As we drove through the town he said:
“This is like coming back to earth from another world. It is like a
dream too. Some streets are just as they were, only the faces are
unfamiliar. I almost expect to see the ghosts of thirty years ago.”
I made some vague comment and as we jogged along talked of the
unchanged or new owners of the houses. Then I felt him make a sudden
movement beside me, and I looked round at him. He could not turn any
paler than he was, yet there had been a change in his face.
“I do see ghosts,” he said slowly and softly.
I followed his glance as he gazed past me. We were approaching the
Kenton homestead and nearly opposite it. It had an old-fashioned
classic portico with four big white columns. At the top of the steps,
between the two middle columns, stood Mary Kenton, all in pink with a
rose in her jetty hair. She was looking intently at us, but not at me.
Case stared at her fixedly.
“Mary Kenton is the picture of her mother,” I told him.
“Her very image,” he breathed, his eyes steadily on her.
She continued gazing at us. Of course she knew whom I was driving. My
horses were trotting slowly and when we were opposite her, she waved
her hand.
“Welcome home, Cousin Cassius,” she called cheerily.
Colonel Case waved his hat to her and bowed, but said nothing.
The Shelby mansion did not suit Colonel Case. What he wanted, he said,
was a house at the edge of the town. When he had made his selection
he bought it promptly. He had the outbuildings razed, the shrubbery
torn up and the trees trimmed so that no limb hung within ten feet of
the ground; above they were left untouched, tall and spreading as they
were and almost interlacing with each other. The house he practically
rebuilt. Its all-round veranda he had torn down and replaced by one
even broader, but at the front only, facing the entrance, the only
entrance he left. For he entirely closed the back-way to the kitchen
and side-gate to the stable, cutting instead a loop-drive around the
house from the one front entrance.
Except for this stone-posted carriage-gate with the little footpath
gate beside it, he had the whole place surrounded with a fence the
like of which Brexington had never seen. The posts were T-beams, of
rolled steel, eight feet tall above ground, reaching six feet below it
and bedded down in rammed concrete. To these was bolted a four-foot
continuous, square-mesh wire fencing, the meshes not over six inches
at its top and as small as two inches at the bottom, which was sunk a
hand’s breadth below the surface and there held by close-set clamps
upon sections of gas-pipe, extending from post to post and bolted to
them. Inside this mesh-fencing, as high as it reached, and above it to
the top of the posts, were strung twenty strands of heavy barbed wire,
the upper wires six inches apart, the lower strands closer. Inside the
fence he had set a close hedge. As the plants composing it were large
and vigorous when they arrived from the nurseryman, this was soon
thick and strong. It was kept clipped to about three feet high. The
flower-beds he abolished and from house to drive and drive to hedge
soon had the whole place in well-kept turf.
Behind the house he had two outbuildings erected; at one corner a small
carriage-house and stable, capable of holding two vehicles and three
horses; at the other a structure of about the same size as the stable,
half wood-shed and half hen-house.
Watching the carpenters at work on this and regarding the
nine-days-wonder of a fence, several negroes stood in talk one day as I
passed. They were laughing and I overheard one say:
“Mahs’r Case shuah ain’ gwine tuh lose no hains awf he roos’. Mus be
gwine tuh be powerful fine hains he gwine raise. He sutt’nly mus’ sot
stoah by he hains. He sutt’nly dun tuk en’ spain’ cunnsdd’ble money awn
he faince.”
The interior of the house was finished plainly and furnished sparingly.
The very day it was ready for occupancy he moved into it and ceased his
camp life. Besides Cato, an old negro named Samson acted as cook, and
another named Pompey as butler. These three made up all his household.
Jeff was quartered in a room over the carriage-house.
Before his residence was prepared and while he was still camping he
bought Shelby Manor.
“Nothing like obliging one’s cousins,” he said. He also bought two
adjoining farms, forming a property of over a thousand acres. This
he proceeded to equip as a stud farm, engaging a competent manager;
refitting the house for him and the two smaller houses for his
assistants, the overseer and farmer; abolishing the old outbuildings;
putting up barns and stables in the most lavish fashion. He bought many
blooded mares and created an establishment on a large scale.
About two miles out of town on the road past his house, nearly half
way to Shelby Manor, he bought a worthless little farm of some forty
acres. This he had fenced and put in grass, except a small garden-patch
by the house, which he had made snug and where he had installed an
elderly negro couple as caretakers. The old man had formerly belonged
to the Colonel’s father, and was named Erastus Everett. All the other
buildings he had removed, except a fair-sized hay barrack standing on
a knoll near the middle of the largest field. This he had new roofed
and repaired and given two coats of shingle stain, moss green on the
roof and weather gray on the sides. In it he had ranked up some forty
cords of fat pine wood. Near the house was built a small stable, which
harbored the two mules Case allowed uncle Rastus.
Besides this he had built a number of low sheds, opening on spaces
enclosed with wire netting. Soon the enclosures swarmed with dogs, not
blooded dogs, but mere mongrel curs. Not a small dog among them, all
were big or fairly large. Uncle Rastus drove about the country in his
big close-covered wagon, behind his two mules. Wherever he found an
utterly worthless dog of some size he bought it, if it could be had
cheap, and turned it in with the rest. Before a year had passed uncle
Rastus had more than a hundred no-account brutes to feed and care for.
Colonel Case was not a man to whom anyone, least of all a stranger,
would put a direct unsolicited question. Uncle Rastus was more
approachable. But the curious gained little information from him.
“Mahs’r Cash ain’ tole muh wuff’r he keepin’ awl dees yeah houns. He
ain’ spoke nuffin. He done tole muh tur buy ’um, he done tole muh to
feed ’um. Ahze buyed ’um en’ Ah feeds ’um.”
Once he had established himself Case lived an extremely regular life.
He rose early, breakfasted simply, and whatever the weather, drove
out to Shelby Manor. He never rode in the forenoon. At his estate he
had a pistol-range and a rifle-range. He spent nearly an hour each
morning in pistol and rifle practice. He never used a shot-gun, but
shot at targets, running marks, and trap-sprung clay-pigeons with both
repeating rifle and revolver. He always carried his two repeating
rifles with him, and brought them back with him. Several times, when I
happened to accompany him, I watched him shoot.
The first time I was rather surprised. He emptied the chambers of one
revolver, made some fifty shots with it, cleaned it, replaced the six
cartridges which had been in it, and put it in its holster. Then he
did the like with the other. Then he similarly emptied the magazines
of one of his rifles, made some fifty shots with that, cleaned it and
reloaded it with the original cartridges. So with the second rifle.