"
Birt overheard her. "Tennessee air too peart ter git herself hurt,"
he said, a trifle ashamed of his ready championship of his little
sister, as a big rough boy is apt to be of gentler emotions.
If ever infancy can be deemed uncouth, she was an uncouth little
atom of humanity. Her blue checked homespun dress, graced with big
horn buttons, descended almost to her feet. Her straight, awkwardly
cropped hair was of a nondescript shade pleasantly called "tow." As
she came into the light of the fire, she lifted wide black eyes
deprecatingly to her mother.
"She ain't pretty, I know, but she air powerful peart," Birt used to
say so often that the phrase became a formula with him.
If she were "powerful peart," it was a fact readily apparent only to
him, for she was a silent child, with the single marked
characteristic of great affection for her eldest brother and a
singular pertinacity in following him about.
"I dunno 'bout Tennie's peartness," his mother sarcastically
rejoined. "'Pears ter me like the chile hain't never hed good
sense; afore she could walk she'd crawl along the floor arter ye,
an' holler like a squeech-owEL ef ye went off an' lef' her. An' ye
air plumb teched in the head too, Birt, ter set sech store by
Tennie. I look ter see her killed, or stunted, some day, in them
travels o' hern."
For when Birt Dicey went "yerrands" on the mule through the woods to
the Settlement, Tennessee often rode on the pommel of his saddle.
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