"Yas'm." His face glowed with relief at once more having someone to tell him what to do.
Scarlett drove on thoughtfully.
Will would certainly welcome a good field hand at Tara.
Pork had never been any good in the fields and never would be any good.
With Sam on the place, Pork could come to Atlanta and join Dilcey as she had promised him when Gerald died.
When she reached the mill the sun was setting and it was later than she cared to be out.
Johnnie Gallegher was standing in the doorway of the miserable shack that served as cook room for the little lumber camp.
Sitting on a log in front of the slab-sided shack that was their sleeping quarters were four of the five convicts Scarlett had apportioned to Johnnie's mill.
Their convict uniforms were dirty and foul with sweat, shackles clanked between their ankles when they moved tiredly, and there was an air of apathy and despair about them.
They were a thin, unwholesome lot, Scarlett thought, peering sharply at them, and when she had leased them, so short a time before, they were an upstanding crew.
They did not even raise their eyes as she dismounted from the buggy but Johnnie turned toward her, carelessly dragging off his hat.
His little brown face was as hard as a nut as he greeted her.
"I don't like the look of the men," she said abruptly.
"They don't look well.
Where's the other one?"
"Says he's sick," said Johnnie laconically.
"He's in the bunk house."
"What ails him?"
"Laziness, mostly."
"I'll go see him."
"Don't do that.
He's probably nekkid.
I'll tend to him.
He'll be back at work tomorrow."
Scarlett hesitated and saw one of the convicts raise a weary head and give Johnnie a stare of intense hatred before he looked at the ground again.
"Have you been whipping these men?"
"Now, Mrs. Kennedy, begging your pardon, who's running this mill?
You put me in charge and told me to run it.
You said I'd have a free hand.
You ain't got no complaints to make of me, have you?
Ain't I making twice as much for you as Mr. Elsing did?"
"Yes, you are," said Scarlett, but a shiver went over her, like a goose walking across her grave.
There was something sinister about this camp with its ugly shacks, something which had not been here when Hugh Elsing had it.
There was a loneliness, an isolation, about it that chilled her.
These convicts were so far away from everything, so completely at the mercy of Johnnie Gallegher, and if he chose to whip them or otherwise mistreat them, she would probably never know about it.
The convicts would be afraid to complain to her for fear of worse punishment after she was gone.
"The men look thin.
Are you giving them enough to eat?
God knows, I spend enough money on their food to make them fat as hogs.
The flour and pork alone cost thirty dollars last month.
What are you giving them for supper?"
She stepped over to the cook shack and looked in.
A fat mulatto woman, who was leaning over a rusty old stove, dropped a half curtsy as she saw Scarlett and went on stirring a pot in which black-eyed peas were cooking.
Scarlett knew Johnnie Gallegher lived with her but thought it best to ignore the fact.
She saw that except for the peas and a pan of corn pone there was no other food being prepared.
"Haven't you got anything else for these men?"
"No'm."
"Haven't you got any side meat in these peas?"
"No'm."
"No boiling bacon in the peas?