Dick made the journey homeward alone, and as rapidly as the conveyances
of the day would permit. As he drew near home his conduct in going back
without Grandison took on a more serious aspect than it had borne at any
previous time, and although he had prepared the colonel by a letter sent
several days ahead, there was still the prospect of a bad quarter of an
hour with him; not, indeed, that his father would upbraid him, but he
was likely to make searching inquiries. And notwithstanding the vein of
quiet recklessness that had carried Dick through his preposterous
scheme, he was a very poor liar, having rarely had occasion or
inclination to tell anything but the truth. Any reluctance to meet his
father was more than offset, however, by a stronger force drawing him
homeward, for Charity Lomax must long since have returned from her visit
to her aunt in Tennessee.
Dick got off easier than he had expected. He told a straight story, and
a truthful one, so far as it went.
The colonel raged at first, but rage soon subsided into anger, and anger
moderated into annoyance, and annoyance into a sort of garrulous sense
of injury. The colonel thought he had been hardly used; he had trusted
this negro, and he had broken faith. Yet, after all, he did not blame
Grandison so much as he did the abolitionists, who were undoubtedly at
the bottom of it.
As for Charity Lomax, Dick told her, privately of course, that he had
run his father's man, Grandison, off to Canada, and left him there.
"Oh, Dick," she had said with shuddering alarm, "what have you done? If
they knew it they 'd send you to the penitentiary, like they did that
Yankee."
"But they don't know it," he had replied seriously; adding, with an
injured tone, "you don't seem to appreciate my heroism like you did that
of the Yankee; perhaps it 's because I was n't caught and sent to the
penitentiary. I thought you wanted me to do it."
"Why, Dick Owens!" she exclaimed. "You know I never dreamed of any such
outrageous proceeding.
"But I presume I 'll have to marry you," she concluded, after some
insistence on Dick's part, "if only to take care of you. You are too
reckless for anything; and a man who goes chasing all over the North,
being entertained by New York and Boston society and having negroes to
throw away, needs some one to look after him."
"It 's a most remarkable thing," replied Dick fervently, "that your
views correspond exactly with my profoundest convictions. It proves
beyond question that we were made for one another."
* * * * *
They were married three weeks later. As each of them had just returned
from a journey, they spent their honeymoon at home.
A week after the wedding they were seated, one afternoon, on the piazza
of the colonel's house, where Dick had taken his bride, when a negro
from the yard ran down the lane and threw open the big gate for the
colonel's buggy to enter. The colonel was not alone. Beside him, ragged
and travel-stained, bowed with weariness, and upon his face a haggard
look that told of hardship and privation, sat the lost Grandison.
The colonel alighted at the steps.
"Take the lines, Tom," he said to the man who had opened the gate, "and
drive round to the barn. Help Grandison down,--poor devil, he 's so
stiff he can hardly move!--and get a tub of water and wash him and rub
him down, and feed him, and give him a big drink of whiskey, and then
let him come round and see his young master and his new mistress."
The colonel's face wore an expression compounded of joy and
indignation,--joy at the restoration of a valuable piece of property;
indignation for reasons he proceeded to state.
"It 's astounding, the depths of depravity the human heart is capable
of! I was coming along the road three miles away, when I heard some one
call me from the roadside. I pulled up the mare, and who should come out
of the woods but Grandison. The poor nigger could hardly crawl along,
with the help of a broken limb. I was never more astonished in my life.
You could have knocked me down with a feather. He seemed pretty far
gone,--he could hardly talk above a whisper,--and I had to give him a
mouthful of whiskey to brace him up so he could tell his story. It 's
just as I thought from the beginning, Dick; Grandison had no notion of
running away; he knew when he was well off, and where his friends were.
All the persuasions of abolition liars and runaway niggers did not move
him. But the desperation of those fanatics knew no bounds; their guilty
consciences gave them no rest. They got the notion somehow that
Grandison belonged to a nigger-catcher, and had been brought North as a
spy to help capture ungrateful runaway servants. They actually kidnaped
him--just think of it!--and gagged him and bound him and threw him
rudely into a wagon, and carried him into the gloomy depths of a
Canadian forest, and locked him in a lonely hut, and fed him on bread
and water for three weeks. One of the scoundrels wanted to kill him, and
persuaded the others that it ought to be done; but they got to
quarreling about how they should do it, and before they had their minds
made up Grandison escaped, and, keeping his back steadily to the North
Star, made his way, after suffering incredible hardships, back to the
old plantation, back to his master, his friends, and his home. Why, it 's
as good as one of Scott's novels! Mr. Simms or some other one of our
Southern authors ought to write it up."
"Don't you think, sir," suggested Dick, who had calmly smoked his cigar
throughout the colonel's animated recital, "that that kidnaping yarn
sounds a little improbable? Is n't there some more likely explanation?"
"Nonsense, Dick; it 's the gospel truth! Those infernal abolitionists
are capable of anything--everything! Just think of their locking the
poor, faithful nigger up, beating him, kicking him, depriving him of his
liberty, keeping him on bread and water for three long, lonesome weeks,
and he all the time pining for the old plantation!"
There were almost tears in the colonel's eyes at the picture of
Grandison's sufferings that he conjured up. Dick still professed to be
slightly skeptical, and met Charity's severely questioning eye with
bland unconsciousness.
The colonel killed the fatted calf for Grandison, and for two or three
weeks the returned wanderer's life was a slave's dream of pleasure. His
fame spread throughout the county, and the colonel gave him a permanent
place among the house servants, where he could always have him
conveniently at hand to relate his adventures to admiring visitors.
* * * * *
About three weeks after Grandison's return the colonel's faith in sable
humanity was rudely shaken, and its foundations almost broken up. He
came near losing his belief in the fidelity of the negro to his
master,--the servile virtue most highly prized and most sedulously
cultivated by the colonel and his kind. One Monday morning Grandison was
missing. And not only Grandison, but his wife, Betty the maid; his
mother, aunt Eunice; his father, uncle Ike; his brothers, Tom and John,
and his little sister Elsie, were likewise absent from the plantation;
and a hurried search and inquiry in the neighborhood resulted in no
information as to their whereabouts. So much valuable property could not
be lost without an effort to recover it, and the wholesale nature of the
transaction carried consternation to the hearts of those whose ledgers
were chiefly bound in black. Extremely energetic measures were taken by
the colonel and his friends. The fugitives were traced, and followed
from point to point, on their northward run through Ohio. Several times
the hunters were close upon their heels, but the magnitude of the
escaping party begot unusual vigilance on the part of those who
sympathized with the fugitives, and strangely enough, the underground
railroad seemed to have had its tracks cleared and signals set for this
particular train. Once, twice, the colonel thought he had them, but
they slipped through his fingers.
One last glimpse he caught of his vanishing property, as he stood,
accompanied by a United States marshal, on a wharf at a port on the
south shore of Lake Erie. On the stern of a small steamboat which was
receding rapidly from the wharf, with her nose pointing toward Canada,
there stood a group of familiar dark faces, and the look they cast
backward was not one of longing for the fleshpots of Egypt. The colonel
saw Grandison point him out to one of the crew of the vessel, who waved
his hand derisively toward the colonel. The latter shook his fist
impotently--and the incident was closed.