Didn't you tell me once you came from Virginia? What
part?"

"Palmyra, sir. In Fluvanna County, that's where I come from. Excuse
me, but I bound to set down. Go _home_? Me go _home_? I couldn't
git there and back not to save my life for lessen than twenty-five
dollars, and till I git that farm paid for what I been buyin' to go
back to and die on I can't go nowhere. That I can't."

Laine looked up from the collection of collars, cravats, and cuffs he
was sorting. "Is it the money that's keeping you back, or is it you
don't want to go?"

"Don't want to go!" The palms of Moses's hands came together,
opened, and came back. "Yesterday I near 'bout bus' open with
wantin' to go. My mother she's near 'bout eighty, and she got Miss
Lizzie to write me and beg me to come for this here Christmas. Miss
Lizzie is old Major Pleasants's youngest old-maid daughter. He's got
three of 'em. He was my mother's marster, old Major Pleasants was,
and he sold me the land my mother's livin' on now. He didn't charge
nothin' much for it, but I had to have a house built, and buy some
pigs and some furniture and git a cow, and I bought two of them
street-car mules what was in Richmond when they put the 'lectric cars
on down there. 'T'was the first city in the United States to have
'em, Richmond was. They thought them mules was wore out, but there
ain't no friskier ones in the county than they is, I tell you now. I
ain't been home for four years--"

"And your mother is eighty?"

"Yes, sir, that's what they tell me, though she say she don't know
herself 'ceptin' she had four chillern which was good size when the
war broke out. I belong to the second crop. My mother done had
nineteen chillern, the triflinest, good-for-nothin'est lot the Lord
ever let live on this earth, if I do say it, and ain't a one of 'em
what does a thing for her, savin' 'tis me and Eliza--Eliza she's my
sister and lives with her."

"And you'd like to spend Christmas with your mother, you say?"

In the years of his service Moses had never before mentioned family
matters, but, having started, he was not likely to stop, and Laine
was forced to interrupt,

"Yes, sir. This Christmas I would. Some other Christmases I
wouldn't, 'count of a yaller girl what lived on the next place. It
was in the summer-time, the last time I was home, and, she bein' a
likely-lookin' girl, I seen right much of her every now and then, and
I just talk along and tell her 'bout