"Oh, no! You mustn't do that! Something dreadful might happen to you. They say that
Shantytown settlement on the Decatur road is just full of mean darkies and you'd have to pass right by it. Let me think--Darling, promise me you won't do anything today and I'll think of something. Promise me you'll go home and lie down. You look right peaked. Promise me."
Because she was too exhausted by her anger to do otherwise, Scarlett sulkily promised
and went home, haughtily refusing any overtures of peace from her household.
That afternoon a strange figure stumped through Melanie's hedge and across Pitty's back
yard. Obviously, he was one of those men whom Mammy and Dilcey referred to as "de riffraff whut Miss Melly pick up off de streets an' let sleep in her cellar."
There were three rooms in the basement of Melanie's house which formerly had been
servants' quarters and a wine room. Now Dilcey occupied one, and the other two were in constant use by a stream of miserable and ragged transients. No one but Melanie knew whence they came or where they were going and no one but she knew where she collected them. Perhaps the
negroes were right and she did pick them up from the streets. But even as the great and the near great gravitated to her small parlor, so unfortunates found their way to her cellar where they were fed, bedded and sent on their way with packages of food. Usually the occupants of the rooms were former Confederate soldiers of the rougher, illiterate type, homeless men, men without families, beating their way about the country in hope of finding work.
Frequently, brown and withered country women with broods of tow-haired silent children
spent the night there, women widowed by the war, dispossessed of their farms, seeking relatives who were scattered and lost. Sometimes the neighborhood was scandalized by the presence of foreigners, speaking little or no English, who had been drawn South by glowing tales of fortunes easily made. Once a Republican had slept there. At least, Mammy insisted he was a Republican, saying she could smell a Republican, same as a horse could smell a rattlesnake; but no one believed Mammy's story, for there must be some limit even to Melanie's charity. At least
everyone hoped so.
Yes, thought Scarlett, sitting on the side porch in the pale November sunshine with the
baby on her lap, he is one of Melanie's lame dogs. And he's really lame, at that!
The man who was making his way across the back yard stumped, like Will Benteen, on a
wooden leg. He was a tall, thin old man with a bald head, which shone pinkishly dirty, and a grizzled beard so long he could tuck it in his belt. He was over sixty, to judge by his hard, seamed face, but there was no sag of age to his body. He was lank and ungainly but, even with his wooden peg, he moved as swiftly as a snake.
He mounted the steps and came toward her and, even before he spoke, revealing in his
tones a twang and a burring of "rs" unusual in the lowlands, Scarlett knew that he was mountain born. For all his dirty, ragged clothes there was about him, as about most mountaineers, an air of fierce silent pride that permitted no liberties and tolerated no foolishness. His beard was stained with tobacco juice and a large wad in his jaw made his face look deformed. His nose was thin and craggy, his eyebrows bushy and twisted, into witches' locks and a lush growth of hair sprang from his ears, giving them the tufted look of a lynx's ears. Beneath his brow was one hollow socket from which a scar ran down his cheek, carving a diagonal line through his beard.
The other eye was small, pale and cold, an unwinking and remorseless eye. There was a heavy
pistol openly in his trouser band and from the top of his tattered boot protruded the hilt of a bowie knife.
He returned Scarlett's stare coldly and spat across the rail of the banister before he spoke.
There was contempt in his one eye, not a personal contempt for her, but for her whole sex.
"Miz Wilkes sont me to work for you," he said shortly. He spoke rustily, as one unaccustomed to speaking, the words coming slowly and almost with difficulty. "M' name's Archie."
"I'm sorry but I have no work for you, Mr. Archie."
"Archie's m'fuss name."
"I beg your pardon. What is your last name?"
He spat again. "I reckon that's my bizness," he said. "Archie'll do."
"I don't care what your last name is! I have nothing for you to do."
"I reckon you have. Miz Wilkes was upsot about yore wantin' to run aroun' like a fool by yoreself and she sont me over here to drive aroun' with you."
"Indeed?" cried Scarlett, indignant both at the man's rudeness and Melly's meddling.