sheared by unknown
parties; the feeling widened and deepened, and had been handed down to
the present generation with now and then a fresh provocation, on
the part of one or the other, to renew and continue the rankling old
grudges.

And here stood the hereditary enemy, wanting to pat their baby on the
head.

"Naw, sir, ye won't!" exclaimed the boy at the mill, greatly incensed at
the boldness of this proposition, glaring at the lean, tender, wistful
little face between the rails of the fence.

But the baby, who had not sense enough to know anything about hereditary
enemies, bounced and laughed and gurgled and sputtered with glee, and
waved her hands, and had never looked fatter or more beguiling.

"I jes wanter pat it wunst," sighed the hereditary enemy, with a lithe
writhing of her thin little anatomy in the anguish of denial--"_jes
wunst!_

"Naw, sir!" exclaimed the youthful Grinnell, more insistently than
before. He did not continue, for suddenly there came running down the
road a boy of his own size, out of breath, and red and angry--the
pursuer, evidentl