For good reason the plantation was very silent on this warm spring
morning. Where only a year before dozens of soft eyed Jerseys had ranged
through the pastures and wood lots there was now no sound of tinkling
bells--one after another the fine, blooded stock had been requisitioned
by a sad faced quartermaster of the Army of Northern Virginia. And one
by one the fat porkers who had muzzled greedily among the ears from the
Cary bins and who ought to have gone into the smoke house had departed,
squealing, to furnish bone and sinew with which to repel the invader.
Saddest of all, the chicken coops down by the deserted negro quarters
were quite as empty as the once teeming cabins themselves. Poverty, grim
and relentless, had caught the Carys in its iron hand and behind
Poverty stood its far more frightening shadow--Starvation.

But in these gloomy thoughts she was not entirely alone. All that
troubled her and more, though perhaps in a different way, passed hourly
through the old gray kinky head of Uncle Billy who happened at this very
moment to be emerging stealthily from the woods below the house. Slowly
and deliberately he made his way toward the front till he reached a
bench where he sat down under a tree to ruminate over the situation and
inspect the feathered prize which he had lately acquired by certain,
devious means known only to Uncle Billy. Wiping his forehead with his
ragged sleeve and holding the bird up by its tied feet he regarded it
with the eye of an expert, and the fatigue of one who has been sorely
put to it in order to accomplish his purpose.

"It 'pears to me," said Uncle Billy, "dat des' when you needs 'em the
mostest the chickens goes to roosting higher 'n' higher. Rooster--I
wonder who you b'longs to. Um-_um_!" he murmured as he thoughtfully
sounded the rooster's well developed chest through the feathers. "From
de feelin' of you, my son, I 'spec' you was raise' by one er de ol'es'