Colonel Tom thinks of what big folks the Buckner fambly has always been at home. And how high they had always held their heads. And how none of the women has ever been like this before. Nor no disgrace of any kind. And that there kid, if it is alive, is a sign of disgrace. And he hoped to God, he said, it wasn't alive.
But he don't say so. He stands there and watches that nurse fight fur to hold onto the little mist of life she thinks now is still into it. She un-buttons her dress and lays the kid against the heat of her own breast. And wills fur it to live, and fights fur it to, and determines that it must, and jest natcherally tries fur to bullyrag death into going away. And Colonel Tom watching, and wishing that it wouldn't. But he gets interested in that there fight, and so purty soon he is hoping both ways by spells. And the fight all going on without a word spoken.
But finally the nurse begins fur to cry. Not be-cause she is sure it is dead. But because she is sure it is coming back. Which it does, slow.
"'But I have told HER that it is dead,'" says Colonel Tom, jerking his head toward the other room where Miss Lucy is lying. He speaks in a low voice and closes the door when he speaks. Fur it looks now like it was getting strong enough so it might even squall a little.
"I don't know what kind of a look there was on my face," says Colonel Tom, telling of the story to his sister and the doctor, "but she must have seen that I was--and heaven help me, but I WAS!--sorry that the baby was alive. It would have been such an easy way out of it had it been really dead!
"'She mustn't know that it is living,' I said to the nurse, finally," says Colonel Tom, going on with his story. I had been watching Miss Lucy's face as Colonel Tom talked and she was so worked up by that fight fur the kid's life she was breath-less. But her eyes was cast down, I guess so her brother couldn't see them. Colonel Tom goes on with his story:
"'You don't mean--' said the nurse, startled.
"'No! No!' I said, 'of course--not that! But--why should she ever know that it didn't die?'""'It is illegitimate?' asked the nurse.
"'Yes,' I said." The long and short of it was, Colonel Tom went on to tell, that the nurse went out and got her mother. Which the two of them lived alone, only around the corner. And give the child into the keeping of her mother, who took it away then and there.
Colonel Tom had made up his mind there wasn't going to be no bastards in the Buckner fambly.
And now that Miss Lucy thought it was dead he would let her keep on thinking so. And that would be settled for good and all. He figgered that it wouldn't ever hurt her none if she never knowed it.
The nurse's mother kept it all that week, and it throve. Colonel Tom was coaxing of his sister to go back to Tennessee. But she wouldn't go. So he had made up his mind to go back and get his Aunt Lucy Davis to come and help him coax. He was only waiting fur his sister to get well enough so he could leave her. She got better, and she never ast fur the kid, nor said nothing about it. Which was probable because she seen he hated it so. He had made up his mind, before he went back after their Aunt Lucy Davis, to take the baby himself and put it into some kind of an institution.
"I thought," he says to Miss Lucy, telling of the story, "that you yourself were almost reconciled to the thought that it hadn't lived."Miss Lucy interrupted him with a little sound.