At last and at last, school was out! Patsy, free and merry as a bird,
wrote a long letter to Anne Lewis.
She begged Anne to hurry and come to The Village. There were so many
things to do! Camp Feed Friend was getting on famously; Anne would see
it was better than the boys’ Camp Fight Foe. Happy Acres was a bower
of roses; they would take their knitting to the summerhouse every day.
Anne remembered--of course she remembered--Dick’s dare and double dare
about their following him and finding out what he was doing? They must
certainly do that. He went off every few days, no one knew where. David
and Steve had tried to follow him, but Dick led them a chase--like an
old red fox, Cousin Mayo said--for miles and miles, and then back home.
It was certainly a _secret_, and she and Anne must find it out. And
Patsy ended as she began; begging Anne to hurry and come to The Village.
It was such an important letter that Patsy took it to the post office
herself to put it into Mr. Blair’s own hand, feeling that would make
it go more surely and safely than if she dropped it into the letter
box. She had to wait awhile, for he was talking to Mr. Spencer who had
come in just before her.
“We missed you at church yesterday, Joe,” said Mr. Blair. “What’s the
matter? You look seedy.”
“It’s malaria, I reckon,” Mr. Spencer said in a weak, listless voice.
“I stayed in bed yesterday, but I don’t feel much better to-day.”
“You ought not to have got up,” said Mr. Blair.
“I have to crawl around and do all the work I can. Crop’s in the grass,
Will. Give me two plow points and half a dozen bolts; I must start a
plow to-morrow. And I ought to be a dozen hoe hands at the same time.”
“Can’t you hire hands?”
Mr. Spencer shook his head. “I never saw labor so scarce and
unreliable. I counted on Jeff to help work the crop after I put it in;
now he’s in the army, you know.”
“You need him mighty bad at home.”
“Yes, but we must do without him; there’s where he ought to be. Well,
if I can’t get hands to chop my cotton this week, I’ll have to plow it
up and sow peas or something that I can raise without hoe work. Cotton
is like tobacco, a ‘gentleman crop’ that requires waiting on; it won’t
stand grass. My crop must be worked this week, or it’s lost.”
Patsy went home, frowning to herself as she thought how sick and
worried Mr. Spencer looked. At the dinner table that day, she told
about seeing him and what he had said about his cotton.
“Poor fellow!” said Mrs. Osborne. “I hope he can get hands. It would be
a serious thing for him to lose his crop.”
“I wish----” began Patsy.
“It would be a severe personal loss,” said Mr. Osborne, “and these
things are national calamities, too; cotton is one of the sinews of
war.”
“Sinews of war? What do you mean, Uncle Mayo?” asked David.
“Cotton is one of the great essentials of war,” explained Mr. Osborne.
“Its fiber is used for tents and soldiers’ uniforms and airplane
wings and automobile tires; its seed supplies food products; and
fiber and seed are used in making the high explosives of modern
warfare--guncotton, nitroglycerin, cordite. Cotton is one of the great
essentials of war.”
“What a lot of things it’s good for!” exclaimed Dick.
Patsy spoke again, and this time she did not say “I wish.” Instead, she
said: “I know we could help Mr. Spencer, and the war. Mother, father,
please let us do it. I’m sure Ruth and Alice and the other girls will
help; and maybe the boys. We can work rows of cotton as well as rows of
beans.”
Dick laughed. “H’m! I was just thinking we boys might get together and
help Mr. Spencer. But you girls!”
“If we all help, the twenty of us, it’ll not take long to chop over Mr.
Spencer’s cotton,” said David. He was more respectful of girls’ work,
since he was seeing their flourishing garden.
“Good!” cried Patsy, clapping her hands.
“My dear!” exclaimed Mrs. Osborne. “You don’t mean, Patsy,--are you
suggesting that you girls work a crop, like common field hands?”
“They’re very uncommon nowadays,” laughed Patsy. “That’s why Mr.
