“Ef dey’s been drinkin’ look out fo’ ’em,” Sally called after me.
“Dey’s pow’rful mean in liquah.”
“Don’t worry about me, Sally,” I called back. “They wouldn’t hurt
anybody.”
By riding ’cross lots I came out on the road to their farm ahead of
them. The telltale tracks in the sand told they had driven out, but
had not yet returned. I rode back to meet them. Half way to the main
road I came up with them. They were coming along at their usual funeral
pace, and the musical Tom was whistling a jolly jig tune. I rode up and
stopped their mule.
“Good mawnin’, suh,” they chorused.
“Which of you boys smokes a pipe?” I asked.
They were surprised and outdid each other in looking as innocent as
lambs.
“Whichever it is, hand over my pipe.”
They shifted uneasily, but neither made a move to restore my property.
“Come, be quick,” I said, moving the pony in closer to their carriage.
Tom slowly reached in his pocket and drew out my pipe. He reached it
out to me silently.
“Thanks,” I said. “Now understand this: the next time I catch or hear
of one of you boys on my place except on business I am coming after him
with this.”
I shook my riding crop and they nodded solemnly. The pony was dancing
about and I rode off, leaving them looking after me surprised and
disgusted, a little mad, but properly scared. After that we became
friends.
Till recently the country where “them Huggins boys” live has been known
all over North Carolina as “poor old Moore County”. It lies in the
very heart of the Sandhills, and the farmers who “make corn and cotton
on the clay” have long scoffed at the sandy slopes where, so the joke
runs, “you can hear the cotton grunting trying to make a living in the
poor soil”. Too poor even to give a decent stand of grass--except the
coarse, useless crab grass--the Sandhills supported a fine growth of
long leafed pine, and years ago the Huggins boys’ grandfather and his
neighbors eked out their thin crops with the tall, straight timber and
with turpentine. Their sons, the best of the timber gone, hewed out
railroad ties and burned tar. They were poor farmers on poor soil, a
ruinous combination. The roads were bad, and the Sandhills’ natives,
having little to sell and nothing with which to buy, lived sufficient
unto themselves. Theirs was a narrow life and a hard one, a life of few
pleasures and almost no advantages, of much labor and little reward.
[Illustration: Photo by Dr. Achorn
DESERTED TURPENTINE STILL]
A score of years ago new factors entered into the life of the
Sandhills. Inspired by the few passengers and little freight on this
division of the road, railroad men turned their attention to this
country. They sent agricultural and industrial experts who reported
back that all the Sandhills had was a glorious winter climate. So the
general passenger agent and the traffic manager consulted physicians,
and the Sandhills became famous as a resort for tubercular patients.
But wiser men nipped the growing sanitoriums in the bud and planted in
their stead great winter resorts, big hotels, golf courses, hunting
preserves.
Men and women came from all over the country to slip away from Jack
Frost and play in the open, and the mysterious spell of the Sandhills
was thrown over them.
Under this spell a little group of Northern men, fresh from college,
ambitious and full of energy, decided the Sandhills should be good for
other things besides golf and quail shooting. Agricultural experts from
Raleigh and Washington said things that confirmed this belief, and
these young men turned Sandhills farmers. The Huggins boys’ father and
his neighbors in poor old Moore County laughed at these soft-handed
agriculturists; but they fattened cattle with great profit over at
Jackson Springs; they grew tobacco at Samarcand which brought top price
in the open market, and their big dairy near Hoffman sold cream to
the railroad and fed hogs on the skimmed milk. The pioneers have been
followed by others, and most of the Huggins boys’ neighbors from good
examples have learned to get bigger crops and sell them for higher
prices.
[Illustration: AT THE PINEHURST FARM]
[Illustration: LORD OF THE PINEHURST DAIRY]
But in among the hills, a little way back from the railroad and the
new automobile highways the old life, the hard, narrow life, is still
lived. “Them Huggins boys” and their poor, old mother and drab sister
are still drudging along in the old way. That, after I knew them,
was the only real fault I found. They are not vicious or mean: they
are frightened and suspicious. They are not clever and they are very
lazy, so they have no confidence in themselves to cope with the keener
competition that the new life has brought. They have neither the speed
nor the stamina to stand the swifter pace, and they balk. Underneath
their diffidence and sham effrontery they are helpless and hopeless.
They are the tattered remnants of an out-worn age.
[Illustration: OLD SLAVE QUARTERS]