CHAPTER I

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[Illustration: THE KINNEYS "Take care of Lily"]

THE

Bishop of Cottontown

A STORY OF THE SOUTHERN

COTTON MILLS

BY

JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE

AUTHOR OF

"A Summer Hymnal," "Ole Mistis," "Songs and Stories

from Tennessee," etc.

ILLUSTRATED BY THE KINNEYS

"And each in his separate star,

Shall paint the thing as he sees it

For the God of Things As They Are."

Kipling

PHILADELPHIA

THE JOHN C. WINSTON COMPANY

1906

COPYRIGHT, 1906,

BY JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE

Entered at Stationers' Hall, London, 1906

_All Rights Reserved_

IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER,

EMILY BILLINGSLEA MOORE,

WHO DIED

DECEMBER 14TH, 1903,

THE FAITH OF THIS BOOK BEING HERS.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

PART FIRST--THE BLOOM.

PROLOGUE--THE COTTON BLOSSOM 7

PART SECOND--THE BOLL.

I. COTTON 13

II. RICHARD TRAVIS 18

III. JUD CARPENTER 27

IV. FOOD FOR THE FACTORY 39

V. THE FLY CATCHER CAUGHT 50

VI. THE FLINT AND THE COAL 64

VII. HILLARD WATTS 84

VIII. WESTMORELAND 92

IX. A MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING 103

X. A STAR AND A SATELLITE 108

XI. A MIDNIGHT BURIAL 117

XII. JACK BRACKEN 127

PART THIRD--THE GIN.

I. ALICE WESTMORE 143

II. THE REAL HEROES 151

III. FRANKLIN 154

PART FOURTH--THE LINT.

I. COTTONTOWN 179

II. BEN BUTLER 187

III. AN ANSWER TO PRAYER 199

IV. HOW THE BISHOP FROZE 205

V. THE FLOCK 209

VI. A BISHOP MILITANT 213

VII. MARGARET ADAMS 219

VIII. HARD-SHELL SUNDAY 226

IX. THE RETURN 232

X. THE SWAN SONG OF THE CREPE MYRTLE 239

XI. THE CASKET AND THE GHOST 248

XII. A MIDNIGHT GUARD 254

XIII. THE THEFT OF A CHILDHOOD 258

XIV. UNCLE DAVE'S WILL 275

XV. EDWARD CONWAY 287

XVI. HELEN'S DESPAIR 296

XVII. THE WHIPPER-IN 305

XVIII. SAMANTHA CAREWE 312

XIX. A QUICK CONVERSION 317

XX. A LIVE FUNERAL 326

XXI. JACK AND THE LITTLE ONES 336

XXII. THE BROKEN THREAD 344

XXIII. GOD WILL PROVIDE 350

XXIV. BONAPARTE'S WATERLOO 355

XXV. A BORN NATURALIST 366

XXVI. BEN BUTLER'S LAST RACE 380

XXVII. YOU'LL COME BACK A MAN 414

PART FIFTH--THE LOOM.

I. A NEW MILL GIRL 419

II. IN THE DEPTHS 431

III. WORK IN A NEW LIGHT 438

IV. MAGGIE 443

V. PAY-DAY 447

VI. THE PLOT 456

VII. MRS. WESTMORE TAKES A HAND 464

VIII. A QUESTION BROUGHT HOME 473

IX. THE PEDIGREE OF ACHIEVEMENT 487

X. MARRIED IN GOD'S SIGHT 493

XI. THE QUEEN IS DEAD 499

XII. IN THYSELF THERE IS WEAKNESS 508

XIII. HIMSELF AGAIN 512

XIV. THE JOY OF THE MORNING 519

XV. THE TOUCH OF GOD 526

XVI. MAMMY MARIA 533

XVII. THE DOUBLE THAT DIED 545

XVIII. THE DYING LION 552

XIX. FACE TO FACE WITH DEATH 564

XX. THE ANGEL WITH THE FLAMING SWORD 572

XXI. THE GREAT FIRE 581

XXII. A CONWAY AGAIN 588

XXIII. DIED FOR THE LAW 596

XXIV. THE ATONEMENT 611

XXV. THE SHADOWS AND THE CLOUDS 624

XXVI. THE MODEL MILL 633

[Transcriber's Note: Obvious printer errors, have been silently

corrected. For clarity, have added new paragraphs with respect to

dialogue within paragraphs. The name Hillard and Hilliard have

been uniformly changed to Hillard. Corrected incorrect usages of

'its' and 'it's.' All other inconsistencies (i.e. The inconsistent

spellings--sombre/somber, gray/grey, hyphen/no hyphen) have been

left as they were in the original.]

PART FIRST--THE BLOOM

THE COTTON BLOSSOM

The cotton blossom is the only flower that is born in the shuttle of

a sunbeam and dies in a loom.

It is the most beautiful flower that grows, and needs only to become

rare to be priceless--only to die to be idealized.

For the world worships that which it hopes to attain, and our ideals

are those things just out of our reach.

Satiety has ten points and possession is nine of them.

If, in early August, the delicately green leaves of this most

aristocratic of all plants, instead of covering acres of Southland

shimmering under a throbbing sun, peeped daintily out, from among the

well-kept beds of some noble garden, men would flock to see that

plant, which, of all plants, looks most like a miniature tree.

A stout-hearted plant,--a tree, dwarfed, but losing not its dignity.

Then, one morning, with the earliest sunrise, and born of it, there

emerges from the scalloped sea-shell of the bough an exquisite,

pendulous, cream-white blossom, clasping in its center a golden

yellow star, pinked with dawn points of light, and, setting high up

under its sky of milk-white petals flanked with yellow stars, it

seems to the little nestling field-wrens born beneath it to be the

miniature arch of daybreak, ere the great eye of the morning star

closes.

Later, when the sun rises and the sky above grows pink and purple,

it, too, changes its color from pink to purple, copying the sky from

zone to zone, from blue to deeper blue, until, at late evening the

young nestlings may look up and say, in their bird language: "It is

twilight."

What other flower among them can thus copy Nature, the great master?

Under every sky is a sphere, and under this sky picture, when night

falls and closes it, a sphere is born. And in that sphere is all of

earth.

Its oils and its minerals are there, and one day, becoming too full

of richness, it bursts, and throws open a five-roomed granary, stored

with richer fabric than ever came from the shuttles of Fez and

holding globes of oil such as the olives of Hebron dreamed not of.

And in that fabric is the world clothed.

Oh, little loom of the cotton-plant, poet that can show us the sky,

painter that paints it, artisan that reaches out, and, from the skein

of a sunbeam, the loom of the air and the white of its own soul,

weaves the cloth that clothes the world!

From dawn and darkness building a loom. From sunlight and shadow

weaving threads of such fineness that the spider's were ropes of sand

and the hoar frost's but clumsy icicles.

Weaving--weaving--weaving them. And the delicately patterned tapestry

of ever-changing clouds forming patterns of a fabric, white as the

snow of the centuries, determined that since it has to make the

garments of men, it will make them unsullied.

Oh, little plant, poet, painter, master-artisan!

It is true to Nature to the last. The summer wanes and the winter

comes, and when the cotton sphere bursts, 'tis a ball of snow, but a

dazzling white, spidery snow, which warms and does not chill, brings

comfort and not care, wealth and the rich warm blood, and not the

pinches of poverty.

There are those who cannot hear God's voice unless He speaks to them

in the thunders of Sinai, nor see Him unless He flares before them in

the bonfires of a burning bush. They grumble because His Messenger

came to a tribe in the hill countries of Long Ago. They wish to see

the miracle of the dead arising. They see not the miracle of life

around them. Death from Life is more strange to them than life from

death.

'Tis the silent voice that speaks the loudest. Did Sinai speak louder

than this? Hear it:

"I am a bloom, and yet I reflect the sky from the morning's star to

the midnight's. I am a flower, yet I show you the heaven from the

dawn of its birth to the twilight of its death. I am a boll, and yet

a miniature earth stored with silks and satins, oils of the olives,

minerals of all lands. And when I am ripe I throw open my five-roomed

granary, each fitted to the finger and thumb of the human hand, with

a depth between, equalled only by the palm."

O voice of the cotton-plant, do we need to go to oracles or listen

for a diviner voice than yours when thus you tell us: Pluck?

PART SECOND--THE BOLL

CHAPTER I

COTTON

The frost had touched the gums and maples in the Tennessee Valley,

and the wood, which lined every hill and mountain side, looked like

huge flaming bouquets--large ones, where the thicker wood clustered

high on the side of Sand Mountain and stood out in crimson, gold and

yellow against the sky,--small ones, where they clustered around the

foot hills.

Nature is nothing if not sentimental. She will make bouquets if none

be made for her; or, mayhap, she wishes her children to be, and so

makes them bouquets herself.

There was that crispness in the air which puts one to wondering if,

after all, autumn is not the finest time of the year.

It had been a prosperous year in the Tennessee Valley--that year of

1874. And it had brought a double prosperity, in that, under the

leadership of George S. Houston, the white men of the state, after a

desperate struggle, had thrown off the political yoke of the negro

and the carpetbagger, and once more the Saxon ruled in the land of

his birth.

Then was taken a full, long, wholesome, air-filling Anglo-Saxon

breath, from the Tennessee Valley to the Gulf. There was a quickening

of pulses that had faltered, and heart-beats that had fluttered,

dumb and discouraged, now rattled like kettle-drums, to the fight of

life.

It meant change--redemption--prosperity. And more: that the white

blood which had made Alabama, need not now leave her for a home

elsewhere.

It was a year glorious, and to be remembered. One which marks an

epoch. One wherein there is an end of the old and a beginning of the

new.

The cotton--the second picking--still whitened thousands of acres.

There were not hands enough to pick it. The negroes, demoralized for

a half score of years by the brief splendor of elevation, and backed,

at first, by Federal bayonets and afterwards by sheer force of their

own number in elections, had been correspondingly demoralized and

shiftless. True to their instinct then, as now, they worked only so

long as they needed money. If one day's cotton picking fed a negro

for five, he rested the five.

The negro race does not live to lay up for a rainy day.

And so the cotton being neglected, its lengthened and frowseled locks

hung from wide open bolls like the locks of a tawdry woman in early

morning.

No one wanted it--that is, wanted it bad enough to pick it. For

cotton was cheap that fall--very cheap--and picking cotton is a

back-bending business. Therefore it hung its frowsy locks from the

boll.

And nothing makes so much for frowsiness in the cotton plant, and in

woman, as to know they are not wanted.

The gin-houses were yet full, tho' the gin had been running day and

night. That which poured, like pulverized snow, from the mouth of the

flues into the pick-room--where the cotton fell before being pressed

into bales--scarcely had time to be tramped down and packed off in

baskets to the tall, mast-like screws which pressed the bales and

bound them with ties, ere the seed cotton came pouring in again from

wagon bed and basket.

The gin hummed and sawed and sang and creaked, but it could not

devour the seed cotton fast enough from the piles of the incoming

fleece.

Those grew lighter and larger all the time.

The eight Tennessee sugar-mules, big and sinewy, hitched to the lever

underneath the gin-house at The Gaffs, sweated until they sprinkled

in one continual shower the path which they trod around the

pivot-beam from morning until night.

Around--around--forever around.

For the levers turned the pivot-beam, and the pivot-beam turned the

big shaft-wheel which turned the gin-wheel, and the gin had to go or

it seemed as if the valley would be smothered in cotton.

Picked once, the fields still looked like a snowfall in November, if

such a thing were possible in a land which scarcely felt a dozen

snowfalls in as many years.

Dust! There is no dust like that which comes from a gin-house. It may

be tasted in the air. All other dust is gravel compared to the

penetrating fineness of that diabolical, burning blight which flies

out of the lint, from the thousand teeth of the gin-saws, as diamond

dust flies from the file.

It is all penetrating, consumptive-breeding, sickening, stifling,

suffocating. It is hot and has a metallic flavor; and it flies from

the hot steel teeth of the saws, as pestilence from the hot breath of

the swamps.

It is linty, furry, tickling, smothering, searing.

It makes one wonder why, in picturing hell, no priest ever thought of

filling it with cotton-gin dust instead of fire.

And it clings there from the Lint to the Loom.

Small wonder that the poor little white slaves, taking up their

serfdom at the loom where the negro left off at the lint, die like

pigs in a cotton-seed pen.

There was cotton everywhere--in the fields, unpicked; in the

gin-houses, unginned. That in the fields would be plowed under next

spring, presenting the strange anomaly of plowing under one crop to

raise another of the same kind. But it has been done many times in

the fertile Valley of the Tennessee.

There is that in the Saxon race that makes it discontented, even with

success.

There was cotton everywhere; it lay piled up around the gin-houses

and screws and negro-cabins and under the sheds and even under the

trees. All of it, which was exposed to the weather, was in bales,

weighing each a fourth of a ton and with bulging white spots in their

bellies where the coarse cotton baling failed to cover their

nakedness.

It was cotton--cotton--cotton. Seed,--ginned,--lint,--baled,--cotton.

The Gaffs was a fine estate of five thousand acres which had been

handed down for several generations. The old home sat in a grove of

hickory, oak and elm trees, on a gentle slope. Ancient sentinels, and

they were there when the first Travis came from North Carolina to the

Tennessee Valley and built his first double-log cabin under the

shelter of their arms.

From the porch of The Gaffs,--as the old home was called--the

Tennessee River could be seen two miles away, its brave swift channel

glittering like the flash of a silver arrow in the dark green wood

which bordered it.

Back of the house the mountain ridge rolled; not high enough to be

awful and unapproachable, nor so low as to breed contempt from a too

great familiarity. Not grand, but the kind one loves to wander over.

CHAPTER II

RICHARD TRAVIS

Strength was written in the face of Richard Travis--the owner of The

Gaffs--intellectual, physical, passion-strength, strength of purpose

and of doing. Strength, but not moral strength; and hence lacking all

of being all-conquering.

He had that kind of strength which made others think as he thought,

and do as he would have them do. He saw things clearly, strongly,

quickly. His assurance made all things sure. He knew things and was

proud of it. He knew himself and other men. And best of all, as he

thought, he knew women.

Richard Travis was secretary and treasurer of the Acme Cotton Mills.

To-night he was alone in the old-fashioned but elegant dining-room of

the Gaffs. The big log fire of ash and hickory was pleasant, and the

blaze, falling in sombre color on the old mahogany side-board which

sat opposite the fireplace, on the double ash floor, polished and

shining, added a deeper and richer hue to it. From the toes of the

dragon on which it rested, to the beak of the hand-carved eagle,

spreading his wings over the shield beneath him, carved in the solid

mahogany and surrounded by thirteen stars, all was elegance and

aristocracy. Even the bold staring eyes of the eagle seemed proud of

the age of the side-board, for had it not been built when the stars

numbered but thirteen? And was not the eagle rampant then?

The big brass andirons were mounted with the bronzed heads of

wood-nymphs, and these looked saucily up at the eagle. The

three-cornered cupboard, in one corner of the room, was of cherry,

with small diamond-shaped windows in front, showing within rare old

sets of china and cut glass. The handsome square dining table matched

the side-board, only its dragon feet were larger and stronger, as if

intended to stand up under more weight, at times.

Everything was ancient and had a pedigree. Even the Llewellyn setter

was old, for he was grizzled around the muzzle and had deep-set,

lusterless eyes, from which the firelight, as if afraid of their very

uncanniness, darted out as soon as it entered. And he carried his

head to one side when he walked, as old and deaf dogs do.

He lay on a rug before the fire. He had won this license, for

opposite his name on the kennel books were more field-trials won than

by any other dog in Alabama. And now he dozed and dreamed of them

again, with many twitchings of feet, and cocked, quivering ears, and

rigid tail, as if once more frozen to the covey in the tall

sedge-grass of the old field, with the smell of frost-bitten

Lespedeza, wet with dew, beneath his feet.

Travis stooped and petted the old dog. It was the one thing of his

household he loved most.

"Man or dog--'tis all the same," he mused as he watched the dreaming

dog--"it is old age's privilege to dream of what has been done--it is

youth's to do."

He stretched himself in his big mahogany chair and glanced down his

muscular limbs, and drew his arms together with a snap of quick

strength.

Everything at The Gaffs was an open diary of the master's life. It is

so in all homes--that which we gather around us, from our books to

our bed-clothes, is what we are.

And so the setter on the rug meant that Richard Travis was the best

wing-shot in the Tennessee Valley, and that his kennel of Gladstone

setters had won more field trials than any other kennel in the South.

No man has really hunted who has never shot quail in Alabama over a

well-broken setter. All other hunting is butchery compared to the

scientific sweetness of this sport.

There was a good-night, martial, daring crow, ringing from the

Hoss-apple tree at the dining-room window. Travis smiled and called

out:

"Lights waked you up, eh, Dick? You're a gay Lothario--go back to

sleep."

Richard Travis had the original stock--the Irish Greys--which his

doughty old grandsire, General Jeremiah Travis, developed to

championship honors, and in a memorable main with his friend, General

Andrew Jackson, ten years after the New Orleans campaign, he had

cleared up the Tennesseans, cock and pocket. It was a big main in

which Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama were pitted against each other,

and in which the Travis cocks of the Emerald Isle strain, as Old

Hickory expressed it, "stood the steel like a stuck she-b'ar,

fightin' for her cubs."

General Travis had been an expert at heeling a cock; and it is said

that his skill on that occasion was worth more than the blood of his

Greys; for by a peculiar turn of the gaffs,--so slight as to escape

the notice of any but an expert--his champion cock had struck the

blow which ended the battle. With the money won, he had added four

thousand acres to his estate, and afterwards called it The Gaffs.

And a strong, brave man had been General Jeremiah Travis,--pioneer,

Indian fighter, Colonel in the Creek war and at New Orleans, and a

General in the war with Mexico.

His love for the Union had been that of a brave man who had gone

through battles and shed his blood for his country.

The Civil War broke his heart.

In his early days his heart had been in his thoroughbred horses and

his fighting cocks, and when he heard that his nephew had died with

Crockett and Bowie at the Alamo, he drew himself proudly up and said:

"A right brave boy, by the Eternal, and he died as becomes one

crossed on an Irish Grey cock."

That had been years before. Now, a new civilization had come on the

stage, and where the grandsire had taken to thoroughbreds, Richard

Travis, the grandson, took to trotters. In the stalls where once

stood the sons of Sir Archie, Boston, and imported Glencoe himself,

now were sons of Mambrino Patchin, and George Wilkes and Harold. And

a splendid lot they were--sires,--brood mares and colts, in the

paddocks of The Gaffs.