Spencer’s cotton is in the grass. Oh, mother dear! he’s so sick and
miserable looking! We would love to save his crop, and we can, if
you’ll let us. You heard what father said. It will be patriotic as well
as neighborly; with Jeff in the army, too! It’ll not be a bit harder
than gardening. Do say we may, mother.”
Finally it was agreed that the young folks might undertake the task.
As Patsy said, if they could work rows of vegetables in a garden, they
could work rows of cotton in a field. They would use light hoes, and
the soil was sandy and easy to work. But it was a big job to undertake,
those acres and acres of cotton!
Patsy and Dick and David went to see all the members of Camps Feed
Friend and Fight Foe, to enlist them in the little army of crop savers.
They were easily persuaded. It was harder to win over their parents.
The Malletts and Walthalls and Joneses were unwilling to let their
girls “do field work like niggers,” but they consented when they
learned that Alice Blair and Ruth Wilson and Patsy Osborne were in the
party; whatever the Blairs and Wilsons and Osbornes did was right and
proper.
On Tuesday morning, the volunteer workers, with hoes on their
shoulders, presented themselves to Mr. Spencer.
“Why--why,” he stammered, “it’s awfully kind of you. But I can’t let
you do it, you girls, you young ladies! If the boys will help chop my
cotton, and let me pay them----”
“Come on, Mr. Spencer, and do your talking while we work,” laughed
Patsy. “Come on! You may be our overseer and boss the job.”
Before the morning was half over, however, they deposed him. Why, he
wanted them to stop and rest every few minutes; at that rate, it would
be cotton-picking time before they finished chopping the crop! So they
elected David foreman.
Sweet William, as water boy, trotted back and forth to supply cool
drinks; and about the middle of the forenoon, he proudly invited the
workers to a surprise luncheon, where each had half a dozen delicious
little wild strawberries on a sycamore-leaf plate.
At noon they rested and ate their picnic dinner in the grove at the
spring. Evening found them healthily and happily tired, and they went
gladly back to work the next day. Thursday brought showers that gave
them a rest and made the freshly worked crop grow like magic. By noon
on Saturday, they finished hoeing the cotton and, for the time at
least, the crop was saved.
On Saturday afternoon, the young workpeople loafed like real farmers;
for, according to rural custom, that day was a sort of secular Sabbath
on which the men of the community rested from all their labors and
gathered sociably in the post office or on Court-house Green.
What wonderful things they had to talk about these days!
Mr. Blair read the account in his daily paper of the Confederate
Reunion at Washington and the President’s Arlington speech. The old
soldiers chuckled at hearing that foreigners, seeing the Stars and
Bars displayed alongside the Allies’ flags, asked wonderingly, “What
flag is that? What new nation has entered the war?” They straightened
their stooped old shoulders at the description of their ten thousand
comrades, in gray suits and broad hats, marching along the Avenue. And
they said, with a sigh, that the story was as good--almost--as being
there.
Then they rehearsed tales of their battles and marches and sieges, and
compared old feats with new.
Those brilliant Canadian drives were like Jackson’s charges. And like
one of his messages was Foch’s telegram to Joffre in the battle of the
Marne: “The enemy is attacking my flank; my rear is threatened; I am,
therefore, attacking in front.”
The heroic, hopeless, glorious Gallipoli campaign--ah! it was the
epitome of their War of Secession. As long as the world honors high
courage and stanch devotion to a desperate cause, it will remember
those men who, like the Franks in the old story of Roland, beat off
army after army and died, defeated by their own victories, “triumphing
over disaster and death.”
And the trench warfare----
“They learned that from us,” chuckled old Captain Anderson; “and iron
ships. Ah! we showed the world a thing or two.”
But never had they dreamed of trenches like these--stretching in long
lines from the Swiss mountains to the Belgian coast, bent in and out
by great attacks like the British at Neuve-Chapelle, the Germans at
Verdun, and both sides in the bloody battle of the Somme.
And there were strange, new modes of warfare--U-boats hiding underseas,
aircraft battling miles above the earth, tanks pushing forward and
cutting barbed wire like twine.
