Miss Taylor stopped him, for he looked interesting,
and might answer some of her brother's questions. He turned back and
stood regarding her with sorrowful eyes and ugly mouth.
"Do you live about here?" she asked.
"I'se lived here a hundred years," he answered. She did not believe it;
he might be seventy, eighty, or even ninety--indeed, there was about him
that indefinable sense of age--some shadow of endless living; but a
hundred seemed absurd.
"You know the people pretty well, then?"
"I knows dem all. I knows most of 'em better dan dey knows demselves. I
knows a heap of tings in dis world and in de next."
"This is a great cotton country?"
"Dey don't raise no cotton now to what dey used to when old Gen'rel
Cresswell fust come from Carolina; den it was a bale and a half to the
acre on stalks dat looked like young brushwood. Dat was cotton."
"You know the Cresswells, then?"
"Know dem? I knowed dem afore dey was born."
"They are--wealthy people?"
"Dey rolls in money and dey'se quality, too. No shoddy upstarts dem,
but born to purple, lady, born to purple. Old Gen'ral Cresswell had
niggers and acres no end back dere in Carolina. He brung a part of dem
here and here his son, de father of dis Colonel Cresswell, was born. De
son--I knowed him well--he had a tousand niggers and ten tousand acres
afore de war.
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