Travis took no man's dust in the Tennessee Valley. At county fairs he

had a walk-over.

He had inherited The Gaffs from his grandfather, for both his parents

died in his infancy, and his two remaining uncles gave their lives in

Virginia, early in the war, following the flag of the Confederacy.

One of them had left a son, whom Richard Travis had educated and who

had, but the June before, graduated from the State University.

Travis saw but little of him, since each did as he pleased, and it

did not please either of them to get into each other's way.

There had been no sympathy between them. There could not be, for they

were too much alike in many ways.

There can be no sympathy in selfishness.

All through the summer Harry Travis had spent his time at picnics and

dances, and, but for the fact that his cousin now and then missed one

of his best horses from the stable, or found his favorite gun put

away foul, or his fishing tackle broken, he would not have known that

Harry was on the place.

Cook-mother Charity kept the house. Bond and free, she had spent all

her life at The Gaffs. Of this she was prouder than to have been

housekeeper at Windsor. Her word was law; she was the only mortal who

bossed, as she called it, Richard Travis.

Usually, friends from town kept the owner company, and The Gaffs'

reputation for hospitality, while generous, was not unnoted for its

hilarity.

To-night Richard Travis was lonely. His supper tray had not been

removed. He lit a cigar and picked up a book--it was Herbert Spencer,

and he was soon interested.

Ten minutes later an octoroon house-girl, with dark Creole eyes, and

bright ribbons in her hair, came in to remove the supper dishes. She

wore a bright-colored green gown, cut low. As she reached over the

table near him he winced at the strong smell of musk, which beauties

of her race imagine adds so greatly to their aesthetic _status-quo_.

She came nearer to him than was necessary, and there was an attempted

familiarity in the movement that caused him to curve slightly the

corner of his thin, nervous lip, showing beneath his mustache. She

kept a half glance on him always. He smoked and read on, until the

rank smell of her perfume smote him again through the odor of his

cigar, and as he looked up she had busied around so close to him that

her exposed neck was within two feet of him bent in seeming innocence

over the tray. With a mischievous laugh he reached over and flipped

the hot ashes from his cigar upon her neck. She screamed affectedly

and danced about shaking off the ashes. Then with feigned maidenly

piquancy and many reproachful glances, she went out laughing good

humoredly.

He was good natured, and when she was gone he laughed boyishly.

Good nature is one of the virtues of impurity.

Still giggling she set the tray down in the kitchen and told

Cook-mother Charity about it. That worthy woman gave her a warning

look and said:

"The frisk'ness of this new gen'ration of niggers makes me tired.

Better let Marse Dick alone--he's a dan'g'us man with women."

In the dining-room Travis sat quiet and thoughtful. He was a

handsome man, turning forty. His face was strong, clean shaved,

except a light mustache, with full sensual lips and an unusually fine

brow. It was the brow of intellect--all in front. Behind and above

there was no loftiness of ideality or of veneration. His smile was

constant, and though slightly cold, was always approachable. His

manner was decisive, but clever always, and kind-hearted at times.

Contrary to his habit, he grew reminiscent. He despised this kind of

a mood, because, as he said, "It is the weakness of a fool to think

about himself." He walked to the window and looked out on the broad

fields of The Gaffs in the valley before him. He looked at the

handsomely furnished room and thought of the splendid old home. Then

he deliberately surveyed himself in the mirror. He smiled:

"'Survival of the fittest'--yes, Spencer is right--a great--great

mind. He is living now, and the world, of course, will not admit his

greatness until he is dead. Life, like the bull that would rule the

herd, is never ready to admit that other life is great. A poet is

always a dead rhymester,--a philosopher, a dead dreamer.

"Let Spencer but die!

"Tush! Why indulge in weak modesty and fool self-depreciation? Even

instinct tells me--that very lowest of animal intellectual

forces--that I survive because I am stronger than the dead.

Providence--God--whatever it is, has nothing to do with it except to

start you and let you survive by overcoming. Winds you up and

then--devil take the hindmost!

"It is brains--brains--brains that count--brains first and always.

This moral stuff is fit only for those who are too weak to

conquer. I have accomplished everything in life I have ever

undertaken--everything--and--by brains! Not once have I failed--I have

done it by intellect, courage--intuition--the thing in one that speaks.

"Now as to things of the heart,"--he stopped suddenly--he even

scowled half humorously. It came over him--his failure there, as one

who, sweeping with his knights the pawns of an opponent, suddenly

finds himself confronting a queen--and checkmated.

He walked to the window again and looked toward the northern end of

the valley. There the gables of an old and somewhat weather-beaten

home sat in a group of beech on a rise among the foothills.

"Westmoreland"--he said--"how dilapidated it is getting to be!

Something must be done there, and Alice--Alice,"--he repeated the

name softly--reverently--"I feel--I know it--she--even she shall be

mine--after all these years--she shall come to me yet."

He smiled again: "Then I shall have won all around. Fate? Destiny?

Tush! It's living and surviving weaker things, such for instance as

my cousin Tom."

He smiled satisfactorily. He flecked some cotton lint from his coat

sleeve.

"I have had a hard time in the mill to-day. It's a beastly business

robbing the poor little half-made-up devils."

He rang for Aunt Charity. She knew what he wished, and soon came in

bringing him his cocktail--his night-cap as she always called

it,--only of late he had required several in an evening,--a thing

that set the old woman to quarreling with him, for she knew the limit

of a gentleman. And, in truth, she was proud of her cocktails. They

were made from a recipe given by Andrew Jackson. For fifty years

Cook-mother Charity had made one every night and brought it to "old

marster" before he retired. Now she proudly brought it to his

grandson.

"Oh, say Mammy," he said as the old woman started out--"Carpenter

will be here directly with his report. Bring another pair of these

in--we will want them."

The old woman bristled up. "To be sure, I'll fix 'em, honey. He'll

not know the difference. But the licker he gits in his'n will come

outen the bottle we keep for the hosses when they have the colic. The

bran' we keep for gem'men would stick in his th'oat."

Travis laughed: "Well--be sure you don't get that horse brand in

mine."

CHAPTER III

JUD CARPENTER

An hour afterwards, Travis heard a well-known walk in the hall and

opened the door.

He stepped back astonished. He released the knob and gazed half

angry, half smiling.

A large dog, brindled and lean, walked complacently and

condescendingly in, followed by his master. At a glance, the least

imaginative could see that Jud Carpenter, the Whipper-in of the Acme

Cotton Mills, and Bonaparte, his dog, were well mated.

The man was large, raw-boned and brindled, and he, also, walked in,

complacently and condescendingly.

The dog's ears had been cropped to match his tail, which in his

infancy had been reduced to a very few inches. His under jaw

protruded slightly--showing the trace of bull in his make-up.

That was the man all over. Besides he had a small, mean, roguish ear.

The dog was cross-eyed--"the only cross-eyed purp in the worl'"--as

his master had often proudly proclaimed, and the expression of his

face was uncanny.

Jud Carpenter's eastern-eye looked west, and his western-eye looked

east, and the rest of the paragraph above fitted him also.

The dog's pedigree, as his master had drawlingly proclaimed, was

"p'yart houn', p'yart bull, p'yart cur, p'yart terrier, an' the rest

of him--wal, jes' dog."

Reverse this and it will be Carpenter's: Just dog, with a sprinkling

of bull, cur, terrier, and hound.

Before Richard Travis could protest, the dog walked deliberately to

the fireplace and sprang savagely on the helpless old setter dreaming

on the rug. The older dog expostulated with terrific howls, while

Travis turned quickly and kicked off the intruder.

He stood the kicking as quietly as if it were part of the programme

in the last act of a melodrama in which he was the villain. He was

kicked entirely across the room and his head was driven violently

into the half-open door of the side-board. Here it came in contact

with one of Cook-mother's freshly baked hams, set aside for the

morrow's lunch. Without even a change of countenance--for, in truth,

it could not change--without the lifting even of a hair in surprise,

the brute seized the ham and settled right where he was, to lunch.

And he did it as complacently as he had walked in, and with a

satisfied growl which seemed to say that, so far as the villain was

concerned, the last act of the melodrama was ending to his entire

satisfaction.

Opening a side door, Travis seized him by the stump of a tail and one

hind leg--knowing his mouth was too full of ham to bite anything--and

threw him, still clutching the ham, bodily into the back yard.

Without changing the attitude he found himself in when he hit the

ground, the brindled dog went on with his luncheon.

The very cheek of it set Travis to laughing. He closed the door and

said to the man who had followed the dog in: "Carpenter, if I had

the nerve of that raw-boned fiend that follows you around, I'd soon

own the world."

The man had already taken his seat by the fire as unaffectedly as had

the dog. He had entered as boldly and as indifferently and his two

deep-set, cat-gray cross-eyes looked around as savagely.

He was a tall, lank fellow, past middle age, with a crop of stiff,

red-brown hair, beginning midway of his forehead, so near to an

equally shaggy and heavy splotch of eyebrows as to leave scarce a

finger's breadth between them.

He was wiry and shrewd-looking, and his two deep-set eyes seemed

always like a leopard's,--walking the cage of his face, hunting for

some crack to slip through. Furtive, sly, darting, rolling hither and

thither, never still, comprehensive, all-seeing, malicious and deadly

shrewd. These were the eyes of Jud Carpenter, and they told it all.

To this, add again that they looked in contrary directions.

As a man's eye, so is the tenor of his life.

Yet in them, now and then, the twinkle of humor shone. He had a

conciliatory way with those beneath him, and he considered all the

mill hands in that class. To his superiors he was a frowning, yet

daring and even presumptuous underling.

Somewhat better dressed than the Hillites from whom he sprang was

this Whipper-in of the Acme Cotton Mills--somewhat better dressed,

and with the air of one who had arisen above his surroundings. Yet,

withal, the common, low-born, malicious instinct was there--the

instinct which makes one of them hate the man who is better educated,

better dressed than he. All told, it might be summed up and said of

Jud Carpenter that he had all the instincts of a Hillite and all the

arrogance of a manager.

"Nobody understands that dog, Bonaparte, but me," said Carpenter

after a while--"he's to dogs what his namesake was to man. He's the

champ'un fighter of the Tennessee Valley, an' the only cross-eyed

purp in the worl', as I have often said. Like all gen'uses of course,

he's a leetle peculiar--but him and me--we understan's each other."

He pulled out some mill papers and was about to proceed to discuss

his business when Travis interrupted:

"Hold on," he said, good humoredly, "after my experience with that

cross-eyed genius of a dog, I'll need something to brace me up."

He handed Carpenter a glass and each drank off his cocktail at a

quaff.

Travis settled quickly to business. He took out his mill books, and

for an hour the two talked in a low tone and mechanically. The

commissary department of the mill was taken up and the entire

accounts gone over. Memoranda were made of goods to be ordered. The

accounts of families were run over and inspected. It was tedious

work, but Travis never flagged and his executive ability was quick

and incisive. At last he closed the book with an impatient gesture:

"That's all I'll do to-night," he muttered decisively. "I've other

things to talk to you about. But we'll need something first."

He went to the side-board and brought out a decanter of whiskey, two

goblets and a bowl of loaf sugar.

He laughed: "Mammy knows nothing about this. Two cocktails are the

limit she sets for me, and so I keep this private bottle."

He made a long-toddy for himself, but Carpenter took his straight. In

all of it, his furtive eyes, shining out of the splotch of eyebrows

above, glanced inquiringly around and obsequiously followed every

movement of his superior.

"Now, Carpenter," said the Secretary after he had settled back in his

chair and lit a cigar, handing the box afterwards to the other--"You

know me--you and I--must understand each other in all things."

"'Bleeged to be that way," drawled the Whipper-in--"we must wu'ck

together. You know me, an' that Jud Carpenter's motto is, 'mum, an'

keep movin'.' That's me--that's Jud Carpenter."

Travis laughed: "O, it's nothing that requires so much heavy villain

work as the tone of your voice would suggest. We're not in a

melodrama. This is the nineteenth century and we're talking business

and going to win a thing or two by common sense and business ways,

eh?"

Carpenter nodded.

"Well, now, the first is quite matter of fact--just horses. I believe

we are going to have the biggest fair this fall we have ever had."

"It's lots talked about," said Carpenter--"'specially the big race

an' purse you've got put up."

Travis grew interested quickly and leaned over excitedly.

"My reputation is at stake--and that of The Gaffs' stable. You see,

Carpenter, it's a three-cornered race for three-thousand

dollars--each of us, Col. Troup, Flecker and me, have put up a

thousand--three heats out of five--the winner takes the stake. Col.

Troup, of Lenox, has entered a fast mare of his, and Flecker, of

Tennessee, will be there with his gelding. I know Flecker's horse. I

could beat him with Lizette and one of her legs tied up. I looked him

over last week. Contracted heels and his owner hasn't got horse-sense

to know it. It's horse-sense, Carpenter, that counts for success in

life as in a race."

Carpenter nodded again.

"But it's different with Col. Troup's entry. Ever been to Lenox?" he

asked suddenly.

Carpenter shook his head.

"Don't know anybody there?" asked Travis. "I thought so--just what I

want."

He went on indifferently, but Carpenter saw that he was measuring his

words and noting their effect upon himself. "They work out over there

Tuesdays and Fridays--the fair is only a few weeks off--they will be

stepping their best by Friday. Now, go there and say nothing--but

just sit around and see how fast Col. Troup's mare can trot."

"That'll be easy," said Carpenter.

"I have no notion of losing my thousand and reputation, too." He bent

over to Carpenter and laughed. "All's fair in love and--a horse race.

You know it's the 2:25 class, and I've entered Lizette, but Sadie B.

is so much like her that no living man who doesn't curry them every

day could tell them apart. Sadie B.'s mark is 2:15. Now see if Troup

can beat 2:25. Maybe he can't beat 2:15."

Then he laughed ironically.

Carpenter looked at him wonderingly.

It was all he said, but it was enough for Carpenter. Fraud's wink to

the fraudulent is an open book. Her nod is the nod of the Painted

Thing passing down the highway.

Base-born that he was--low by instinct and inheritance, he had never

heard of so brilliant and so gentlemanly a piece of fraud. The

consummate boldness of it made Carpenter's eyes twinkle--a gentleman

and in a race with gentlemen--who would dare to suspect? It was the

boldness of a fine woman, daring to wear a necklace of paste-diamonds.

He sat looking at Travis in silent admiration. Never before had his

employer risen to such heights in the eyes of the Whipper-in. He sat

back in his chair and chuckled. His furtive eyes danced.

"Nobody but a born gen'us 'ud ever have tho'rt of that," he

said--"never seed yo' e'kal--why, the money is your'n, any way you

fix it. You can ring in Lizette one heat and Sadie B."----

"There are things to be thought and not talked of," replied Travis

quickly. "For a man of your age ar'n't you learning to talk too much

out loud? You go and find out what I've asked--I'll do the rest. I'm

thinking I'll not need Sadie B. Never run a risk, even a dead sure

one, till you're obliged to."

"I'll fetch it next week--trust me for that. But I hope you will do

it--ring in Sadie B. just for the fun of it. Think of old bay-window

Troup trottin' his mare to death ag'in two fast horses an' never

havin' sense enough to see it."

He looked his employer over--from his neatly turned foot to the

cravat, tied in an up-to-date knot. At that, even, Travis flushed.

"Here," he said--"another toddy. I'll trust you to bring in your

report all right."

Carpenter again took his straight--his eyes had begun to glitter, his

face to flush, and he felt more like talking.

Travis lit another cigar. He puffed and smoked in silence for a

while. The rings of smoke went up incessantly. His face had begun to

redden, his fingers to thrill to the tip with pulsing blood. With it

went his final contingency of reserve, and under it he dropped to the

level of the base-born at his side.

Whiskey is the great leveler of life. Drinking it, all men are,

indeed, equal.

"When are you going out to get in more hands for the mill?" asked

Travis after a pause.

"To-morrow----"

"So soon?" asked Travis.

"Yes, you see," said Carpenter, "there's been ha'f a dozen of the

brats died this summer an' fall--scarlet fever in the mill."

Travis looked at him and smiled.

"An' I've got to git in some mo' right away," he went on. "Oh,

there's plenty of 'em in these hills."

Travis smoked for a few minutes without speaking.

"Carpenter, had you ever thought of Helen Conway--I mean--of getting

Conway's two daughters into the mill?" He made the correction with a

feigned indifference, but the other quickly noticed it. In an instant

Carpenter knew.

As a matter of fact the Whipper-in had not thought of it, but it was

easy for him to say what he thought the other wished him to say.

"Wal, yes," he replied; "that's jes' what I had been thinkin' of.

They've got to come in--'ristocrats or no 'ristocrats! When it comes

to a question of bread and meat, pedigree must go to the cellar."

"To the attic, you mean," said Travis--"where their old clothes are."

Carpenter laughed: "That's it--you all'ers say the k'rect thing. 'N'

as I was sayin'"--he went on--"it is a ground-hog case with 'em. The

Major's drunk all the time. His farm an' home'll be sold soon. He's

'bleeged to put 'em in the mill--or the po'-house."

He paused, thinking. Then, "But ain't that Helen about the pretties'

thing you ever seed?" He chuckled. "You're sly--but I seen you givin'

her that airin' behin' Lizette and Sadie B.--"

"You've nothing to do with that," said Travis gruffly. "You want a

new girl for our drawing-in machine--the best paying and most

profitable place in the mill--off from the others--in a room by

herself--no contact with mill-people--easy job--two dollars a day--"

"One dollar--you forgit, suh--one dollar's the reg'lar price, sah,"

interrupted the Whipper-in.

The other turned on him almost fiercely: "Your memory is as weak as

your wits--two dollars, I tell you, and don't interrupt me again--"

"To be sho'," said the Whipper-in, meekly--"I did forgit--please

excuse me, sah."

"Then, in talking to Conway, you, of course, would draw his attention

to the fact that he is to have a nice cottage free of rent--that will

come in right handy when he finds himself out in the road--sold out

and nowhere to go," he said.

"'N' the commissary," put in Carpenter quietly. "Excuse me, sah, but

there's a mighty good bran' of whiskey there, you know!"

Travis smiled good humoredly: "Your wits are returning," he said; "I

think you understand."

"I'll see him to-morrow," said Carpenter, rising to go.

"Oh, don't be in a hurry," said Travis.

"Excuse me, sah, but I'm afraid I've bored you stayin' too long."

"Sit down," said the other, peremptorily--"you will need something to

help you along the road. Shall we take another?"

So they took yet another drink, and Carpenter went out, calling his

dog.