There were many things besides fighting to discuss.
America was making vast and speedy preparation for its part in the
World War.
Two weeks after war was declared, Congress without a dissenting voice
voted the largest war credit in the history of the world. And there was
a two-billion-dollar issue of Liberty Bonds. The government must be
trying to gather up all the money in the United States, so as to have
enough to carry on the war many years, so these country people said,
little dreaming of the billions and billions to be raised during the
next two years.
There was the draft, too, to discuss. The Selective Conscription
Bill had passed. “They” were having men from the ages of twenty-one
to thirty registered, and “they” were to pick and choose soldiers
from these registered men. It was wonderful how calmly this supreme
assertion of the government’s power was accepted. There was a little
opposition here and there--in the Virginia mountains, in Kansas and
Ohio, in New York City--but all plots were promptly and firmly quelled.
The Draft Act was accepted quietly by The Village. It had its
sentimental, passionate devotion to the past; but now that it was being
tested, it realized the living, sacred strength of the ties that bound
it to the Union.
It heard, with even more horror than of things “over there,” of
outrages at home--the German plot to get Mexico to declare war against
the United States, factories blown up, railroad bridges destroyed, food
poisoned; even here in Virginia, things were happening. “They” said
loyal citizens everywhere ought to be on the lookout.
“There’s one safe place in the world; that’s The Village,” said old Mr.
Tavis, who was sitting on the post office porch with Pete Walthall and
Jake Andrews and Mr. Smith.
Mr. Smith shook his head and smiled. “See who comes there,” he said.
“It’s Black Mayo,” Mr. Tavis said in a constrained tone.
Somehow, no one understood how or why, there had grown up a feeling of
constraint about Black Mayo whenever Mr. Smith was present.
“He’s got a basket,” commented Jake Andrews, “and I bet there are
pigeons in it. Yes, Mr. Smith, it does look foolish for a grown-up man
to be raising birds and carrying them about and playing with them.”
Dick Osborne, who came out of the post office just then, spoke up
indignantly. “Why, Mr. Andrews! Cousin Mayo’s training those pigeons
for war; they use them to carry messages.”
“Shucks!” Jake laughed deridingly.
“Well, they can fetch and carry, you know,” old Mr. Tavis said mildly.
“It’s in the Bible; Noah sent a dove out of the Ark and it came to him
in the evening with an olive leaf pluckt off.”
“That’s all right--in the Bible,” said Jake. “But we’re talking ’bout
our days. My daddy was in The War; I never heard him tell of using
pigeons. You were in The War yourself, Mr. Tavis. I ask you, is you
ever sent your news by a pigeon?”
Mr. Tavis had to confess that he never did.
“And Black Mayo says they can fly a thousand miles. Did you ever see a
pigeon fly a thousand miles, Mr. Tavis?”
“I never went a thousand miles myself,” Mr. Tavis answered.
“I never did neither,” said Jake; “and I don’t believe no pigeon ever
did.”
Black Mayo now came up the porch steps, greeting his neighbors
cordially.
“Hope your ‘rheumatiz’ is better, Mr. Tavis. Hey, Pete! Jake! How are
folks at home? and your crops? Ah, Dick! You are the boy I was looking
for. Here is the pigeon--a fine fellow he is--that I want you to take
this afternoon for a three- or four-mile flight.”
“Good! I was just starting,” said Dick. “What are you going to do with
that other bird, Cousin Mayo?”
“I’m going to send it to Richmond.”
“To Richmond! What for?” asked Jake Andrews.
“To be set free there and fly back here, as a part of its training.”
“Cousin Mayo----” began Dick.
But Pete Walthall interrupted. “To fly back here? You think it’ll come
all that ways?” He laughed incredulously.
“A hundred miles!” It was Black Mayo’s turn to laugh. “He’ll make it in
two or three hours. Why, man, I have had birds fly nine hundred miles,
and they have been known to go eighteen hundred, flying over forty
miles an hour.”
