When she had forced him down this declivity below the level of the needle-strewn forest floor, she seated him upon a mossy root, and shaking out her skirts in a half childlike, half coquettish way, comfortably seated herself in his lap, with her arm supplementing the clinging braid around his neck.
"Now hark to me, and don't holler so loud," she said turning his face to her questioning eyes.

"What's gone of you anyway, nigger boy ?" It should be premised that Cressy's terms of endearment were mainly negro-dialectical, reminiscences of her brief babyhood, her slave-nurse, and the only playmates she had ever known.
Still implacable, the master coldly repeated the counts of his indictment against the girl's strange indifference and still stranger entanglements, winding up by setting forth the whole story of his interview with her mother, his forced defence of the barn, Seth's outspoken accusation, and their silent and furious struggle in the loft.
But if he had expected that this daughter of a Southwestern fighter would betray any enthusiasm over her lover's participation in one of their characteristic feuds--if he looked for any fond praise for his own prowess, he was bitterly mistaken.

She loosened her arm from his neck of her own accord, unwound the braid, and putting her two little hands clasped between her knees, crossed her small feet before her, and, albeit still in his lap, looked the picture of languid dejection.
"Maw ought to have more sense, and you ought to have lit out of the window after me," she said with a lazy sigh.

"Fightin' ain't in your line--it's too much like THEM.

That Seth's sure to get even with you." "I can protect myself," he said haughtily.