Travis stood in the doorway and watched them go down the driveway.

They both staggered lazily along. Travis smiled: "Both drunk--the dog

on ham."

As he turned to go in, he reeled slightly himself, but he did not

notice it.

When he came back he was restless. He looked at the clock. "Too early

for bed," he said. "I'd give a ten if Charley Biggers were here with

his little cocktail laugh to try me a game of poker."

Suddenly he went to the window, and taking a small silver whistle

from his pocket he blew it toward the stables. Soon afterwards a well

dressed mulatto boy entered.

"How are the horses to-night, Jim?" he asked.

"Fine, sir--all eatin' well an' feelin' good."

"And Coquette--the saddle mare?"

"Like split silk, sir."

"Exercise her to-morrow under the saddle, and Sunday afternoon we

will give Miss Alice her first ride on her--she's to be a present for

her on her birth-day, you know--eh?"

Jim bowed and started out.

"You may fix my bath now--think I'll retire. O Jim!" he called, "see

that Antar, the stallion, is securely stalled. You know how dangerous

he is."

He was just dozing off when the front door closed with a bang.

Then a metal whip handle thumped heavily on the floor and the

jingling of a spur rattled over the hall floor, as Harry Travis

boisterously went down the hall, singing tipsily,

"Oh, Johnny, my dear,

Just think of your head,

Just think of your head

In the morning."

Another door banged so loudly it awakened even the setter. The old

dog came to the side of the bed and laid his head affectionately in

Travis' palm. The master of The Gaffs stroked his head, saying: "It

is strange that I love this old dog so."

CHAPTER IV

FOOD FOR THE FACTORY

The next morning being Saturday, Carpenter, the Whipper-in, mounted

his Texas pony and started out toward the foothills of the mountains.

Upon the pommel of his saddle lay a long single-barreled squirrel

gun, for the hills were full of squirrels, and Jud was fond of a

tender one, now and then. Behind him, as usual, trotted Bonaparte,

his sullen eyes looking for an opportunity to jump on any timid

country dog which happened along.

There are two things for which all mills must be prepared--the wear

and tear of Time on the machinery--the wear and tear of Death on the

frail things who yearly work out their lives before it.

In the fight for life between the machine and the human labor, in the

race of life for that which men call success, who cares for the life

of one little mill hand? And what is one tot of them from another?

And if one die one month and another the next, and another the next

and the next, year in and year out, who remembers it save some

poverty-hardened, stooped and benumbed creature, surrounded by a

scrawny brood calling ever for bread?

The world knows not--cares not--for its tiny life is but a thread in

the warp of the great Drawing-in Machine.

So fearful is the strain upon the nerve and brain and body of the

little things, that every year many of them pass away--slowly,

surely, quietly--so imperceptibly that the mill people themselves

scarcely miss them. And what does it matter? Are there not hundreds

of others, born of ignorance and poverty and pain, to take their

places?

And the dead ones--unknown, they simply pass into a Greater Unknown.

Their places are filled with fresh victims--innocents, whom Passion

begets with a caress and Cupidity buys with a curse. Children they

are--tots--and why should they know that they are trading--life for

death?

It was a bright fall morning, and Jud Carpenter rode toward the

mountain a few miles away. They are scarcely mountains--these

beautifully wooded hills in the Tennessee Valley, hooded by blue in

the day and shrouded in somber at night; but it pleases the people

who live within the sweet influence of their shadows to call them

mountains.

Jud knew where he was going, and he rode leisurely along, revolving

in his mind the plan of his campaign. He needed the recruits for the

Acme Mills, and in all his past experience as an employment agent he

had never undertaken to bring in a family where as much tact and

diplomacy was required as in this case.

It was a dilapidated gate at which he drew rein. There had once been

handsome pillars of stone and brick, but these had fallen and the

gate had been swung on a convenient locust tree that had sprung up

and grown with its usual rapidity from its sheltered nook near the

crumbling rock wall. Only one end of the gate was hung; and it lay

diagonally across the entrance of what had once been a thousand acres

of the finest farm in the Tennessee Valley.

Dismounting, Jud hitched his horse and set his gun beside the tree;

and as it was easier to climb over the broken-down fence than to lift

the gate around, he stepped over and then shuffled along in his lazy

way toward the house.

It was an old farmhouse, now devoid of paint; and the path to it had

once been a well-kept gravel walk, lined with cedars; but the

box-plants, having felt no pruning shears for years, almost filled,

with their fantastically jagged boughs, the narrow path, while the

cedars tossed about their broken and dead limbs.

The tall, square pillars in the house, from dado above to where they

rested in the brick base below, showed the naked wood, untouched so

long by paint that it had grown furzy from rain and snow, and

splintery from sun and heat. Its green shutters hung, some of them,

on one hinge; and those which could be closed, were shut up close and

sombre under the casements.

A half dozen hounds came baying and barking around him. As Jud

proceeded, others poured out from under the house. All were ribby,

and half starved.

Without a moment's hesitation they promptly covered Bonaparte, much

to the delight of that genius. Indeed, from the half-satisfied, half

malignant snarl which lit up his face as they piled rashly and

brainlessly on him, Jud took it that Bonaparte had trotted all these

miles just to breakfast on this remnant of hound on the half-shell.

In a few minutes Bonaparte's terrible, flashing teeth had them flying

in every direction.

Jud promptly cuffed him back to the gate and bade him wait there.

On the front portico, his chair half-tilted back, his trousers in his

boot legs, and his feet on the balustrade rim, the uprights of which

were knocked out here and there, like broken teeth in a comb,--sat a

man in a slouch hat, smoking a cob pipe. He was in his shirt sleeves.

His face was flushed and red; his eyes were watery, bleared. His head

was fine and long--his nose and chin seemed to meet in a sharp point.

His face showed that form of despair so common in those whom whiskey

has helped to degenerate. He did not smile--he scowled continuously,

and his voice had been imprecatory so long that it whined in the same

falsetto twang as one of his hounds.

Jud stepped forward and bowed obsequiously.

"How are you to-day, Majah, sah?" he asked while his puckered and

wrinkled face tried to smile.

Jud was chameleon. Long experience had taught him to drop

instinctively into the mannerism--even the dialect--of those he hoped

to cajole. With the well-bred he could speak glibly, and had airs

himself. With the illiterate and the low-bred, he could out-Caliban

the herd of them.

The man did not take the pipe out of his mouth. He did not even turn

his head. Only his two bleared eyes shot sidewise down to the

ground, where ten feet below him stood the employment agent of the

mills, smiling, smirking, and doing his best to spell out on the

signboard of his unscrupulous face the fact that he came in peace and

good will.

Major Edward Conway scarcely grunted--it might have been anything

from an oath to an eructation. Then, taking his pipe-stem from

between his teeth, and shifting his tobacco in his mouth,--for he was

both chewing and smoking--he expectorated squarely into the eyes of a

hound which had followed Jud up the steps, barking and snarling at

his heels.

He was a good marksman even with spittle, and the dog fled, whining.

Then he answered, with an oath, that he was about as well as the

rheumatism and the beastly weather would permit.

Jud came up uninvited and sat down. The Major did not even turn his

head. The last of a long line of gentlemen did not waste his manners

on one beneath him socially.

Jud was discreetly silent, and soon the Major began to tell all of

his troubles, but in the tone of one who was talking to his servant

and with many oaths and much bitterness:

"You see it's this damned rheumatism, Carpenter. Las' night, suh, I

had to drink a quart of whiskey befo' I cu'd go to sleep at all. It

came on me soon aftah I come out of the wah, an' it growed on me like

jim'son weeds in a hog-pen. My appetite's quit on me--two pints of

whiskey an' wild-cherry bark a day, suh, don't seem to help it at

all, suh. I cyant tell whut the devil's the matter with my stomach.

Nothin' I eat or drink seems to agree with me but whiskey. If I drink

this malarial water, suh, m'legs an' m'feet begin to swell. I have to

go back to whiskey. Damn me, but I was born for Kentucky. Why, I've

got a forty dollar thirst on me this very minute. I'm so dry I cu'd

kick up a dust in a hog wallow. Maybe, though, it's this rotten stuff

that cross-roads Jew is sellin' me an' callin' it whiskey. He's got a

mortgage on everything here but the houn's and the house cat, an'

he's tryin' to see if he cyant kill me with his bug-juice an' save a

suit in Chancery. I'm goin' to sen' off an' see if I cyant git

another bran' of it, suh."

Edward Conway was the type of the Southerner wrecked financially and

morally by the war. His father and grandfather had owned Millwood,

and the present owner had gone into the war a carefully educated,

well reared youth of twenty. He came out of it alive, it is true,

but, like many another fine youth of both North and South, addicted

to drink.

The brutality of war lies not alone in death--it is often more fatal,

more degenerating, in the life it leaves behind.

Coming out of the war, Conway found, as did all others in the

Tennessee Valley who sided with the South, that his home was a wreck.

Not a fence, even, remained--nothing but the old home--shutterless,

plasterless, its roof rotten, its cellar the abode of hogs.

Thousands of others found themselves likewise--brave hearts--men they

proved themselves to be--in that they built up their homes out of

wreck and their country out of chaos.

The man who retrieves his fortune under the protecting arm of law and

order is worthy of great praise; but he who does it in the surly,

snarling teeth of Disorder itself is worthy of still greater praise.

And the real soldier is not he with his battles and his bravery. All

animals will fight--it is instinct. But he who conquers in the great

moral battle of peace and good government, overcoming prejudice,

ignorance, poverty and even injustice, till he rises to the height of

the brave whose deeds do vindicate them--this is the real soldier.

Thousands of Southern soldiers did this, but Edward Conway had not

been one of them. For where whiskey sits he holds a scepter whose

staff is the body of the Upas tree, and there is no room for the oak

of thrift or the wild-flower of sweetness underneath.

From poverty to worse poverty Edward Conway had gone, until now,

hopelessly mortgaged, hopelessly besotted, hopelessly soured, he

lived the diseased product of weakness, developed through stimulated

inactivity.

Nature is inexorable, morally, physically, mentally, and as two

generations of atheists will beget a thief, so will two generations

of idle rich beget nonentities.

On this particular morning that Jud Carpenter came, things had

reached a crisis with Edward Conway. By a decree of the court, the

last hope he had of retaining a portion of his family estate had been

swept away, and the entire estate was to be advertised for sale, to

satisfy a mortgage and judgment. It is true, he had the two years of

redemption under the Alabama law, but can a drunkard redeem his land

when he can not redeem himself?

And so, partly from despair, and partly from that instinct which

makes even the most sensitive of mortals wish to pour their secret

troubles into another's ear, partly even from drunken recklessness,

Edward Conway sat on his verandah this morning and poured his

troubles into the designing ear of Jud Carpenter. The refrain of his

woe was that luck--luck--remorseless luck was against him.

Luck, since the beginning of the world, has been the cry of him who

gambles with destiny. Work is the watchword of the man who believes

in himself.

This thing went because that man had been against him, and this went

because of the faithlessness of another. His health--well, that was

God's doing.

Jud was too shrewd to let him know that he thought whiskey had

anything to do with it--and so, very cautiously did the employment

agent proceed.

A child with sunny hair and bright eyes ran across the yard. She was

followed by an old black mammy, whose anxiety for fear her charge

might get her clothes soiled was plainly evident; from the parlor

came the notes of an old piano, sadly out of tune, and Jud could hear

the fine voice of another daughter singing a love ballad.

"You've got two mighty pyeart gyrls here," at last he ventured.

"Of course, they are, suh," snapped their father--"they are

Conways."

"Ever think of it, sah," went on Jud, "that they could make you a

livin' in the mill?"

Conway was silent. In truth, he had thought of that very thing.

To-day, however, he was nerved and desperate, being more besotted

than usual.

"Now, look aheah--it's this way," went on Jud--"you're gettin' along

in age and you need res'. You've been wuckin' too hard. I tell you,

Majah, sah, you're dead game--no other man I know of would have stood

up under the burdens you've had on yo' shoulders."

The Major drew himself up: "That's a family trait of the Conways,

suh."

"Wal, it's time for you to res' awhile. No use to drive a willin'

hoss to death. I can get a place for both of the gyrls in the mill,

an' aftah the fust month--aftah they learn the job, they can earn

enough to support you comf't'bly. Now, we'll give you a nice little

cottage--no bother of keepin' up a big run-down place like this--jes'

a neat little cottage. Aunt Mariah can keep it in nice fix. The gyrls

will be employed and busy an' you can jes' live comf't'bly, an' res'.

An' say," he added, slyly--"you can get all the credit at the

Company's sto' you want an' I'm thinkin' you'll find a better brand

of licker than that you've been samplin'."

Besotted as he was--hardened and discouraged--the proposition came

over Conway with a wave of shame. Even through his weakened mind the

old instinct of the gentleman asserted itself, and for a moment the

sweet refined face of a beautiful dead wife, the delicate beauty of a

little daughter, the queenliness of an elder one, all the product of

good breeding and rearing, came over him. He sprang to his feet.

"What do you mean, suh? My daughters--grandchildren of Gen. Leonidas

Conway--my daughters work in the mill by the side of that poor trash

from the mountains? I'll see you damned first."

He sat down--he bowed his head in his hands. A glinty look came into

his eyes.

Jud drew his chair up closer: "But jes' think a minute--you're sold

out--you've got no whur to go, you've wuck'd yo'self down tryin' to

save the farm. We've all got to wuck these days. The war has changed

all the old order of things. We havn't got any mo' slaves."

"We,"--repeated Conway, and he looked at the man and laughed.

Jud flushed even through his sallow skin:

"Wal, that's all right," he added. "Listen to me, now, I'm tryin' to

save you from trouble. The war changed everything. Your folks got to

whur they did by wuckin'. They built up this big estate by economy

an' wuck. Now, you mus' do it. You've got the old dead-game Conway

breedin' in yo' bones an' you've got the brains, too." He lowered his

voice: "It's only for a little while--jes' a year or so--it'll give

you a nice little home to live in while you brace up an' pull out of

debt an' redeem yo' farm. Here--it is only for a year or so--sign

this--givin' you a home, an' start all over in life--sign it right

there, only for a little while--a chance to git on yo' feet--."

Conway scarcely knew how it happened that he signed--for Jud quickly

changed the subject.

After a while Jud arose to go. As he did so, Lily, the little

daughter, came out, and putting her arms around her father's neck,

kissed him and said:

"Papa--luncheon is served, and oh, do come on! Mammy and Helen and I

are so hungry."

Mammy Maria had followed her and stood deferentially behind the

chair. And as Jud went away he thought he saw in the old woman's

eyes, as she watched him, a trace of that fine scorn bred of

generations of gentleness, but which whiskey had destroyed in the

master.

CHAPTER V

THE FLY CATCHER CAUGHT

As Jud went out of the dilapidated gate at Millwood, he chuckled to

himself. He had, indeed, accomplished something. He had gained a

decided advance in the labor circles of the mill. He had broken into

the heretofore overpowering prejudice the better class had against

the mill, for he held in his possession the paper wherein an

aristocrat had signed his two daughters into it. Wouldn't Richard

Travis chuckle with him?

In the South social standing is everything.

To have the mill represented by a first family--even if brought to

poverty through drunkenness--was an entering wedge.

His next job was easier. A mile farther on, the poor lands of the

mountain side began. Up on the slope was a cabin, in the poorest and

rockiest portion of it, around the door of which half a dozen cracker

children stared at Jud with unfeigned interest as he rode up.

"Light an' look at yer saddle"--came from a typical Hillite within,

as Jud stopped.

Jud promptly complied--alighted and looked at his saddle.

A cur--which, despite his breeding, is always a keen detective of

character--followed him, barking at his heels.

This one knew Jud as instinctively and as accurately as he knew a

fresh bone from a rank one--by smell. He was also a judge of other

dogs and, catching sight of Bonaparte, his anger suddenly fled and he

with it.

"Won't you set down an' res' yo' hat?" came invitingly from the

doorway.

Jud sat down and rested his hat.

A tall, lank woman, smoking a cob pipe which had grown black with age

and Samsonian in strength, came from the next room. She merely ducked

her long, sharp nose at Jud and, pretending to be busily engaged

around the room, listened closely to all that was said.

Jud told the latest news, spoke of the weather and made many familiar

comments as he talked. Then he began to draw out the man and woman.

They were poor, child-burdened and dissatisfied. Gradually,

carefully, he talked mill and the blessings of it. He drew glorious

pictures of the house he would take them to, its conveniences--the

opportunities of the town for them all. He took up the case of each

of the six children, running from the tot of six to the girl of

twenty, and showed what they could earn.

In all it amounted to sixteen dollars a week.

"You sho'ly don't mean it comes to sixteen dollars ev'y week," said

the woman, taking the cob pipe out for the first time, long enough to

spit and wipe her mouth on the back of her hand, "an' all in silver

an' all our'n?" she asked. "Why that thar is mo' money'n we've seed

this year. What do you say to tryin' it, Josiah?"

Josiah was willing. "You see," he added, "we needn't stay thar

longer'n a year or so. We'll git the money an' then come back an' buy

a good piece of land."

Suddenly he stopped and fired this point blank at Jud: "But see heah,

Mister-man, is thar any niggers thar? Do we hafter wuck with

niggers?"

Jud looked indignant. It was enough.

At the end of an hour the family head had signed for a five years'

contract. They would move the next week.

"Cash--think of it--cash ever' week. An' in silver, too," said the

woman. "Why, I dunno hardly how it'll feel. I'm afeared it mou't gin

me the eetch."

Jud, when he left, had induced their parents to sell five children

into slavery for five years.

It meant for life.

And both parents declared when he left that never before had they

"seed sech a nice man."

Jud had nearly reached the town when he passed, high up on the level

plateau by which the mountain road now ran, the comfortable home of

Elder Butts. Peach and apple trees adorned the yard, while bee-hives

sat in a corner under the shade of them behind the cottage. The

tinkle of a sheep bell told of a flock of sheep nearby. A neatly

painted new wagon stood under the shed by the house, and all around

was an air of thrift and work.

"Now if I cu'd git that Butts family," he mused, "I'd have something

to crow about when I got back to Kingsley to-night. He's got a little

farm an' is well to do an' is thrifty, an' if I cu'd only git that

class started in the mill an' contented to wuck there, it 'ud open up

a new class of people. There's that Archie B.--confound him, he cu'd

run ten machines at onct and never know it. I'd like to sweat that

bottled mischief out of him a year or two.

"Hello!"

