N her new ancestral mansion, which climaxed the upper ether of Cherry Street, Mrs. J. Garner Wyndham lived and moved serenely, justifying the plaudit of admiring friends that from her brilliant conversation “you'd never suspect that Elizabeth Wyndham even has a servant. Of course not. Her superior mentality declined to think of servants, of expenses, of butcher-bills. Neither did she allude to her limousines or touring-cars, after the fashion of upstarts with their first flivver. Such things were so common, and Mrs. J. Garner Wyndham. was most distinctly not a common person. She was a club woman, a leader of feminist thought, an authority upon families descended from the Conqueror, a proponent of culture, a patroness of charity and fine art; and since cutting loose from her kinfolks in Yalobusha County, Mrs. Wyndham became fixed as a planet in the rarefied firmament of aristocracy. Satellites might twinkle, but Mrs. Wyndham shone, dazzling, well-rounded, superb.
Ordinarily her own back yard stretched like a terra incognita behind the lady, who paid no heed to the rear—her business being to put up a front. All matters aft she proxied to her gardener, all except one solitary detail of the first magnitude, for nobody can trust everything to a negro.
On Wednesday morning Mrs. Wyndham went out to conduct this negotiation in person, a negotiation with Cooney Bug in the outhouse where corn and oats had been stored until the Wyndham state equipages began feeding on gasoline. Now the room was half-full of empty bottles, varied, of long accumulation.
A little more than fat, a trifle over forty and most extremely blonde, Mrs. Wyndham in very tight shoes minced her way to the feed-house. Within, a negro stood waiting, a black, apologetic and perpetually bowing negro, who received the mandate that she so graciously handed down.
“Cooney, I desire two gallons of the same.”
Yas'm—yas'm.” Cooney's slewfoot scraped the floor and he bobbed his kinky head. “Out o' dat same ol' charred barrel?”
“Certainly. I specified the same.”
“Sholy, ma'am. Co'se, I wouldn't fetch you nothin' else; an' he don't 'low nobody to git a drap o' dat 'cept you.
“It must be delivered here on Friday morning.”
“Yas'm. But, Mrs. Windy—”
“Mrs. Wyndham—ham,” she corrected: it had been always most annoying at public school to have the other children call her “Windy Liz.”
“But y'onderstan', Mrs. Windy,” Cooney kept explaining, “it's a heap more harder now to git dat stuff across de river now dan what it used to be.”
The difficulties—of other people—never impressed Mrs. Wyndham; she merely repeated:
“It must be here on Friday morning.”
“Yas'm—yas'm. I'll fetch it.”
“Very good. I shall hold you strictly responsible.”
Mrs. Wyndham saw nothing humorous in the Bug's responsibility. Not tarrying to argue, Cooney opened himself out like a stepladder and spraddled through the feed-house window. Disappearance was the Bug's long suit.
“Friday mornin,'” he mumbled to himself. “Huh!”
Cooney suspected that this transaction would require time. He couldn't cross into Louisiana, grab two gallons of reverend bourbon, and parade the streets of Vicksburg just the same as totin' the United States mail. He might wriggle like a moccasin among the swamps and bayous to where a certain person still hoarded his ancient remnant. Mighty few white folks could do that much, and no darkies at all—except Cooney. Night or day this might be simple to the Bug, who followed deer-trails and possum-tracks. But recrossing the Mississippi River and chaperoning a demijohn into Mrs. Windy's feed-house was a maneuver that demanded generalship and genius. During the free-and-easy days Cooney had traveled back and forth from Delta Point to Vicksburg, propping his patent leathers on a red plush seat, tilting a cigar in his mouth, and importing eight quarts in a grip-sack. Those happy excursions ended when prohibition constables began to get his liquor and Cooney began to get thirty days, so rapid and regular that he shifted his patronage to the ferry, until meddlesome bulls contracted a habit of meeting him at the landing. Trip by trip the trade grew more ticklish. Even his unostentatious motorboat made such a fuss that Cooney now paddled a midnight skiff, and squinted around mightily before he stepped ashore.