“Whew!” Jake Andrews whistled his unbelief, and Pete Walthall stared
and laughed.
“That beats the dove in the Ark,” Mr. Tavis said doubtingly.
Dick now got in his question. “Cousin Mayo, aren’t carrier pigeons
useful in war?”
“Certainly and indeed they are,” Mr. Osborne answered. Then, as Mr.
Tavis still looked doubtful, he gave an instance. “At Verdun a company
of Allied troops was cut off from the main line, and one man after
another, who tried to go back for help, was shot down. At last a basket
of pigeons was found beside a dead soldier. The birds were weak, almost
starved; but the men, as a desperate last chance, started them off
with notes fastened to their legs. Off they flew, through that curtain
of fire no man could pass. The message was delivered; forces came to
rescue the trapped soldiers--saved by those birds.”
Pete and Jake shook their heads incredulously.
Mr. Tavis pondered a while, and then said: “Well, they could carry that
note just as good as that other dove could carry the olive leaf for
Noah. _I_ am going to believe it, Mr. Mayo.”
“Of course,” said Black Mayo. “What’s the matter with you folks? Don’t
you always believe what I say? And why shouldn’t you?”
No one answered, and he went on into the post office, looking a little
puzzled.
Mr. Smith raised his eyebrows and glanced around with a disagreeable
smile. “Pe-cu-li-ar amusement; pe-cu-li-ar statements; he himself is
pe-cu-li-ar.” The drawled-out word was unfriendly and sinister.
“Black Mayo is all right; all right,” old Mr. Tavis said emphatically.
But Pete and Jake dropped their eyes. Black Mayo Osborne was a queer
fellow. They had known him all their lives. But did they really know
him? Why was he playing about with birds, like a schoolboy, while other
men were working their corn and cotton and tobacco? They looked askance
at him as he came out of the post office and went up The Street toward
The Roost.
He found Mrs. Osborne sitting on the porch with her eyes on a book
propped on the railing and her hands busily knitting a sweater.
“Howdy, Miranda! Where’s David?” he asked.
She looked up with a start. “Oh! it’s you, Mayo,” she said. “David
isn’t here; he’s at his corn acre, I suppose. But, Mayo, come in a
minute. There’s something I want to speak to you about. It’s Dick,” she
went on, as her cousin took off his broad-brimmed straw hat and settled
himself on the porch step.
“What about Dick?”
She hesitated a minute. “The other young folks are working splendidly
in their war garden.”
“Yes; that was a good suggestion of Anne’s. The food question is
serious,” said Black Mayo. “Did you ever know anything like the way
the price of wheat has climbed--and soared? Flour is fifteen dollars a
barrel, and it will go to twenty, if the government doesn’t get those
Food Bills through Congress and take control. I hope it will be a good
crop year. The young folks are doing a splendid work in their war
gardens.”
“And Dick not in it,” said Dick’s mother, frowning. “He goes off alone
somewhere every chance he gets. We’ve never interfered with their
little secrets; but this looks so selfish! We’ve thought of compelling
him to help, but----”
“But you’ll not. This gardening is free-will work.”
“Yes.” Mrs. Osborne agreed. “And we’ve always taken the stand that
after the children do their regular home work, their spare time is
their own. But, if Dick could be persuaded, influenced----” She looked
hopefully at Black Mayo. “You can do anything with him,” she said.
“Your word is law and gospel to all the Village young folks.”
“I refuse to be flattered into coercing Dick,” laughed Black Mayo. “If
you want him spoken to, my dear Miranda, speak to him yourself.” He
leaned back against the porch post, stretched out his long legs, and
then twisted them comfortably together. “Speak to your own erring boy!”
“I have done it,” she said. “I tried to shame him just now. I reminded
him how David and Patsy and even little Sweet William are working
to raise food for the hungry, suffering world. I told him about the
Richmond Boy Scouts who are going on farms, to save the potato crop.”
“And he refused to be shamed?”