Jud drew his horse up with a jerk. Above him, with legs locked, high

up around the body of a dead willow, his seat the stump of a broken

bough and fully twenty feet above the employment agent's head, sat

Archie B., a freckled-faced lad, with fiery red hair and a world of

fun in his blue eyes. He was one of the Butts twins and the very

object of the Whipper-in's thoughts. From his head to his feet he had

on but three garments--a small, battered, all-wool hat, a coarse

cotton shirt, wide open at the neck, and a pair of jeans pants which

came to his knees. But in the pockets of his pants were small samples

of everything of wood and field, from shells of rare bird eggs to a

small supply of Gypsy Juice.

His pockets were miniature museums of nature.

No one but a small boy, bent on fun, knows what Gypsy Juice is. No

adult has ever been able to procure its formula and no small boy in

the South cares, so long as he can get it.

"The thing that hit does," Archie B. explained to his timid and pious

twin brother, Ozzie B., "is ter make anything it touches that wears

hair git up and git."

Coons, possums, dogs, cats--with now and then a country horse or

mule, hitched to the town rack--with these, and a small vial of Gypsy

Juice, Archie B., as he expressed it, "had mo' fun to the square

inch than ole Barnum's show ever hilt in all its tents."

Jud stood a moment watching the boy. It was easy to see what Archie

B. was after. In the body of the dead tree a wood-pecker had chiseled

out a round hole.

"Hello, yo'se'f"--finally drawled Jud--"whatcher doin' up thar?"

"Why, I am goin' to see if this is a wood-pecker's nes' or a

fly-ketcher's."

Bonaparte caught his cue at once and ran to the foot of the tree

barking viciously, daring the tree-climber to come down. His vicious

eyes danced gleefully. He looked at his master between his snarls as

much as to say: "Well, this is great, to tree the real live son of

the all-conquering man!"

It maddened him, too, to see the supreme indifference with which the

all-conqueror's son treated his presence.

Jud grunted. He prided himself on his bird-lore. Finally he said:

"Wal, any fool could tell you--it's a wood-pecker's nest."

"Yes, that's so and jus' exacly what a fool 'ud say," came back from

the tree. "But it 'ud be because he is a fool, tho', an' don't see

things as they be. It's a fly-ketcher's nest, for all that--" he

added.

"Teach yo' gran'-mammy how to milk the house cat," sneered Jud, while

Bonaparte grew furious again with this added insult. "Don't you know

a wood-pecker's nest when you see it?"

"Yes," said Archie B., "an' I also know a fly-ketcher will whip a

wood-pecker and take his nes' from him, an' I've come up here to see

if it's so with this one."

"Oh," said Jud, surprised, "an' what is it?"

"Jus' as I said--he's whipped the wood-pecker an' tuck his nes'."

"What's a fly-ketcher, Mister Know-It-All?" said Jud. Then he grinned

derisively.

Bonaparte, watching his master, ran around the tree again and

squatting on his stump of a tail grinned likewise.

"A fly-ketcher," said Archie B. calmly, "is a sneaking sort of a

bird, that ketches flies an' little helpless insects for a--mill,

maybe. Do you know any two-legged fly-ketchers a-doin' that?"

Jud glared at him, and Bonaparte grew so angry that he snapped

viciously at the bark of the tree as if he would tear it down.

"What do you mean, you little imp?--what mill?"

"Why his stomach," drawled Archie B., "it's a little differunt from a

cotton-mill, but it grinds 'em to death all the same."

Jud looked up again. He glared at Archie B.

"How do you know that's a fly-ketcher's nest and not a wood-pecker's,

then?" he asked, to change the subject.

"That's what I'd like to know, too," said Bonaparte as plainly as his

growls and two mean eyes could say it.

"If it's a fly-ketcher's, the nest will be lined with a

snake's-skin," said Archie B. "That's nachrul, ain't it," he

added--"the nest of all sech is lined with snake-skins."

Bonaparte, one of whose chief amusements in life was killing snakes,

seemed to think this a personal thrust at himself, for he flew around

the tree with renewed rage while Archie B., safe on his high perch,

made faces at him and laughed.

"I'll bet it ain't that way," said Jud, rattled and discomfited and

shifting his long squirrel gun across his saddle. Archie B. replied

by carefully thrusting a brown sunburnt arm into the hole and

bringing out a nest. "Now, a wood-pecker's egg," he said, carefully

lifting an egg out and then replacing it, "'ud be pearly white."

"How did you learn all that?" sneered Jud.

"Oh, by keepin' out of a cotton mill an' usin' my eye," said Archie

B., winking at Bonaparte.

Bonaparte glared back.

"I'd like to git you into the mill," said Jud. "I'd put you to wuck

doin' somethin' that 'ud be worth while."

"Oh, yes, you would for a few years," sneered back Archie B. "Then

you'd put me under the groun', where I'd have plenty o' time to

res'."

"I'm goin' up there now to see yo' folks an' see if I can't git you

into the mill."

"Oh, you are?--Well, don't be in sech a hurry an' look heah at yo'

snake-skin fust--didn't I tell you it 'ud be lined with a

snake-skin?" And he threw down a last year's snake-skin which

Bonaparte proceeded to rend with great fury.

"Now, come under here," went on Archie B. persuasively, "and I'll

sho' you they're not pearly white, like a wood-pecker's, but

cream-colored with little purple splotches scratched over 'em--like a

fly-ketcher's."

Jud rode under and looked up. As he did so Archie B. suddenly turned

the nest upside down, that Jud might see the eggs, and as he looked

up four eggs shot out before he could duck his head, and caught him

squarely between his shaggy eyes. Blinded, smeared with yelk and

smarting with his eyes full of fine broken shell, he scrambled from

his horse, with many oaths, and began feeling for the little branch

of water which ran nearby.

"I'll cut that tree down, but I'll git you and wring yo' neck," he

shouted, while Bonaparte endeavored to tear it down with his teeth.

But Archie B. did not wait. Slowly he slid down the tree, while

Bonaparte, thunder-struck with joy, waited at the foot, his eyes

glaring, his mouth wide open, anticipating the feast on fresh boy

meat. Can he be--dare he be--coming down? Right into my jaws, too?

The very thought of it stopped his snarls.

Jud's curses filled the air.

Down--down, slid Archie B., both legs locked around the tree, until

some ten feet above the dog, and, then tantalizingly, just out of

reach, he suddenly tightened his brown brakes of legs, and thrusting

his hand in his pocket, pulled out a small rubber ball. Reaching

over, he squirted half of its contents over the dog, which still sat

snarling, half in fury and half in wonder.

Then something happened. Jud could not see, being down on his knees

in the little stream, washing his eyes, but he first heard

demoniacal barks proceed from Bonaparte, ending in wailful snorts,

howls and whines, beginning at the foot of the tree and echoing in a

fast vanishing wail toward home.

Jud got one eye in working order soon enough to see a cloud of sand

and dust rolling down the road, from the rear of which only the stub

of a tail could be seen, curled spasmodically downward toward the

earth.

Jud could scarcely believe his eyes--Bonaparte--the champion

dog--running--running like that?

"Whut--whut--whut,"--he stammered, "Whut _did he do_ to Bonaparte?"

Then he saw Archie B. up the road toward home, rolling in the sand

with shouts of laughter.

"If I git my hands on you," yelled Jud, shaking his fist at the boy,

"I'll swaller you alive."

"That's what the fly-ketcher said to the butterfly," shouted back

Archie B.

It was a half hour before Jud got all the fine eggshell out of his

eyes. After that he decided to let the Butts family alone for the

present. But as he rode away he was heard to say again:

"Whut--whut--whut _did he do_ to Bonaparte?"

Archie B. was still rolling on the ground, and chuckling now and then

in fits of laughter, when a determined, motherly looking, fat girl

appeared at the doorway of the family cottage. It was his sister,

Patsy Butts:

"Maw," she exclaimed, "I wish you'd look at Archie B. I bet he's done

sump'in."

There was a parental manner in her way. Her one object in life,

evidently, was to watch Archie B.

"You Archie B.," yelled his mother, a sallow little woman of quick

nervous movements, "air you havin' a revulsion down there? What air

you been doin' anyway? Now, you git up from there and go see why

Ozzie B. don't fetch the cows home."

Archie B. arose and went down the road whistling.

A ground squirrel ran into a pile of rocks. Archie B. turned the

rocks about until he found the nest, which he examined critically and

with care. He fingered it carefully and patted it back into shape.

"Nice little nes'," he said--"that settles it--I thought they lined

it with fur." Then he replaced the rocks and arose to go.

A quarter of a mile down the road he stopped and listened.

He heard his brother, Ozzie B., sobbing and weeping.

Ozzie B. was his twin brother--his "after clap"--as Archie B. called

him. He was timid, uncertain, pious and given to tears--"bo'hn on a

wet Friday"--as Archie B. had often said. He was always the effect of

Archie B.'s cause, the illustration of his theorem, the solution of

his problem of mischief, the penalty of his misdemeanors.

Presently Ozzie B. came in sight, hatless and driving his cows along,

but sobbing in that hiccoughy way which is the final stage of an

acute thrashing.

No one saw more quickly than Archie B., and he knew instantly that

his brother had met Jud Carpenter, on his way back to the mill.

"He's caught my lickin' ag'in," said Archie B., indignantly--"it's a

pity he looks so much like me."

It was true, and Ozzie B. stood and dug one toe into the ground, and

sobbed and wiped his eyes on his shirt sleeve, and told how, in spite

of his explanations and beseechings, the Whipper-in had met him down

the road and thrashed him unmercifully.

"Ozzie B.," said his brother, "you make me tired all over and in

spots. I hate for as big a fool as you to look like me. Whyncher

run--whyncher dodge him?"

"I--I--wanted ter do my duty," sobbed Ozzie B. "Maw tole me ter

drive--drive the cows right up the road--"

Archie B. surveyed him with fine scorn:

"When the Devil's got the road," said Archie B., "decent fo'ks had

better take to the wood. I'd fixed him an' his ole dorg, an' now you

come along an' spile it all."

He made a cross mark in the road and spat on it. Then he turned with

his back to the cross, threw his hat over his head and said slowly:

"_Venture pee wee under the bridge! bam--bam--bam!_"

"What's that fur?" asked Ozzie B., as he ceased sobbing. His brother

always had something new, and it was always absorbingly interesting

to Ozzie B.

"That," said Archie B., solemnly, "I allers say after meetin' a Jonah

in the road. The spell is now broke. Jus' watch me fix Jud Carpenter

agin. Wanter see me git even with him? Well, come along."

"What'll you do?" asked Ozzie B.

"I'll make that mustang break his neck for the way he treated you, or

my name ain't Archie B. Butts--that's all. _Venture pee wee under

the bridge, bam--bam--bam!_"

"No--oo--no," began Ozzie B., beginning to cry again--"Don't kill

'im--it'll be cruel."

"Don't wanter see me go an' git even with the man that's jus' licked

you for nuthin'?"

"No--oo--no--" sobbed Ozzie B. "Paw says--leave--leave--that for--the

Lord."

"Tarnashun!"--said Archie B., spitting on the ground, disgustedly--,

"too much relig'un is a dang'us thing. You've got all of paw's

relig'un an' maw's brains, an' that's 'nuff said."

With this he kicked Ozzie B. soundly and sent him, still sobbing, up

the road.

Then he ran across the wood to head off Jud Carpenter, who he knew

had to go around a bend in the road.

There was no bird that Archie B. could not mimic. He knew every

creature of the wood. Every wild thing of the field and forest was

his friend. Slipping into the underbrush, a hundred yards from the

road down which he knew Jud Carpenter had to ride, he prepared

himself for action.

Drawing a turkey-call from his pocket, he gave the call of the wild

turkey going to roost, as softly as a violinist tries his instrument

to see if it is in tune.

Prut--prut--prut--it rang out clear and distinctly.

"All right,"--he said--"she'll do."

He had not long to wait. Up the road he soon saw the Whipper-in,

riding leisurely along.

Archie B. swelled with anger at sight of the complacent and

satisfactory way he rode along. He even thought he saw a smile--a

kind of even-up smile--light his face.

When opposite his hiding place, Archie B. put his call to his mouth:

_Prut--Prut--P-R-U-T_--it rang out. Then _Prut--prut!_

Jud Carpenter stopped his horse instantly.

"Turkeys goin' to roost."--he muttered. He listened for the

direction.

_Prut--Prut_--it came out of the bushes on the right--a hundred yards

away under a beech tree.

Jud listened: "Eatin' beech-mast,"--he said, and he slipped off his

pony, tied him quietly to the limb of a sweet-gum tree, and cocking

his long gun, slipped into the wood.

Five minutes later he heard the sound still farther off. "They're

walkin'," muttered Jud--"I mus' head 'em off." Then he pushed on

rapidly into the forest.

Archie B. let him go--then, making a short circuit, slipped like an

Indian through the wood, and came up to the pony hitched on the road

side.

Quietly removing the saddle and blanket, he took two tough prickly

burrs of the sweet-gum and placed one on each side of the pony's

spine, where the saddle would rest. Then he put the blanket and

saddle back, taking care to place them on very gently and tighten the

girth but lightly.

He shook all over with suppressed mirth as he went farther into the

wood, and lay down on the mossy bank behind a clay-root to watch the

performance.

It was a quarter of an hour before Jud, thoroughly tired and

disgusted, gave up the useless search and came back.

Untying the pony, he threw the bridle rein over its head and vaulted

lightly into the saddle.

Archie B. grabbed the clay-root and stuffed his wool hat into his

mouth just in time.

"It was worth a dollar," he told Ozzie B. that night, after they had

retired to their trundle bed. "The pony squatted fust mighty nigh to

the groun'--then he riz a-buckin'. I seed Jud's coat-tail a-turnin'

summersets through the air, the saddle and blanket a-followin'. I

heard him when he hit the swamp hole on the side of the road

_kersplash!_--an' the pony skeered speechless went off tearin'

to-ards home. Then I hollered out: '_Go it ole, fly-ketcher--you're

as good for tad-poles as you is for bird-eggs_'--an' I lit out

through the wood."

Ozzie B. burst out crying: "Oh, Archie B., do you reckin the po' man

got hurt?"

Archie B. replied by kicking him in the ribs until he ceased crying.

"Say yo' prayers now and go to sleep. I'll kick you m'se'f, but I'll

lick anybody else that does it."

As Ozzie B. dozed off he heard:

"_Venture pee-wee under the bridge--bam--bam--bam._ Oh, Lord, you who

made the tar'nal fools of this world, have mussy on 'em!"

CHAPTER VI

THE FLINT AND THE COAL

Love is love and there is nothing in all the world like it. Its

romance comes but once, and it is the perfume that precedes the

ripened fruit of all after life. It is not amenable to any of the

laws of reason; nor subject to any law of logic; nor can it be

explained by the analogy of anything in heaven or earth. Do not,

therefore, try to reason about it. Only love once--and in youth--and

be forever silent.

One of the mysteries of love to older ones is that two young people

may become engaged and never a word be spoken. Put the girl in a

convent, even, and let the boy but walk past, and the thing is done.

They look and love, and the understanding is complete. They see and

sigh, and read each other's secret thoughts, past and present--each

other's hopes, fears.

They sigh and are engaged, and there is perfect understanding.

Time and Romance travel not together. Time must hurry on. Romance

would loiter by the way. And so Romance, in her completeness, loves

to dwell most where Time, traveling over the mile-tracks of the

tropics, which belong by heredity to Alabama--stalks slower than on

those strenuous half-mile tracks that spin around the earth in

latitudes which grow smaller as they approach the frozen pole.

The sun had reached, in his day's journey, the bald knob of Sunset

Peak, and there, behind it, seemed to stop. At least to Helen Conway,

born and reared under the brow of Sand Mountain, he seemed every

afternoon, when he reached the mountain peak, to linger, in a

friendly way, behind it.

And a bold warrior-looking crest it was, helmeted with a stratum of

sand-stone, jutting out in visor-shaped fullness about his head, and

feathery above with scrub-oak and cedar.

Perhaps it had been a fancy which lingered from childhood; but from

the time when Mammy Maria had first told her that the sun went to bed

in the valley beyond the mountain until now,--her eighteenth

year,--Helen still loved to think it was true, and that behind the

face of Sunset Rock he still lingered to undress; and, lingering, it

made for her the sweetest and most romantic period of the day.

True to her antebellum ideas, Mammy Maria dressed her two girls every

afternoon before dinner. It is also true that she cooked the dinner

herself and made their dresses with her own fingers, and that of late

years, in the poverty of her drunken master, she had little to dress

them with and less to cook.

But the resources of the old woman seemed wonderful--to the people

round about,--for never were two girls more gorgeously gowned than

Helen and Lily. It was humorous, it was pathetic--the way it was

done.

From old bureau drawers and cedar chests, stored away in the attic

and unused rooms of Millwood, where she herself had carefully put

them in days long gone--days of plenty and thrift--she brought forth

rich gowns of another age, and made them over for Helen and Lily.

"Now, this gown was Miss Clara's," she would say as she took out a

bundle of satin and old lace. She looked at it fondly--often with

tears in her honest black eyes. "Lor', how well I disremember the

night she fust wore it--the night of the ball we give to Jineral

Jackson when he first come to see old Marster. This flowered silk

with pol'naize she wore at the Gov'nor's ball and the black velvet

with cut steel I've seed her wearin' at many an' many a dinner here

in this very house."

And so the old woman would go over all her treasures. Then, in a few

days the gossipy and astounded neighbors would behold Helen and Lily,

dressed, each, in a gown of white brocaded satin, with a dinner gown

of black velvet, and for Sunday, old point lace, with petticoats of

finest hand-made Irish linen and silk stockings--all modernized with

matchless deft and skill.

"I guess my gals will shine as long as the old chist lasts," she

would say, "an' I ain't started on 'em yet. I'm a-savin' some for

their weddin', bless Gord, if I ever sees a man fitten for 'em."

It was an hour yet before dinner, and Aunt Maria had dressed Helen,

this Saturday afternoon, with great care--for after a little frost,

each day and night in Alabama becomes warmer and warmer until the

next frost.

Mammy Maria knew things by intuition, and hence her care to see that

Helen looked especially pretty to-day.

There was no sun save where he streamed his ribbon rays from behind

Sunset Rock, and threw them in pearl and ivory fan handles--white and

gold and emerald, across the mackerel sky beyond.

Helen's silk skirt fitted her well, and one of those beautiful old

ribbons, flowered in broad leaf and blossoms, wound twice around her

slender waist and fell in broad streamers nearly to the ground. The

bodice was cut V-shaped at the throat--the corsage being taken from

one of her grandmother's made in 1822, and around her neck was a long

chain of pure gold beads.

