“You should not have encouraged us to come out with you when it was sure to rain,” said Ruth, rather tartly for her.
“Sho’ ‘nuff, missy—sho’ ‘nuff,” cackled the old darkey. “But ’twas a great temptation.”
“To earn a dollar. Dollars come skeerce like nowadays, for Unc’ Simmy. He kyan’t keep up wid dese yere taxum-cabs an’ de rich folks’ smart conveyances—no’m!” and the old negro chuckled as though poverty, too, were a humorous thing.
He began to fuss with the hood of the carriage, which was supposed to pull up and shelter the occupants. But it would not “stay put,” as Helen laughingly said, and the summer shower began to patter harder on the unprotected girls.
“You’d better not mind it, Mr. Simmy,” Helen said, “and drive us back at once. We’re bound to get wet anyway.”
“Dey calls me _Unc’_ Simmy, missy—ma frien’s do,” said the old man, rheumatically climbing to his seat again. “An’ Ah ain’t gwine t’ drib yo’ back to de hotel in de face ob dishyer shower, an’ git all yo’ fin’ry wet. No’m! Yo’ leab’ Unc’ Simmy ‘lone fo’ a-gittin’ yo’ to shelter ’twill de storm passes ober.”
He touched up the old horse with the whiplash, and the creature really broke into a knock-kneed trot, Unc’ Simmy meanwhile singing a broken accompaniment to the shuffling pace of his steed:
“‘On Jor-dy-an’s sto’my bank I stand An’ cas’ a wishful eye T’ Can-ny-an’s bright an’ glo-ree-ous land— Ma’ ho-o-me ’twill be, bymeby!’
Dis ain’ gwine t’ be much ob a shower, missy. We turns in yere.“
They had passed several smart looking dwellings—villas they might better be called—and more than one old, Southern house with high pillars in front and an air of decayed gentility about them.
Unc’ Simmy swung his steed through a ruined gateway where the Virginia creeper and honeysuckle hid the gateposts and wall. There was a small wooden structure like a gate-keeper’s cottage, much out of repair. The shingles on the roof had curled in the hot sun’s rays till they resembled clutching fingers; some of the siding-strips in the peak, far out of ordinary reach, hung and flapped by one nail; some bricks were missing from the chimney-top; the house had not been painted for at least two decades. The porch on the front was sheltered by climbing vines, and there were many old-fashioned flowers in neatly kept beds before the little house. But the girls did not see much of the front of the cottage just then, for the old horse went by and up the lane at a clumsy gallop. The rain was coming down faster.