“He cocked up his head, with that superior, self-satisfied air--oh, big
as he is, I want to slap him when he does that!--and said, ‘It’s a nice
little thing David and Patsy and the others are doing--the best they
can, I reckon. But I’d rather do a big thing; something to get a lot
of money, enough to buy a whole Liberty Bond at a whop.’ And before I
could get my wits together to answer that amazing foolishness, he said
he’d finished his tasks, hoed the beans, and brought in stove wood, and
couldn’t he go. And off he went. What would you do, Mayo?”
“I think I’d do nothing, Miranda,” her cousin replied. “A boy’s got
to have his adventures. And Dick’s a fellow that can stand a lot of
letting alone. If he’s on the wrong track, he’s got sense enough to
find it out and get on the right one. Don’t worry, Miranda. Will you
tell David he can get one of my plows any day he wants it? And don’t
you worry about Dick, Miranda,” he repeated, untwining his long legs
and getting up.
As he started down the walk, Mrs. Osborne put aside her work and went
out to the kitchen, a one-roomed cabin behind the Roost dwelling-rooms,
to speak to Emma.
The old woman was standing at the door, looking worried and grum.
“Why, Emma, you haven’t kindled your fire!” Mrs. Osborne exclaimed.
Emma started. “Naw’m. My shoe sole was floppin’. I had to go to de shop
to git it sewed on.”
“De shop” was a shed on The Back Way where shoes were cobbled by Lincum
Gabe, old Solomon Gabe’s son.
“I’m gwine to start de fire now.” Emma’s voice was mournful, and as
she rattled the stove lids, she shook her head and sighed dolefully.
“Is anything the matter? Are you sick?” Mrs. Osborne asked anxiously.
“Naw’m, I ain’t sick, Miss M’randa. I don’t reckon I is. I ain’t got
no out’ard pains. I’m just thinkin’ ’bout my boy, an’ wonderin’ who’ll
git him----” She went off into a confused mumble. Suddenly she turned
to her mistress and said earnestly: “If dey take de colored folks back
in slavery, I’ll belong to you; won’t I, Miss M’randa? Like my folks
always did to yore folks?”
“What nonsense are you talking, Emma?” Mrs. Osborne asked sharply. “No
one could put you back in slavery. No one wants to. We hate and abhor
it more than you do. Why, we wouldn’t have you back in slavery for
anything in the world. What put such a silly notion in your head?”
“I ain’t faultin’ you ’bout it, Miss M’randa. It’s dem folks off
yander,” said Emma, vaguely. “Dey done started it. Dey done numbered de
young bucks an’ dey’re goin’ to nomernate ’em to be slaves. Dey’re just
waitin’ for de orders. My boy Tom is one of ’em.”
Patsy, who had followed her mother, laughed and exclaimed: “Why Aunt
Emma! They numbered all the men, white and colored, from twenty-one to
thirty years old, and they are going to select soldiers from them, to
go and fight the Germans.”
“Emma, some due has told you a lie, a wicked, silly lie,” said Mrs.
Osborne. “There isn’t a word of truth in it. As Patsy says, the white
boys are going, too. Why, some of them have gone--Fayett Mallett and
Jeff Spencer and Will Eppes--boys that you know, and lots of others.
They need a great many soldiers, and they are going to select them from
that draft list.”
“Dey say as how dem white ones was took to be offiseers, an’ boss de
colored ones till dey git ’em handcuffed an’ back in slavery,” said
Emma, lowering her voice and glancing fearfully around as if she were
betraying secrets of state.
Mrs. Osborne laughed. “How silly! Who are ‘they’ that say such foolish
things?”
“Uh, it’s jest bein’ talked ’round,” Emma answered evasively.
“It sounds like propaganda,” said Mrs. Osborne, wrinkling her brow.
“Naw’m, ’tain’t no sort o’ gander. It’s just talk dat’s goin’ ’round.
You-all want some seconds batter-cakes, you say, honey?”
And Emma went bustling about her work, deaf to all further questions.