She was a type of Southern beauty obtained only after years of gentle

dames and good breeding.

Her face was pure and fine, rather expressionless at her age, with a

straight nose and rich fine lips. Her heavy hair was coiled

gracefully about her head and fell in a longer coil, almost to her

shoulders. She was tall with a sloping, angular form, the flat

outlines of which were not yet filled with that fullness that time

would soon add.

Her waist was well turned, her shoulders broad and slightly rounded,

with that fullness of chest and breast which Nature, in her hour of

generosity, gives only to the queenly woman. The curves of her

sloping neck were perfect and carried not a wave-line of grossness.

It was as unsensual as a swan's.

Her gown, low cut, showed slight bony shoulders of classic turn and

whiteness, waiting only for time to ripen them to perfection; and the

long curved lines which ran up to where the deep braid of her rich

brown hair fell over them, together with the big joints of her arms

and the long, fine profile of her face were forerunners of a beauty

that is strong--like that of the thoroughbred brood mare after a

year's run on blue-grass.

Her eyes were her only weakness. They were deep and hazel, and given

to drooping too readily with that feigned modesty wherein vanity

clothes boldness. Down in their depths, also, shone that bright,

penetrating spark of a taper by which Folly lights, in woman, the

lamp of ambition.

Her forehead was high--her whole bearing the unconscious one of a

born lady.

Romance--girlish, idealized romance--was her's to-day. A good

intentioned, but thoughtless romance--and therefore a weak one. And

worse still, one which, coupled with ambition, might be led to ruin.

Down through the tangled box-planted walks she strolled, swinging her

dainty hat of straw and old lace in her hand; on through the small

gate that bound the first yard, then through the shaded lawn, unkept

now and rank with weeds, but still holding the old trees which, in

other days, looked down over the well kept lawn of grass beneath. Now

gaunt hogs had rooted it up and the weeds had taken it, and the limbs

of the old trees, falling, had been permitted to lie as they fell.

The first fence was down. She walked across the road and took a path

leading through a cottonfield, which, protected on all sides by the

wood, and being on the elevated plateau on which the residence stood,

had escaped the severer frosts.

And so she stopped and stood amid it, waist high.

The very act of her stopping showed the romance of her nature.

She had seen the fields of cotton all her life, but she could never

pass through one in bloom and in fruit--the white and purple

blossoms, mingled with the green of the leaves and all banked over

billows of snowy lint,--that she did not stop, thrilled with the same

childhood feeling that came with the first reading of the Arabian

Nights.

She had seen the field when it was first plowed, in the spring, and

the small furrows were thrown up by the little turning shovels. Then,

down the entire length of the ridge the cotton-planter had followed,

its two little wheels straddling the row, while the small bull-tongue

in front opened the shallow furrow for the linty, furry, white seeds

to fall in and be covered immediately by the mold-board behind. She

had seen it spring up from one end of the ridge to the other, like

peas, then chopped out by the hoe, the plants left standing, each the

width of the hoe apart. Then she had watched it all summer, growing

under the Southern sun, throwing out limb above limb of beautiful

delicate leaves, drawing their life and sustenance more from the air

and sunshine above than from the dark soil beneath. Drawing it from

the air and sunshine above, and therefore cotton, silken, snowy

cotton--with the warmth of the sun in the skein of its sheen and the

purity of heaven in the fleece of its fold.

Child of the air and the sky and sun; therefore, cotton--and not

corn, which draws its life from the clay and mud and decay which

comes from below.

She had seen the first cream-white bloom come.

She had found it one sweet day in July, early in the morning, on the

tip end of the eldest branch of the cotton stalk nearest the ground.

It hung like the flower of the cream-white, pendulous abutilon, with

pollen of yellow stars beaded in dew and throwing off a rich,

delicate, aromatic odor, smelt nowhere on earth save in a

cottonfield, damp with early dew and warmed by the rays of the rising

sun. Cream-white it was in the morning, but when she had visited it

again at nightfall, it hung purple in the twilight.

Then had she plucked it.

Through the hot month of July she had watched the boll grow and

expand, until in August the lowest and oldest one next to the ground

burst, and shone through the pale green leaves like the image of a

star reflected in waters of green. And every morning new cream-white

blooms formed to the very top, only to turn purple by twilight, while

beneath, climbing higher and higher as the days went by and the cool

nights came, star above star of cotton arose and stood twinkling in

its sky of green and purple, above the dank manger where, in early

spring, the little child-seed had lain.

To-day, touched by the great frost, the last purple bloom in the very

tip-top seemed to look up yearningly and plead with the sun for one

more day of life; that it, too, might add in time its snowy tribute

to the bank of white which rolled entirely across the field, one big

billow of cotton.

And in the midst of it the girl stood dreaming and wondering.

She plucked a purple blossom and pinned it to her breast. Then, with

a deep sigh of saddened longing--that this should be the last--she

walked on, daintily lifting her gown to avoid the damp stars of

cotton, now fast gathering the night dew.

Across the field, a vine of wild grape ran over the top of two small

hackberry trees, forming a natural umbrella-shaped arbor above two

big moss-covered boulders which cropped out of the ground beneath,

making two natural rustic seats. On one of these she sat down. Above

her head glowed the impenetrable leaves of the grape-vine and the

hackberry, and through them all hung the small purple bunches of wild

grapes, waiting for the frost of affliction to convert into sugar the

acid of their souls.

She was in plain view of Millwood, not a quarter of a mile away, and

in the glow of the blazing red sunset, shining through its broken

shutters and windows, she could see Mammy Maria busy about their

dinner.

She looked up the road anxiously--then, with an impatient gesture she

took the cotton bloom from her bosom and began to pluck the petals

apart, one by one, saying aloud:

"One, I love--two, I love--

Three, I love, I say.

Four, I love with all my heart,

And five, I cast away--"

She stopped short and sighed--"O, pshaw! that was Harry; why did I

name it for him?"

Again she looked impatiently up the road and then went on:

"Six, he loves, seven, she loves,

Eight, both love--"

She turned quickly. She heard the gallop of a saddle horse coming.

The rider sprang off, tied his horse and sat on the rock by her side.

She appeared not to notice him, and her piqued face was turned away

petulantly.

It was a handsome boyish face that looked at her for a moment

mischievously. Then he seized and kissed her despite her struggles.

For this she boxed his ears soundly and sat off on another rock.

"Harry Travis, you can't kiss me every time you want to, no matter if

we are engaged."

It was a strong and rather a masculine voice, and it grated on one

slightly, being scarcely expected from so beautiful a face. In it was

power, self-will, ambition--but no tenderness nor that voice, soft

and low, which "is an excellent thing in woman."

He laughed banteringly.

"Did you ever hear that love is not love if it is a minute late? Just

see how long I have waited here for you?"

She sat down by his side and looked fondly up into his face, flushed

with exercise and smiling half cynically. It was the same smile seen

so often on the face of Richard Travis.

"Oh, say," he said, dolefully, "but don't start the

hubby-come-to-taw-business on me until we are married. I was late

because I had to steal the Gov'nor's new mare--isn't she a beauty?"

"Oh, say," he went on, "but that is a good one--he has bought her for

somebody he is stuck on--can't say who--and I heard him tell Jim not

to let anybody get on her back.

"Well,"--he laughed--"she certainly has a fine back. I stole her out

and galloped right straight here.

"You ought to own her,"--he went on flippantly--pinching playfully at

the lobe of her ear--"her name is Coquette."

Then he tried to kiss her again.

"Harry!" she said, pulling away--"don't now--Mammy Maria said I was

never to--let you kiss me."

"Oh," he said with some iciness--"Listen to her an' you will die an

old maid. Besides, I am not engaged to Mammy Maria."

"Do you think I am a coquette?" she asked, sitting down by him again.

"Worst I ever saw--I said to Nellie just now--I mean--" he stopped

and laughed.

She looked at him, pained.

"Then you've stopped to see Nellie, and that is why you are late? I

do not care what she says--I am true to you, Harry--because--because

I love you."

He was feigning anger, and tapping his boot with his riding whip:

"Well--kiss me yourself then--show me that Mammy Maria does not boss

my wife."

She laughed and kissed him. He received it with indifference and some

haughtiness.

Then his good nature returned and they sat and talked, watching the

sunset.

"Don't you think my dress is pretty?" she asked after a while, with a

becoming toss of her head.

"Why, I hadn't noticed it--stunning--stunning. If there is a queen on

earth it is you,"--he added.

She flushed under the praise and was silent.

"Harry,"--she said after a while, "I hate to trouble you now, but I

am so worried about things at home."

He looked up half frowning.

"You know I have always told you I could not marry you now. I would

not burden you with Papa."

"Why, yes," he answered mechanically, "we're both young and can wait.

You see, really, Pet--you know I am dependent at present on the

Gov'nor an'--"

"I understand all that," she said quickly--"but"--

"A long engagement will only test our love," he broke in with a show

of dignity.

"You do not understand," she went on. "Things have got so bad at home

that I must earn something."

He frowned and tapped his foot impatiently. She sat up closer to him

and put her hand on his. He did not move nor even return the

pressure.

"And so, Harry--if--if to help papa--and Millwood is sold--and I can

get a good place in the mill--one off by myself--what they call

drawer-in--at good wages,--and, if only for a little while I'd work

there--to help out, you know--what would you think?"

He sprang up from his seat and dropped her hand.

"Good God, Helen Conway, are you crazy?" he said brutally--"why, I'd

never speak to you again. Me? A Travis?--and marry a mill girl?"

The color went out of her face. She looked in her shame and sorrow

toward the sunset, where a cloud, but ten minutes before, had stood

all rosy and purple with the flush of the sunbeams behind it.

Now the beams were gone, and it hung white and bloodless.

In the crisis of our lives such trifles as these flash over us. In

the greatness of other things--often turning points in our

life--Nature sometimes points it all with a metaphor.

For Nature is the one great metaphor.

Helen knew that she and the cloud were now one.

But she was not a coward, and with her heart nerved and looking him

calmly in the face, she talked on and told him of the wretched

condition of affairs at Millwood. And as she talked, the setting sun

played over her own cheeks, touching them with a halo of such

exquisite colors that even the unpoetic soul of Harry Travis was

touched by the beauty of it all.

And to any one but Harry Travis the proper solution would have been

plain. Not that he said it or even meant it--for she was too proud a

spirit even to have thought of it--there is much that a man should

know instinctively that a woman should never know at all.

Harry surprised himself by the patience with which he listened to

her. In him, as in his cousin--his pattern--ran a vein of tact when

the crisis demanded, through and between the stratum of bold

sensuousness and selfishness which made up the basis of his

character.

And so as he listened, in the meanness and meagerness of his soul, he

kept thinking, "I will let her down easy--no need for a scene."

It was narrow and little, but it was all that could come into the

soul of his narrowness.

For we cannot think beyond our fountain head, nor can we even dream

beyond the souls of the two things who gave us birth. There are men

born in this age of ripeness, born with an alphabet in their mouths

and reared in the regal ways of learning, who can neither read nor

write. And yet had Shakespeare been born without a language, he would

have carved his thoughts as pictures on the trees.

Harry Travis was born as so many others are--not only without a

language, but without a soul within him upon which a picture might be

drawn.

And so it kept running in his mind, quietly, cold-bloodedly,

tactfully down the narrow, crooked, slum-alleys of his mind: "I

will--I will drop her--now!" She ceased--there were tears in her eyes

and her face was blanched whiter even than the cloud.

He arose quickly and glanced at the setting sun: "Oh, say, but I must

get the Gov'nor's mare back. Jim will miss her at feeding time."

There was a laugh on his lips and his foot was already in the

stirrup. "Sorry to be in such a hurry just now, too--because there

is so much I want to say to you on that subject--awful sorry--but

the Gov'nor will raise Cain if he knows what I've done. I'll just

write you a long letter to-night--and I'll be over, maybe,

soon--ta--ta--but this mare, confound her--see how she cuts up--so

sorry I can't stay longer--but I'll write--to-night."

He threw her a kiss as he rode off.

She sat dazed, numbed, with the shallowness of it all--the shale of

sham which did not even conceal the base sub-stratum of deceit below.

Nothing like it had ever come into her life before.

She dropped down behind the rock, but instead of tears there came

steel. In it all she could only say with her lips white, a defiant

poise of her splendid head, and with a flash of the eyes which came

with the Conway aroused: "Oh, and I kissed him--and--and--I loved

him!"

She sat on the rock again and looked at the sunset. She was too hurt

now to go home--she wished to be alone.

She was a strong girl--mentally--and with a deep nature; but she was

proud, and so she sat and crushed it in her pride and strength,

though to do it shook her as the leaves were now being shaken by the

breeze which had sprung up at sunset.

She thought she could conquer--that she had conquered--then, as the

breeze died away, and the leaves hung still and limp again, her pride

went with the breeze and she fell again on her knees by the big rock,

fell and buried her face there in the cool moss and cried: "Oh, and

I loved that thing!"

Ten minutes later she sat pale and smiling. The Conway pride had

conquered, but it was a dangerous conquest, for steel and tears had

mingled to make it.

In her despair she even plucked another cotton bloom from her bosom

as if trying to force herself to be happy again in saying:

"One, I love--two, I love,

Three, I love, I say--"

But this only hurt her, because she remembered that when she had said

it before she had had an idol which now lay shattered, as the petals

of the cotton-blossom which she had plucked and thrown away.

Then the breeze sprang up again and with it, borne on it, came the

click--click--click of a hammer tapping a rock. It was a small gladey

valley through which a gulley ran. Boulders cropped out here and

there, and haws, red and white elms, and sassafras grew and shaded

it.

Down in the gulch, not a hundred yards from her, she saw a pair of

broad shoulders overtopped by a rusty summer hat--the worse for a

full season's wear. Around the shoulders was strung a leathern

satchel, and she could see that the person beneath the hat was

closely inspecting the rocks he chipped off and put into the satchel.

Then his hammer rang out again.

She sat and watched him and listened to the tap of his hammer half

sadly--half amused. Harry Travis had crushed her as she had never

been crushed before in her life, and the pride in a woman which

endureth a fall is not to be trifled with afterwards.

She grew calmer--even quiet. The old spirit returned. She knew that

she had never been as beautiful in her life, as now--just now--in the

halo of the sunset shining on her hair and reflected in the rare old

gown she wore.

The person with the leathern satchel was oblivious of everything but

his work. The old straw hat bobbed energetically--the big shoulders

nodded steadily beneath it. She watched him silently a few minutes

and then she called out pleasantly:

"You do seem to be very busy, Clay!"

He stopped and looked up. Then he took off his hat and, awkwardly

bowing, wiped his brow, broad, calm and self-reliant, and a

deliberate smile spread over his face. Everything he did was

deliberate. The smile began in the large friendly mouth and spread in

kindred waves upward until it flashed out from his kindly blue eyes,

through the heavy double-lens glasses that covered them.

Without a word he picked up the last rock he had broken off and put

it into his satchel. Very deliberate, too, was his walk up the hill

toward the grape arbor, mopping his brow as he came along--a brow big

and full of cause and effect and of quiet deductions and deliberate

conclusions. His coat was seedy, his trousers bagged at the knees,

his shoes were old, and there were patches on them, but his collar

and linen were white and very much starched, and his awkward,

shambling gait was honest to the last footfall. A world of depth and

soul was in his strong, fine face, lit up now with an honest, humble

smile, but, at rest, full of quiet dignity.

He shuffled along and sat down in a big brotherly way by the girl's

side.

She sat still, looking at him with a half amused smile on her lips.

He smiled back at her abstractedly. She could see that he had not yet

really seen her. He was looking thoughtfully across at the hill

beyond:

"It puzzles me," he said in a fine, mellow voice, "why I should find

this rotten limestone cropping out here. Now, in the blue limestone

of the Niagara period I was as sure of finding it as I am--"

"Of not finding me at all,"--it came queenly, haughtily from her.

He turned, and the thick lenses of his glasses were focused on her--a

radiant, superb being. Then there were swept away all his

abstractions and deductions, and in their place a real smile--a

lover's smile of satisfaction looking on the paradise of his dreams.

"You know I have always worshiped you," he said simply and

reverently.

She moved up in a sisterly way to him and looked into his face.

"Clay--Clay--but you must not--I have told you--I am engaged."

He did not appear to hear her. Already his mind was away off in the

hills where his eyes were. He went on: "Now, over there I struck a

stratum of rotten limestone--it's a curious thing. I traced that vein

of coal from Walker County--clear through the carboniferous period,

and it is bound to crop out somewhere in this altitude--bound to do

it."

"Now it's just this way," he said, taking her hand without being

conscious of it and counting off the periods with her fingers. "Here

is the carboniferous, the sub-carboniferous--" She jerked her hand

away with what would have been an amused laugh except that in a half

conscious way she remembered that Harry had held her hand but half an

hour ago; and it ended in a frigid shaft feathered with a smile--the

arrow which came from the bow of her pretty mouth.

He came to himself with a boyish laugh and a blush that made Helen

look at him again and watch it roll down his cheek and neck, under

the fine white skin there.

Then he looked at her closely again--the romantic face, the coil of

brown hair, the old gown of rich silk, the old-fashioned corsage and

the rich old gold necklace around her throat.

"If there's a queen on earth--it's you," he said simply.

He reddened again, and to divert it felt in his satchel and took out

a rock. Then he looked across at the hills again:

"If I do trace up that vein of coal and the iron which is needed with

it--when I do--for I know it is here as well as Leverrier knew that

Neptune was in our planetary system by the attraction exerted--when I

do--"

He looked at her again. He could not say the words. Real love has

ideas, but never words. It feels, but cannot speak. That which comes

out of the mouth, being words, is ever a poor substitute for that

which comes from the heart and is spirit.

"Clay," she said, "you keep forgetting. I say I--I am--was--" She

stopped confused.

He looked hurt for a moment and smiled in his frank way: "I know it

is here," he said holding up a bit of coal--"here, by the million

tons, and it is mine by right of birth and education and breeding. It

is my heritage to find it. One day Alabama steel will outrank

Pittsburgh's. Oh, to put my name there as the discoverer!"

"Then you"--he turned and said it fondly--reverently--"you should be

mine by right of--of love."

She sighed.

"Clay--I am sorry for you. I can never love you that way. You have

told me that, since--oh, since I can remember, and I have always told

you--you know we are cousins, anyway--second cousins." She shook her

head.

"Under the heart of the flinty hill lies the coal," he said simply.

But she did not understand him. She had looked down and seen Harry's

foot-track on the moss.

And so they sat until the first star arose and shimmered through the

blue mist which lay around the far off purpling hill tops. Then there

was the clang of a dinner bell.

"It is Mammy Maria," she said--"I must go. No--you must not walk

home with me. I'd rather be alone."

She did not intend it, but it was brutal to have said it that way--to

the sensitive heart it went to. He looked hurt for a moment and then

tried to smile in a weak way. Then he raised his hat gallantly,

turned and went off down the gulch.

Helen stood looking for the last time on the pretty arbor. Here she

had lost her heart--her life. She fell on the moss again and kissed

the stone. Then she walked home--in tears.

CHAPTER VII

HILLARD WATTS

It is good for the world now and then to go back to first principles

in religion. It would be better for it never to get away from them;

but, since it has that way of doing--of breeding away and breaking

away from the innate good--it is well that a man should be born in

any age with the faith of Abraham.

It matters not from what source such a man may spring. And he need

have no known pedigree at all, except an honest ancestry behind him.

Such a man was Hillard Watts, the Cottontown preacher.

Sprung from the common people of the South, he was a most uncommon

man, in that he had an absolute faith in God and His justice, and an

absolute belief that some redeeming goodness lay in every human

being, however depraved he may seem to the world. And so firm was his

faith, so simple his religion--so contrary to the worldliness of the

religion of his day,--that the very practice of it made him an

uncommon man.

As the overseer of General Jeremiah Travis's large estate before the

war, he proved by his success that even slaves work better for

kindness. Of infinite good sense, but little education, he had a mind

that went to the heart of things, and years ago the fame of his

homely but pithy sayings stuck in the community. In connection with

kindness to his negroes one of his sayings was, "Oh, kindness can't

be classified--it takes in the whole world or nothin'."

When General Travis got into dire financial straits once, he sent for

his overseer, and advised with him as to the expediency of giving up.

The overseer, who knew the world and its ways with all the good

judgment of his nature, dryly remarked: "That'll never do. Never let

the world know you've quit; an' let the undertaker that buries you be

the fust man to find out you're busted."

General Travis laughed, and that season one of his horses won the

Tennessee Valley Futurity, worth thirty-thousand dollars--and the

splendid estate was again free from debt.

There was not a negro on the place who did not love the overseer, not

one who did not carry that love to the extent of doing his best to

please him. He had never been known to punish one, and yet the work

done by the Travis hands was proverbial.

Among his duties as overseer, the entire charge of the Westmore

stable of thoroughbreds fell to his care. This was as much from love

as choice, for never was a man born with more innate love of all dumb

creatures than the preacher-overseer.

"I've allers contended that a man could love God an' raise horses, too,"

he would say; and it was ludicrous to see him when he went off to the

races, filling the tent trunk with religious tracts, which, after the

races, he would distribute to all who would read them. And when night

came he would regularly hold prayers in his tent--prayer-meetings in

which his auditors were touts, stable-boys and gamblers. And woe to the

stable-boy who uttered an oath in his presence or dared to strike or

maltreat any of his horses!

He preached constantly against gambling on the races. "That's the

Devil's end of it," he would say--"The Almighty lets us raise good

horses as a benefit to mankind, an' the best one wins the purse. It

was the Devil's idea that turned 'em into gambling machines."

No one ever doubted the honesty of his races. When the Travis horses

ran, the racing world knew they ran for blood.

Physically, he had been an athlete--a giant, and unconscious of his

strength. Incidentally, he had taken to wrestling when a boy, and as

a man his fame as a wrestler was coincident with the Tennessee

Valley. It was a manly sport which gave him great pleasure, just as

would the physical development of one of his race horses. Had he

lived in the early days of Greece, he would have won in the Olympian

wrestling match.

There was in Hillard Watts a trait which is one of the most

pronounced of his type of folks,--a sturdy, honest humor. Humor, but

of the Cromwell type--and withal, a kind that went with praying and

fighting. Possessed, naturally, of a strong mind of great good sense,

he had learned to read and write by studying the Bible--the only book

he had ever read through and through and which he seemed to know by

heart. He was earnest and honest in all things, but in his

earnestness and strong fight for right living there was the twinkle

of humor. Life, with him, was a serious fight, but ever through the

smoke of its battle there gleamed the bright sun of a kindly humor.

The overseer's home was a double log hut on the side of the mountain.

His plantation, he called it,--for having been General Travis's

overseer, he could not imagine any farm being less than a plantation.

It consisted of forty acres of flinty land on the mountain side--"too

po' to sprout cow-peas," as his old wife would always add--"but hits

pow'ful for blackberries, an' if we can just live till blackberry

time comes we can take keer ourselves."

Mrs. Watts had not a lazy bone in her body. Her religion was work:

"Hit's nature's remedy," she would add--"wuck and five draps o'

turpentine if you're feelin' po'ly."

She despised her husband's ways and thought little of his religion.

Her tongue was frightful--her temper worse. Her mission on

earth--aside from work--work--work--was to see that too much peace

and good will did not abide long in the same place.

Elder Butts, the Hard-Shell preacher, used to say: "She can go to the

full of the moon mighty nigh every month 'thout raisin' a row, if

hard pressed for time an' she thinks everybody else around her is

miser'ble. But if things look too peaceful and happy, she'll raise

sand in the last quarter or bust. The Bishop's a good man, but if he

ever gits to heaven, the bigges' diamon' in his crown'll be because

he's lived with that old 'oman an' ain't committed murder. I don't

believe in law suits, but if he ain't got a damage case agin the

preacher that married him, then I'm wrong."

But no one ever heard the old man use harsher language in speaking of

her than to remark that she was "a female Jineral--that's what

Tabitha is."

Perhaps she was, and but for her the Bishop and his household had

starved long ago.

"Furagin' is her strong point"--he would always add--"she'd made

Albert Sydney Johnston a great chief of commissary."

And there was not an herb of any value that Mrs. Watts did not know

all about. Any fair day she might be seen on the mountain side

plucking edibles. Ginseng was her money crop, and every spring she

would daily go into the mountain forests and come back with enough of

its roots to help them out in the winter's pinch.

"Now, if anybody'll study Nature," she would say, "they'll see she

never cal'c'lated to fetch us here 'ithout makin' 'lowance fur to

feed us. The fus' thing that comes up is dandelions--an' I don't want

to stick my tooth in anything that's better than dandelion greens

biled with hog-jowl. I like a biled dinner any way. Sas'fras tea

comes mighty handy with dandelions in the spring, an' them two'll

carry us through April. Then comes wild lettice an' tansy-tea--that's

fur May. Blackberries is good fur June an' the jam'll take us through

winter if Bull Run and Appomattox ain' too healthy. In the summer we

can live on garden truck, an' in the fall there is wild reddishes an'

water-cresses an' spatterdock, an' nuts an' pertatoes come in mighty

handy fur winter wuck. Why, I was born wuckin'--when I was a gal I

cooked, washed and done house-work for a family of ten, an' then had

time to spin ten hanks o' yarn a day."

"Now there's the old man--he's too lazy to wuck--he's like all

parsons, he'd rather preach aroun' all his life on a promise of

heaven than to wuck on earth for cash!"

"How did I ever come to marry Hillard Watts? Wal, he wa'n't that

triflin' when I married him. He didn't have so much religiun then.

But I've allers noticed a man's heredity for no-countness craps out

after he's married. Lookin' back now I reckin' I married him jes' to

res' myself. When I'm wuckin' an' git tired, I watches Hillard doin'

nothin' awhile an' it hopes me pow'ful."

"He gits so busy at it an' seems so contented an' happy."

Besides his wife there were five grandchildren in his

family--children of the old man's son by his second wife. "Their

father tuck after his stepmother," he would explain regretfully, "an'

wucked hisself to death in the cotton factory. The dust an' lint give

him consumption. He was the only man I ever seed that tuck after his

stepmother"--he added sadly.

An old soldier never gets over the war. It has left a nervous shock

in his make-up--a memory in all his after life which takes precedence

over all other things. The old man had the naming of the

grandchildren, and he named them after the battles of the Civil war.

Bull Run and Seven Days were the boys. Atlanta, Appomattox and Shiloh

were the girls. His apology for Shiloh was: "You see I thout I'd name

the last one Appomattox. Then came a little one befo' her mammy died,

so weak an' pitiful I named her Shiloh."

It was the boast of their grandmother--that these children--even

little Shiloh--aged seven--worked from ten to twelve hours every day

in the cotton factory, rising before day and working often into the

night, with forty minutes at noon for lunch.

They had not had a holiday since Christmas, and on the last

anniversary of that day they had worked until ten o'clock, making up

for lost time. Their pay was twenty-five cents a day--except Shiloh,

who received fifteen.

"But I'll soon be worth mo', pap," she would say as she crawled up

into the old man's lap--her usual place when she had eaten her supper

and wanted to rest. "An you know what I'm gwine do with my other

nickel every day? I'm gwine give it to the po' people of Indy an'

China you preaches about."

And thus she would prattle--too young to know that, through the

cupidity of white men, in this--the land of freedom and

progress--she--this blue-eyed, white-skinned child of the Saxon race,

was making the same wages as the Indian sepoy and the Chinese coolie.

It was Saturday night and after the old man had put Shiloh to bed, he

mounted his horse and rode across the mountain to Westmoreland.

"Oh," said the old lady--"he's gwine over to Miss Alice's to git his

Sunday School less'n. An' I'd like to know what good Sunday school

less'ns 'll do any body. If folks'd git in the habit of wuckin' mo'

an' prayin' less, the worl'ud be better off, an' they'd really have

somethin' to be thankful fur when Sunday comes, 'stid of livin' frum

han' to mouth an' trustin' in some unknown God to cram feed in you'

crops."

Hardened by poverty, work, and misfortune, she was the soul of

pessimism.

CHAPTER VIII

WESTMORELAND

From The Gaffs to Westmoreland, the home of Alice Westmore, was

barely two miles up the level white pike.

Jim sat in the buggy at The Gaffs holding the horses while Richard

Travis, having eaten his supper, was lighting a cigar and drawing on

his overcoat, preparatory to riding over to Westmoreland.

The trotters stood at the door tossing their heads and eager to be

off. They were cherry bays and so much alike that even Jim sometimes

got them mixed. They were clean-limbed and racy looking, with flanks

well drawn up, but with a broad bunch of powerful muscles which

rolled from hip to back, making a sturdy back for the splendid full

tails which almost touched the ground. In front they stood up

straight, deep-chested, with clean bony heads, large luminous eyes

and long slender ears, tapering into a point as velvety and soft as

the tendril-bud on the tip of a Virginia creeper.

They stood shifting the bits nervously. The night air was cool and

they wanted to go.

Travis came out and sprang from the porch to the buggy seat with the

quick, sure footing of an athlete. Jim sat on the offside and passed

him the lines just as he sang cheerily out:

"Heigh-ho--my honies--go!"

The two mares bounded away so quickly and keenly that the near mare

struck her quarters and jumped up into the air, running. Her off mate

settled to work, trotting as steadily as a bolting Caribou, but

pulling viciously.

Travis twisted the near bit with a deft turn of his left wrist, and

as the two mares settled to their strides there was but one stroke

from their shoes, so evenly and in unison did they trot. Down the

level road they flew, Travis sitting gracefully upright and holding

the lines in that sure, yet careless way which comes to the expert

driver with power in his arms.

"How many times must I tell you, Jim," he said at last rather

gruffly--"never to bring them out, even for the road, without their

boots? Didn't you see Lizette grab her quarters and fly up just now?"

Jim was duly penitent.

Travis let them out a link. They flew down a soft, cool graveled

stretch. He drew them in at the sound of an ominous click. It came

from Sadie B.

"Sadie B.'s forging again. Didn't I tell you to have the blacksmith

move her hind shoes back a little?"

"I did, sir," said Jim.

"You've got no weight on her front feet, then," said Travis

critically.

"Not to-night, sir--I took off the two ounces thinking you'd not

speed them to-night, sir."

"You never know when I'm going to speed them. The night is as good as

the day when I want a tonic."

They had reached the big stone posts which marked the boundary of

Westmoreland. A little farther on the mares wheeled into the gate,

for it was open and lay, half on the ground, hanging by one hinge. It

had not been painted for years. The driveway, too, had been

neglected. The old home, beautiful even in its decay, sat in a fine

beech grove on the slope of a hill. A wide veranda, with marble

flag-stones as a base, ran across the front. Eight Corinthian pillars

sentineled it, resting on a marble base which seemed to spring up out

of the flag-stones themselves, and towering to the projecting

entablature above.

On one side an ell could be seen, covered with ivy. On the other the

roof of a hot-house, with the glass broken out.

It touched even Richard Travis--this decay. He had known the place in

the days of its glory before its proprietor, Colonel Theodore

Westmore, broken by the war, in spirit and in pocket, had sent a

bullet into his brain and ended the bitter fight with debt. Since

then, no one but the widow and her daughter knew what the fight had

been, for Clay Westmore, the brother, was but a boy and in college at

the time. He had graduated only a few months before, and was now at

home, wrapped up, as Richard Travis had heard, in what to him was a

visionary scheme of some sort for discovering a large area of coal

and iron thereabouts. He had heard, too, that the young man had taken

hold of what had been left, and that often he had been seen following

the plough himself.

Travis drove through the driveway--then he pulled up the mares very

gently, got out and felt of their flanks.

"Take them to the barn and rub them off," he said, "while you wait.

And for a half hour bandage their hind legs--I don't want any wind

puffs from road work."

He started into the house. Then he turned and said: "Be here at the

door, Jim, by ten o'clock, sharp. I shall make another call after

this. Mind you now, ten o'clock, sharp."

At the library he knocked and walked in.

Mrs. Westmore sat by the fire. She was a small, daintily-made woman,

and beautiful even at fifty-five. She had keen, black eyes and

nervous, flighty ways. A smile, half cynical, half inviting, lit up

continuously her face.

"Richard?" she said, rising and taking his hand.

"Cousin Alethea--I thought you were Alice and I was going to surprise

her."

Mrs. Westmore laughed her metallic little laugh. It was habit. She

intended it to be reassuring, but too much of it made one nervous. It

was the laugh without the soul in it--the eye open and lighted, but

dead. It was a Damascus blade falling from the stricken arm to the

stone pavement and not against the ringing steel of an opponent.

"You will guess, of course, where she is," she said after they were

seated.

"No?" from Travis.

"Getting their Sunday School lesson--she, Uncle Bisco, and the

Bishop."

Travis frowned and gave a nervous twitch of his shoulders as he

turned around to find himself a chair.

"No one knows just how we feel towards Uncle Bisco and his wife,"

went on Mrs. Westmore in half apology--"she has been with us so long

and is now so old and helpless since they were freed; their children

have all left them--gone--no one knows where. And so Uncle Bisco and

Aunt Charity are as helpless as babes, and but for Alice they would

suffer greatly."

A sudden impulse seized Travis: "Let us go and peep in on them. We

shall have a good joke on Her Majesty."

Mrs. Westmore laughed, and they slipped quietly out to Uncle Bisco's

cabin. Down a shrubbery-lined walk they went--then through the woods

across a field. It was a long walk, but the path was firm and good,

and the moon lit it up. They came to the little cabin at last, in the

edge of another wood. Then they slipped around and peeped in the

window.

A small kerosene lamp sat on a table lighting up a room scrupulously

clean.

Uncle Bisco was very old. His head was, in truth, a cotton plant full

open. His face was intelligent, grave--such a face as Howard Weeden

only could draw from memory. He had finished his supper, and from the

remnants left on the plate it was plain that Alice Westmore had

prepared for the old man dainties which she, herself, could not

afford to indulge in.

By him sat his old wife, and on the other side of the fireplace was

the old overseer, his head also white, his face strong and

thoughtful. He was clean shaven, save a patch of short white

chin-whiskers, and his big straight nose had a slight hook of

shrewdness in it.

Alice Westmore was reading the chapter--her voice added to it an

hundred fold: "Let not your heart be troubled.... Ye believe in God,

believe also in me.... In my Father's house are many mansions...!"

The lamplight fell on her hair. It was brown where the light flashed

over it, and lay in rippling waves around her temples in a splendid

coil down the arch of her neck, and shining in strong contrast

through the gauzy dark sheen of her black gown. But where the light

fell, there was that suspicion of red which the last faint tendril a

dying sunbeam throws out in a parting clutch at the bosom of a cloud.

It gave one a feeling of the benediction of twilight.

And when she looked up, her eyes were the blessings poured

out--luminous, helpful, uplifting, restful,--certain of life and

immortality, full of all that which one sees not, when awake, but

only when in the borderland of sleep, and memory, unleashed, tracks

back on the trail of sweet days which once were.

They spake indeed always thus: "Let not your heart be troubled....

Peace, be still."

Her face did not seem to be a separate thing--apart--as with most

women. For there are women whose hair is one thing and whose face is

another. The hair is beautiful, pure, refined. The face beautiful,

merely. The hair decorous, quiet, unadorned and debauched not by

powder and paint, stands aloof as Desdemona, Ophelia or Rosalind. The

face, brazen, with a sharp-tongued, vulgar queen of a thing in its

center, on a throne, surrounded by perfumed nymphs, under the sensual

glare of two rose-colored lamps, sits and holds a Du Barry court.

They are neighbors, but not friends, and they live in the same

sphere, held together only by the law of gravity which holds to one

spot of earth the rose and the ragwort. And the hair, like the rose,

in all the purity of its own rich sweetness, all the naturalness of

its soul, sits and looks down upon the face as a queen would over the

painted yellow thing thrust by the law of life into her presence.

But the face of Alice Westmore was companion to her hair. The

firelight fell on it; and while the glow from the lamp fell on her

hair in sweet twilight shadows of good night, the rosy, purple beams

of the cheerful firelight lit up her face with the sweet glory of a

perpetual good morning.

Travis stood looking at her forgetful of all else. His lips were

firmly set, as of a strong mind looking on its life-dream, the quarry

of his hunter-soul all but in his grasp. Flashes of hope and little

twists of fear were there; then, as he looked again, she raised, half

timidly, her face as a Madonna asking for a blessing; and around his,

crept in the smile which told of hope long deferred.

Selfish, impure, ambitious, forceful and masterful as he was, he

stood hopeless and hungry-hearted before this pure woman. She had

been the dream of his life--all times--always--since he could

remember.

To own her--to win her!

As he looked up, the hardness of his face attracted even Mrs.

Westmore, smiling by his side at the scene before her. She looked up

at Travis, but when she saw his face the smile went out of hers. It

changed to fear.

All the other passions in his face had settled into one cruel cynical

smile around his mouth--a smile of winning or of death.

For the first time in her life she feared Richard Travis.

"I must go now," said Alice Westmore to the old men--"but I'll sing

you a verse or two."

The overseer leaned back in his chair. Uncle Bisco stooped forward,

his chin resting on his hickory staff.

And then like the clear notes of a spring, dripping drop by drop with

a lengthening cadence into the covered pool of a rock-lined basin,

came a simple Sunday School song the two old men loved so well.

There were tears in the old negro's eyes when she had finished. Then

he sobbed like a child.

Alice Westmore arose to go.

"Now, Bishop--" she smiled at the overseer--"don't keep Uncle Bisco up

all night talking about the war, and if you don't come by the house and

chat with mamma and me awhile, we'll be jealous."

The overseer looked up: "Miss Alice--I'm an ole man an' we ole men all

dream dreams when night comes. Moods come over us and, look where we

will, it all leads back to the sweet paths of the past. To-day--all

day--my mind has been on"--he stopped, afraid to pronounce the word and

hunting around in the scanty lexicon of his mind for some phrase of

speech, some word even that might not awaken in Alice Westmore memories

of the past.

Richard Travis had an intuition of things as naturally as an eagle has

the homing instinct, however high in air and beyond all earth's

boundaries he flies. In this instance Mrs. Westmore also had it, for she

looked up quickly at the man beside her. All the other emotions had

vanished from his face save the one appealing look which said: "Come,

let us go--we have heard enough."

Then they slipped back into the house.

Alice Westmore had stopped, smiling back from the doorway.

"On what, Bishop?" she finally asked.

He shook his head. "Jus' the dream of an ole man," he said. "Don't

bother about us two ole men. I'll be 'long presently."

"Bisco," said the old preacher after a while, "come mighty nigh

makin' a break then--but I've been thinkin' of Cap'n Tom all day. I

can't throw it off."

Bisco shook his head solemnly. "So have I--so have I. The older I

gits, the mo' I miss Marse Tom."

"I don't like the way things are goin'--in yonder"--and the preacher

nodded his head toward the house.

Uncle Bisco looked cautiously around to see that no one was near:

"He's doin' his bes'--the only thing is whether she can forgit Marse

Tom."

"Bisco, it ain't human nature for her to stan' up agin all that's

brought to bear on her. Cap'n Tom is dead. Love is only human at

las', an' like all else that's human it mus' fade away if it ain't

fed. It's been ten years an' mo'--sence--Cap'n Tom's light went out."

"The last day of November--'64--" said Uncle Bisco, "I was thar an'

seed it. It was at the Franklin fight."

"An' Dick Travis has loved her from his youth," went on the overseer,

"an' he loves her now, an' he's a masterful man."

"So is the Devil," whispered Uncle Bisco, "an' didn't he battle with

the angels of the Lord an' mighty nigh hurled 'em from the crystal

battlements."

"Bisco, I know him--I've knowed him from youth. He's a conjurin'

man--a man who does things--he'll win her--he'll marry her yet.

She'll not love him as she did Cap'n Tom. No--she'll never love

again. But life is one thing an' love is another, an' it ain't often

they meet in the same person. Youth mus' live even if it don't love,

an' the law of nature is the law of life."

"I'm afeered so," said the old negro, shaking his head, "I'm afeered

it'll be that way--but--I'd ruther see her die to-night."

"If God lets it be," said the preacher, "Bisco, if God lets it be--"

he said excitedly, "if he'll let Cap'n Tom die an' suffer the

martyrdom he suffered for conscience sake an' be robbed, as he was

robbed, of his home, an' of his love--if God'll do that, then all I

can say is, that after a long life walkin' with God, it'll be the

fus' time I've ever knowed Him to let the wrong win out in the end.

An' that ain't the kind of God I'm lookin' fur."

"Do you say that, Marse Hillyard?" asked the old negro quickly--his

eyes taking on the light of hope as one who, weak, comes under the

influence of a stronger mind. "Marse Hillyard, do you believe it?

Praise God."

"Bisco--I'm--I'm ashamed--why should I doubt Him--He's told me a

thousand truths an' never a lie."

"Praise God," replied the old man softly.

And so the two old men talked on, and their talk was of Captain Tom.

No wonder when the old preacher mounted his horse to go back to his

little cabin, all of his thoughts were of Captain Tom. No wonder

Uncle Bisco, who had raised him, went to bed and dreamed of Captain

Tom--dreamed and saw again the bloody Franklin fight.

CHAPTER IX

A MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING

In the library, Travis and Mrs. Westmore sat for some time in

silence. Travis, as usual, smoked, in his thoughtful way watching the

firelight which flickered now and then, half lighting up the room. It

was plain that both were thinking of a subject that neither wished to

be the first to bring up.

"I have been wanting all day to ask you about the mortgage," she said

to him, finally.

"Oh," said Travis, indifferently enough--"that's all right. I

arranged it at the bank to-day."

"I am so much obliged to you; it has been so on my mind," said his

companion. "We women are such poor financiers, I wonder how you men

ever have patience to bother with us. Did you get Mr. Shipton to

carry it at the bank for another year?"

"Why--I--you see, Cousin Alethea--Shipton's a close dog--and the most

unaccommodating fellow that ever lived when it comes to money. And

so--er--well--the truth is--is--I had to act quickly and for what I

thought was your interest."

Mrs. Westmore looked up quickly, and Travis saw the pained look in

her face. "So I bought it in myself," he went on, carelessly flecking

his cigar ashes into the fire. "I just had the judgment and sale

transferred to me--to accommodate you--Cousin Alethea--you

understand that--entirely for you. I hate to see you bothered this

way--I'll carry it as long as you wish."

She thanked him again, more with her eyes than her voice. Then there

crept over her face that look of trouble and sorrow, unlike any

Travis had ever seen there. Once seen on any human face it is always

remembered, for it is the same, the world over, upon its millions and

millions--that deadened look of trouble which carries with it the

knowledge that the spot called home is lost forever.

There are many shifting photographs from the camera called sorrow,

pictured on the delicate plate of the human soul or focused in the

face. There is the crushed look when Death takes the loved one, the

hardened look when an ideal is shattered, the look of dismay from

wrecked hopes and the cynical look from wrecked happiness--but none

of these is the numbed and dumb look of despair which confronts

humanity when the home is gone.

It runs not alone through the man family, but every other animal as

well, from the broken-hearted bird which sits on the nearby limb, and

sees the wreck of her home by the ravages of a night-prowling

marauder, to the squalidest of human beings, turning their backs

forever on the mud-hut that had once sheltered them.

To Mrs. Westmore it was a keen grief. Here had she come as a

bride--here had she lived since--here had been born her two

children--here occurred the great sorrow of her life.

And the sacredest memory, at last, of life, lies not in the

handclasp of a coming joy, but in the footfall of a vanishing sorrow.

Westmoreland meant everything to Mrs. Westmore--the pride of birth,

of social standing, the ties of motherhood, the very altar of her

life. And it was her husband's name and her own family. It meant she

was not of common clay, nor unknown, nor without influence. It was

bound around and woven into her life, and part of her very existence.

Home in the South means more than it does anywhere else on earth; for

local self-government--wherever the principle came from--finds its

very altar there. States-right is nothing but the home idea,

stretched over the state and bounded by certain lines. The peculiar

institutions of the South made every home a castle, a town, a

government, a kingdom in itself, in which the real ruler is a queen.

Ask the first negro or child met in the road, whose home is this, or

that, and one would think the entire Southland was widowed.

From the day she had entered it as a bride, Westmoreland, throughout

the County, had been known as the home of Mrs. Westmore.

She was proud of it. She loved it with that love which had come down

through a long line of cavaliers loving their castles.

And now she knew it must go, as well as that, sooner or later, Death

itself must come.

She knew Richard Travis, and she knew that, if from his life were

snatched the chance of making Alice Westmore his wife he would sell

the place as cold-bloodedly as Shipton would.

Travis sat smoking, but reading her. He spelled her thoughts as

easily as if they had been written on her forehead, for he was a man

who spelled. He smoked calmly and indifferently, but the one question

of his heart--the winning of Alice,--surged in his breast and it

said: "Now is the time--now--buy her--the mother. This is the one

thing which is her price."

He looked at Mrs. Westmore again. He scanned her closely, from her

foot to the dainty head of beautiful, half-grey hair. He could read

her as an open book--her veneration of all Westmoreland things--her

vanity--her pride of home and name and position; the overpowering

independence of that vanity which made her hold up her head in

company, just as in the former days, tho' to do it she must work,

scrub, pinch, ay, even go hungry.

He knew it all and he knew it better than she guessed--that it had

actually come to a question of food with them; that her son was a

geological dreamer, just out of college, and that Alice's meagre

salary at the run-down female college where she taught music was all

that stood between them and poverty of the bitterest kind.

For there is no poverty like the tyranny of that which sits on the

erstwhile throne of plenty.

He glanced around the room--the hall--the home--in his mind's

eye--and wondered how she did it--how she managed that poverty should

leave no trace of itself in the home, the well furnished and elegant

old home, from its shining, polished furniture and old silver to the

oiled floor of oak and ash.

Could he buy her--bribe her, win her to work for him? He started to

speak and say: "Cousin Alethea, may not all this be stopped, this

debt and poverty and make-believe--this suffering of pride,

transfixed by the spears of poverty? Let you and me arrange it, and

all so satisfactorily. I have loved Alice all my life."

There is the fool in every one of us. And that is what the fool in

Richard Travis wished him to say. What he did say was:

"Oh, it was nothing but purely business on my part--purely business.

I had the money and was looking for a good investment. I was glad to

find it. There are a hundred acres and the house left. And by the

way, Cousin Alethea, I just added five-hundred dollars more to the

principal,--thought, perhaps, you'd need it, you know? You'll find it

to your credit at Shipton's bank."

He smoked on as if he thought it was nothing. As a business fact he

knew the place was already mortgaged for all it was worth.

"Oh, how can we ever thank you enough?"

Travis glanced at her when she spoke. He flushed when he heard her

place a slight accent on the we. She glanced at him and then looked

into the fire. But in their glances which met, they both saw that the

other knew and understood.

"And by the way, Cousin Alethea," said Travis after a while, "of

course it is not necessary to let Alice know anything of this

business. It will only worry her unnecessarily."

"Of course not," said Mrs. Westmore.

CHAPTER X

A STAR AND A SATELLITE

An hour later Mrs. Westmore had gone to her room and Alice had been

singing his favorite songs. Her singing always had a peculiar

influence over Richard Travis--a moral influence, which, perhaps, was

the secret of its power; and all influence which is permanent is

moral. There was in it for him an uplifting force that he never

experienced save in her presence and under the influence of her

songs.

He was a brilliant man and he knew that if he won Alice Westmore it

must be done on a high plane. Women were his playthings--he had won

them by the score and flung them away when won. But all his

life--even when a boy--he had dreamed of finally winning Alice

Westmore and settling down.

Like all men who were impure, he made the mistake of thinking that

one day, when he wished, he could be pure.

Such a man may marry, but it is a thing of convenience, a matter in

which he selects some woman, who he knows will not be his mistress,

to become his housekeeper.

And thus she plods along in life, differing eventually only from his

mistress in that she is the mother of his children.

In all Richard's longings, too, for Alice Westmore, there was an

unconscious cause. He did not know it because he could not know.

Sooner or later love, which is loose, surfeits and sours. It is then

that it turns instinctively to the pure, as the Jews, straying from

their true God and meeting the chastisement of the sword of Babylon,

turned in their anguish to the city of their King.

Nature is inexorable, and love has its laws as fixed as those which

hold the stars in their course. And woe to the man or woman who

transgresses! He who, ere it is ripe, deflowers the bud of blossoming

love in wantonness and waste, in after years will watch and wait and

water it with tears, in vain, for that bloom will never come.

She came over by the fire. Her face was flushed; her beautiful sad

eyes lighted with excitement.

"Do you remember the first time I ever heard you sing, Alice?"

His voice was earnest and full of pathos, for him.

"Was it not when father dressed me as a gypsy girl and I rode my pony

over to The Gaffs and sang from horse-back for your grandfather?"

He nodded: "I thought you were the prettiest thing I ever saw, and I

have thought so ever since. That's when I fell in love with you."

"I remember quite distinctly what you did," she said. "You were a big

boy and you came up behind my pony and jumped on, frightening us

dreadfully."

"Tried to kiss you, didn't I?"

She laughed: "That was ever a chronic endeavor of your youth."

How pretty she looked. Had it been any other woman he would have

reached over and taken her hand.

"Overpower her, master her, make her love you by force of arms"--his

inner voice said.

He turned to the musing woman beside him and mechanically reached out

his hand. Hers lay on the arm of her chair. The next instant he would

have dropped his upon it and held it there. But as he made the motion

her eyes looked up into his, so passion-free and holy that his own

arm fell by his side.

But the little wave of passion in him only stirred him to his depths.

Ere she knew it or could stop him he was telling her the story of his

love for her. Poetry,--romance,--and with it the strength of

saying,--fell from his lips as naturally as snow from the clouds. He

went into the history of old loves--how, of all loves they are the

greatest--of Jacob who served his fourteen years for Rachel, of the

love of Petrarch, of Dante.

"Do you know Browning's most beautiful poem?" he asked at last. His

voice was tenderly mellow:

"All that I know of a certain star

Is, it can throw (like the angled spar)

Now a dart of red, now a dart of blue;

Till my friends have said they would fain see, too,

My star that dartles the red and the blue!

Then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs furled:

They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it.

What matter to me if their star is a world?

Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it."

"Alice," he said, drawing his chair closer to her, "I know I have no

such life to offer as you would bring to me. The best we men can do

is to do the best we can. We are saved only because there is one

woman we can look to always as our star. There is much of our past

that we all might wish to change, but change, like work, is the law

of life, and we must not always dream."

Quietly he had dropped his hand upon hers. Her own eyes were far

off--they were dreaming. So deep was her dream that she had not

noticed it. Passion practised, as he was, the torch of her hand

thrilled him as with wine; and as with wine was he daring.

"I know where your thoughts have been," he went on.

She looked up with a start and her hand slipped from under his into

her lap. It was a simple movement and involuntary--like that of the

little brown quail when she slips from the sedge-grass into the

tangled depths of the blossoming wild blackberry bushes at the far

off flash of a sharp-shinned hawk-wing, up in the blue. Nor could she

say whether she saw it, or whether it was merely a shadow, an

instinctive signal from the innocent courts of the sky to the

brood-children of her innocence below.

But he saw it and said quickly, changing with it the subject: "At

least were--but all that has passed. I need you, Alice," he went on

passionately--"in my life, in my work. My home is there, waiting! It

has been waiting all these years for you--its mistress--the only

mistress it shall ever have. Your mother"--Alice looked at him

surprised.

"Your mother--you,--perhaps, had not thought of that--your mother

needs the rest and the care we could give her. Our lives are not

always our own," he went on gravely--"oftentimes it belongs partly to

others--for their happiness."

He felt that he was striking a winning chord.

"You can love me if you would say so," he said, bending low over her.

This time, when his hand fell on hers, she did not move. Surprised,

he looked into her eyes. There were tears there.

Travis knew when he had gone far enough. Reverently he kissed her

hand as he said:

"Never mind--in your own time, Alice. I can wait--I have waited long.

Twenty years," he added, patiently, even sweetly, "and if need be,

I'll wait twenty more."

"I'll go now," he said, after a moment.

She looked at him gratefully, and arose. "One moment, Richard," she

said--"but you were speaking of mother, and knowing your zeal for her

I was afraid you might--might--the mortgage has been troubling her."

"Oh, no--no"--he broke in quickly--"I did nothing--absolutely

nothing--though I wanted to for your sake."

"I'm so glad," she said--"we will manage somehow. I am so sensitive

about such things."

"I'll come to-morrow afternoon and bring your mare."

She smiled, surprised.

"Yes, your mare--I happened on her quite unexpectedly in Tennessee. I

have bought her for you--she is elegant, and I wish you to ride her

often. I have given Jim orders that no one but you shall ride her. If

it is a pretty day to-morrow I shall be around in the afternoon, and

we will ride down to the bluffs five miles away to see the sunset."

The trotters were at the door. He took her hand as he said good-bye,

and held it while he added:

"Maybe you'd better forget all I said to-night--be patient with

me--remember how long I have waited."

He was off and sprang into the buggy, elated. Never before had she

let him hold her hand even for a moment. He felt, he knew, that he

would win her.

He turned the horses and drove off.

From Westmoreland Travis drove straight toward the town. The

trotters, keen and full of play, flew along, tossing their queenly

heads in the very exuberance of life.

At The Gaffs, he drew rein: "Now, Jim, I'll be back at midnight. You

sleep light until I come in, and have their bedding dry and blankets

ready."

He tossed the boy a dollar as he drove off.

Up the road toward the town he drove, finally slackening his

trotters' speed as he came into the more thickly settled part of the

outskirts. Sand Mountain loomed high in the faint moonlight, and at

its base, in the outposts of the town, arose the smoke-stack of the

cotton mills.

Around it lay Cottontown.

Slowly he brought the nettled trotters down to a walk. Quietly he

turned them into a shaded lane, overhung with forest trees, near

which a cottage, one of the many belonging to the mill, stood in the

shadow of the forest.

Stopping his horses in the shadow, he drew out his watch and pressed

the stem. It struck eleven.

He drew up the buggy-top and taking the little silver whistle from

his pocket, gave a low whistle.

It was ten minutes later before the side door of the cottage opened

softly and a girl came noiselessly out. She slipped out, following

the shadow line of the trees until she came up to the buggy. Then she

threw the shawl from off her face and head and stood smiling up at

Travis. It had been a pretty face, but now it was pinched by overwork

and there was the mingling both of sadness and gladness in her eyes.

But at sight of Travis she blushed joyfully, and deeper still when he

held out his hand and drew her into the buggy and up to the seat

beside him.

"Maggie"--was all he whispered. Then he kissed her passionately on

her lips. "I am glad I came," he went on, as he put one arm around

her and drew her to him--"you're flushed and the ride will do you

good."

She was satisfied to let her head lie on his shoulder.

"They are beauties"--she said after a while, as the trotters'

thrilling, quick step brought the blood tingling to her veins.

"Beauties for the beauty," said Travis, kissing her again. Her brown

hair was in his face and the perfume of it went through him like the

whistling flash of the first wild doe he had killed in his first

boyish hunt and which he never forgot.

"You do love me," she said at last, looking up into his face, where

her head rested. She could not move because his arm held her girlish

form to him with an overpowering clasp.

"Why?" he asked, kissing her again and in sheer passionate excess

holding his lips on hers until she could not speak, but only look

love with her eyes. When she could, she sighed and said:

"Because, you could not make me so happy if you didn't."

He relaxed his arm to control the trotters, which were going too fast

down the road. She sat up by his side and went on.

"Do you know I have thought lots about what you said last Saturday

night?"

"Why, what?" he asked.

She looked pained that he had forgotten.

"About--about--our bein' married to each

other--even--even--if--if--there's no preacher. You know--that true

love makes marriages, and not a ceremony--and--and--that the heart is

the priest to all of us, you know!"

Travis said nothing. He had forgotten all about it.

"One thing I wrote down in my little book when I got back home an'

memorized it--Oh, you can say such beautiful things."

He seized her and kissed her again.

"I am so happy with you--always--" she laughed.

He drove toward the shaded trees down by the river.

"I want you to see how the setting moonlight looks on the river," he

said. "There is nothing in all nature like it. It floats like a

crescent above, falling into the arms of its companion below. All

nature is love and never fails to paint a love scene in preference

to all others, if permitted. How else can you account for it making

two lover moons fall into each other's arms," he laughed.

She looked at him enraptured. It was the tribute which mediocrity

pays to genius.

Presently they passed by Westmoreland, and from Alice's window a

light shone far out into the golden tinged leaves of the beeches

near.

Travis glanced up at it. Then at the pretty mill-girl by his side:

"A star and--a satellite!"--he smiled to himself.

CHAPTER XI

A MIDNIGHT BURIAL

It was growing late when the old preacher left Westmoreland and rode

leisurely back toward the cabin on Sand Mountain. The horse he was

riding--a dilapidated roan--was old and blind, but fox-trotted along

with the easy assurance of having often travelled the same road.

The bridle rested on the pommel of the saddle. The old man's head was

bent in deep thought, and the roan, his head also down and half

dreaming, jogged into the dark shadows which formed a wooded gulch,

leading into the valley and from thence into the river.

There is in us an unnameable spiritual quality which, from lack of a

more specific name, we call mental telepathy. Some day we shall know

more about it, just as some day we shall know what unknown force it

is which draws the needle to the pole.

It is the border land of the spiritual--a touch of it, given, to let

us know there is more and in great abundance in the country to which

we ultimately shall go,--a glimpse of the kingdom which is to be.

To-night, this influence was on the old man. The theme of his

thoughts was, Captain Tom. Somehow he felt that even then Captain Tom

was near him. How--where--why--he could not tell. He merely felt it.

And so the very shadows of the trees grew uncanny to him as he rode

by them and the slight wind among them mourned _Captain

Tom--Captain Tom_.

It was a desolate place in the narrow mountain road and scarcely

could the old man see the white sand which wound in and through it,

and then out again on the opposite side into the clearing beyond the

scraggy side of Sand Mountain. But the horse knew every foot of the

way, and though it was always night with him, instinct had taught him

a sure footing.

Suddenly the rider was awakened from his reverie by the old horse

stopping so suddenly as almost to unseat him. With a snort the roan

had stopped and had thrown up his head, quivering with fear, while

with his nose he was trying to smell out the queer thing which stood

in his path.

The moon broke out from behind a cloud at the same moment, and there,

in the middle of the road, not ten yards from him, stood a heavily

built, rugged, black-bearded man in a ragged slouched hat and

pointing a heavy revolver at the rider's head.

"Hands up, Hillard Watts!"

The old man looked quietly into the muzzle of the revolver and said,

with a laugh:

"This ain't 'zactly my benediction time, Jack Bracken, an' I've no

notion of h'istin' my arms an' axin' a blessin' over you an' that old

pistol. Put it up an' tell me what you want," he said more softly.

"Well, you do know me," said the man, coming forward and thrusting

his pistol into its case. "I wa'nt sho' it was you," he said, "and I

wa'nt sho' you'd kno' me if it was. In my business I have to be

mighty keerful," he added with a slight laugh.

He came up to the saddle-skirt and held out his hand, half

hesitatingly, as he spoke.

The Bishop--as every one knew him--glanced into the face before him

and saw something which touched him quickly. It was grief-stricken,

and sorrow sat in the fierce eyes, and in the shadows of the dark

face. And through it all, a pleading, beseeching appeal for sympathy

ran as he half doubtingly held out his hand.

"Why,--yes--, I'll take it, Jack, robber that you are," said the old

man cheerily. "You may not be as bad as they say, an' no man is worse

than his heart. But what in the worl' do you want to hold up as po' a

man as me--an' if I do say it, yo' frien' when you was a boy?"

"I know," said the other--"I know. I don't want yo' money, even if

you had it. I want you. You've come as a God-send. I--I couldn't bury

him till you'd said somethin'."

His voice choked--he shook with a suppressed sob.

The bishop slid off his horse: "What is it, Jack? You hain't kilt

anybody, have you?"

"No--no"--said the other--"it's little--little Jack--he's dead."

The Bishop looked at him inquiringly. He had never before heard of

little Jack.

"I--I dunno', Jack," he said. "You'll have to tell me all. I hain't

seed you sence you started in your robber career after the war--sence

I buried yo' father," he added. "An' a fine, brave man he was,

Jack--a fine, brave man--an' I've wondered how sech a man's son

could ever do as you've done."

"Come," said the other--"I'll tell you. Come, an' say a prayer over

little Jack fust. You must do it"--he said almost fiercely--"I won't

bury him without a prayer--him that was an angel an' all I had on

earth. Hitch yo' hoss just outer the road, in the thicket, an' follow

me."

The Bishop did as he was told, and Jack Bracken led the way down a

rocky gulch under the shaggy sides of Sand Mountain, furzed with

scraggy trees and thick with underbrush and weeds.

It was a tortuous path and one in which the old man himself, knowing,

as he thought he did, every foot of the country around, could easily

have been lost. Above, through the trees, the moon shone dimly, and

no path could be seen under foot. But Jack Bracken slouched heavily

along, in a wabbling, awkward gait, never once looking back to see if

his companion followed.

For a half mile they went through what the Bishop had always thought

was an almost impenetrable cattle trail. At last they wound around a

curve on the densely wooded side of the mountain, beyond which lay

the broad river breathing out frosty mist and vapor from its sleeping

bosom.

Following a dry gulch until it ended abruptly at the river's bluff,

around the mouth of which great loose rocks lay as they had been

washed by the waters of many centuries, and bushes grew about, the

path terminated abruptly. It overlooked the river romantically, with

a natural rock gallery in front.

Jack Bracken stopped and sat down on one of the rocks. From

underneath he drew forth a lantern and prepared to light it. "This is

my home," he said laconically.

The Bishop looked around: "Well, Jack, but this is part of my own

leetle forty-acre farm. Why, thar's my cabin up yander. We've wound

in an' aroun' the back of my place down by the river! I never seed

this hole befo'."

"I knew it was yo's," said the outlaw quietly. "That's why I come

here. Many a Sunday night I've slipped up to the little church winder

an' heard you preach--me an' po' little Jack. Oh, he loved to hear

the Bible read an' he never forgot nothin' you ever said. He knowed

all about Joseph an' Moses an' Jesus, an' last night when he died o'

that croup befo' I c'ud get him help or anything, he wanted you, an'

he said he was goin' to the lan' where you said Jesus was--"

He broke down--he could not say it.

Stepping into the mouth of the cave, he struck a match, when out of

sight of the entrance way, and stepping from stone to stone he guided

the Bishop down some twenty feet, following the channel the water had

cut on its way underground to the river. Here another opening entered

into the dry channel, and into it he stepped.

It was a nicely turned cave--a natural room,--arched above with

beautiful white lime-rock, the stalactites hanging in pointed

clusters, their starry points twinkling above like stars in a winter

sky. Underneath, the soft sand made a clean, warm floor, and the

entire cave was so beautiful that the old man could do nothing but

look and admire, as the light fell on stalagmite and ghostly columns

and white sanded floors.

"Beautiful," he said--"Jack, you cudn't he'p gettin' relig'un here."

"Little Jack loved 'em," said the outlaw. "He'd lay here ev'y night

befo' he'd go to sleep an' look up an' call it his heaven; an' he

said that big column thar was the great white throne, an' them big

things up yander with wings was angels. He had all them other columns

named for the fellers you preached about--Moses an' Aaron an' Joseph

an' all of 'em, an' that kind o' double one lookin' like a woman

holding her child, he called Mary an' little Jesus."

"He's gone to a prettier heaven than this," said the Bishop looking

down on the little figure, with face as pale and white as any of the

columns around him, neatly dressed and wrapped, save his face, in an

old oil cloth and lying on the little bed that sat in a corner.

The old man sat down very tenderly by the little dead boy and,

pulling out a testament from his pocket, read to the outlaw, whose

whole soul was centered in all he said, the comforting chapter which

Miss Alice had that night read to the old negro: "_Let not your

hearts be troubled...._"

He explained as he read, and told the father how little Jack was now

in one of the many mansions and far better off than living in a cave,

the child of an outlaw, for the Bishop did not mince his words. He

dwelt on it, that God had taken the little boy for love of him, and

to give him a better home and perhaps as a means of changing the

father, and when he said the last prayer over the dead child asking

for forgiveness for the father's sins, that he might meet the little

one in heaven, the heart of the outlaw burst with grief and

repentance within him.

He fell at the old man's feet, on his knees--he laid his big shaggy

head in the Bishop's lap and wept as he had never wept before.

"There can't be--you don't mean," he said--"that there is forgiveness

for me--that I can so live that I'll see little Jack again!"

"That's just what I mean, Jack," said the old man--"here it all

is--here--in a book that never lies, an' all vouched for by Him who

could walk in here to-night and lay His sweet hands on little Jack

an' tell him to rise an' laugh agin, an' he'd do it. You turn about

now an' see if it ain't so--an' that you'll be better an' happier."

"But--my God, man--you don't know--you don't understan'. I've robbed,

I've killed. Men have gone down befo' my bullets like sheep. They was

shootin' at me, too--but I shot best. I'm a murderer."

The old Bishop looked at him calmly.

"So was Moses and David," he replied--"men after God's own heart. An'

so was many another that's now called a saint, from old Hickory

Jackson up."

"But I'm a robber--a thief"--began Jack Bracken.

"We all steal," said the old man sadly shaking his head--"it's human

nature. There's a thief in every trade, an' every idle hand is a

robber, an' every idle tongue is a thief an' a liar. We all steal.

But there's somethin' of God an' divinity in all of us, an' in spite

of our shortcomin' it'll bring us back at last to our Father's home

if we'll give it a chance. God's Book can't lie, an' it says: '_Tho'

your sins be as scarlet they shall be white as snow!_' ... an' then

agin, _shall have life everlasting!_"

"Life everlastin'," repeated the outlaw. "Do you believe that? Oh, if

it was only so! To live always up there an' with little Jack. How do

you know it ain't lyin'?--It's too gran' to be so. How do you know it

ain't lyin', I say? Hillard Watts, are you handin' it out to me

straight about this here Jesus Christ?" he cried bitterly.

"Well, it's this way, Jack," said the old man, "jes' this away an'

plain as the nose on yo' face: Now here's me, ain' it? Well, you know

I won't lie to you. You believe me, don't you?"

The outlaw nodded.

"Why?" asked the Bishop.

"Because you ain't never lied to me," said the other. "You've allers

told me the truth about the things I know to be so."

"But now, suppose," said the old man, "I'd tell you about somethin'

you had never seed--that, for instance, sence you've been an outcast

from society an' a livin' in this cave, I've seed men talk to each

other a hundred miles apart, with nothin' but a wire betwix' 'em."

"That's mighty hard to believe," said the outlaw grimly.

"But I've seed it done," said the Bishop.

"Do you mean it?" asked the other.

"As I live, I have," said the Bishop.

"Then it's so," said Jack.

"Now that's faith, Jack--an' common sense, too. We know what'll be

the earthly end of the liar, an' the thief, an' the murderer, an' him

that's impure--because we see 'em come to thar end all the time. It

don't lie when it tells you the good are happy, an' the hones' are

elevated an' the mem'ry of the just shall not perish, because them

things we see come so. Now, if after tellin' you all that, that's

true, it axes you to believe when it says there is another life--a

spiritual life, which we can't conceive of, an' there we shall live

forever, can't you believe that, too, sence it ain't never lied about

what you can see, by your own senses? Why ever' star that shines, an'

ever' beam of sunlight fallin' on the earth, an' ever' beat of yo'

own heart by some force that we know not of, all of them is mo'

wonderful than the telegraph, an' the livin' agin of the spirit ain't

any mo' wonderful than the law that holds the stars in their places.

You'll see little Jack agin as sho' as God lives an' holds the worl'

in His hand."

The outlaw sat mute and motionless, and a great light of joy swept

over his face.

"By God's help I'll do it"--and he bowed his head in prayer--the

first he had uttered since he was a boy.

It was wonderful to see the happy and reconciled change when he arose

and tenderly lifted the dead child in his arms. His face was

transformed with a peace the old man had never seen before in any

human being.

Strong men are always strong--in crime--in sin. When they reform it

is the reformation of strength. Such a change came over Jack Bracken,

the outlaw.

He carried his dead child to the next room: "I've got his grave

already chiseled out of the rocks. I'll bury him here--right under

the columns he called Mary and little Jesus, that he loved to talk of

so much."

"It's fitten"--said the old man tenderly--"it's fitten an' beautiful.

The fust burial we know of in the Bible is where Abraham bought the

cave of Machpelah for to bury Sarah, his wife. And as Abraham bought

it of Ephron, the Hittite, and offered it to Abraham for to bury his

dead out of his sight, so I give this cave to you, Jack Bracken,

forever to be the restin' place of little Jack."

And so, tenderly and with many kisses did they bury little Jack,

sinless and innocent, deep in the pure white rock, covered as he was

with purity and looking ever upwards toward the statue above, wherein

Nature's chisel had carved out a Madonna and her child.

CHAPTER XII

JACK BRACKEN

Jack Bracken was comfortably fixed in his underground home. There was

every comfort for living. It was warm in winter and cool in summer,

and in another apartment adjoining his living room was what he called

a kitchen in which a spring of pure water, trickling down from rock

to rock, formed in a natural basin of whitest rock below.

"Jack," said the old man, "won't you tell me about yo'self an' how

you ever got down to this? I knowed you as a boy, up to the time you

went into the army, an' if I do say it to yo' face, you were a brave

hon'rble boy that never forgot a frien' nor--"

"A foe," put in Jack quickly. "Bishop, if I cu'd only forgive my

foes--that's been the ruin of me."

The old man was thoughtful a while: "Jack, that's a terrible thing in

the human heart--unforgiveness. It's to life what a drought is to

Nature--an' it spiles mo' people than any other weakness. But that

don't make yo' no wuss than the rest of us, nor does robbery nor even

murder. So there's a chance for you yet, Jack--a mighty fine chance,

too, sence yo' heart is changed."

"Many a time, Jack, many a time when the paper 'ud be full of yo'

holdin' up a train or shootin' a shar'ff, or robbin' or killin', I'd

tell 'em what a good boy you had been, brave an' game but revengeful

when aroused. I'd tell 'em how you dared the bullets of our own men,

after the battle of Shiloh, to cut down an' carry off a measley

little Yankee they'd hung up as a spy 'cause he had onct saved yo'

father's life. You shot two of our boys then, Jack."

"They was a shootin' me, too," he said quietly. "I caught two bullets

savin' that Yankee. But he was no spy; he was caught in a Yankee

uniform an'--an' he saved my father, as you said--that settled it

with me."

"It turned our boys agin you, Jack."

"Yes, an' the Yankees were agin me already--that made all the worl'

agin me, an' it's been agin me ever since--they made me an outlaw."

The old man softened: "How was it, Jack? I knowed you was driven to

it."

"They shot my father--waylaid and killed him--some home-made Yankee

bush-whackers that infested these hills--as you know."

The Bishop nodded. "I know--I know--it was awful. 'But vengeance is

mine--I will repay'--saith the Lord."

"Well, I was young, an' my father--you know how I loved him. Befo' I

c'ud get home they had burned our house, killed my sick mother from

exposure and insulted my sisters."

"Jack," said the old man hotly--"a home-made Yankee is a 'bomination

to the Lord. He's a twin brother to the Copperhead up north."

"My little brother--they might have spared him," went on the

outlaw--"they might have spared him. He tried to defen' his mother

an' sisters an' they shot him down in col' blood."

"'Vengeance is mine,' saith the Lord," replied the old man sadly.

"Well, I acted as His agent that time,"--his eyes were hot with a

bright glitter. "I put on their uniform an' went after 'em. I j'ined

'em--the devils! An' they had a nigger sarjent an' ten of their

twenty-seven was niggers, wearin' a Yankee uniform. I j'ined

'em--yes,--for wasn't I the agent of the Lord?" He laughed bitterly.

"An' didn't He say: 'He that killeth with the sword must be killed

with the sword.' One by one they come up missin', till I had killed

all but seven. These got panicky--followed by an unknown doom an'

they c'udn't see it, for it come like a thief at midnight an' agin

like a pesterlence it wasted 'em at noonday. They separated--they

tried to fly--they hid--but I followed 'em 'an I got all but one. He

fled to California."

"It was awful, Jack--awful--God he'p you."

"Then a price was put on my head. I was Jack Bracken, the spy and the

outlaw. I was not to be captured, but shot and hung. Then I cut down

that Yankee an' you all turned agin me. I was hunted and hounded. I

shot--they shot. I killed an' they tried to. I was shot down three

times. I've got bullets in me now.

"After the war I tried to surrender. I wanted to quit and live a

decent life. But no, they put a bigger price on my head. I came home

like other soldiers an' went to tillin' my farm. They ran me

away--they hunted an' hounded me. Civilization turned ag'in me.

Society was my foe. I was up ag'in the fust law of Nature. It is the

law of the survival--the wild beast that, cowered, fights for his

life. Society turned on me--I turned on Society."

"But there was one thing that happen'd that put the steel in me wuss

than all. All through them times was one star I loved and hoped for.

I was to marry her when the war closed. She an' her sister--the

pretty one--they lived up yander on the mountain side. The pretty one

died. But when I lost faith in Margaret Adams, I lost it in mankind.

I'd ruther a seen her dead. It staggered me--killed the soul in

me--to think that an angel like her could fall an' be false."

"I don't blame you," said the old man. "I've never understood it

yet."

"I was to marry Margaret. I love her yet," he added simply. "When I

found she was false I went out--and--well, you know the rest."

He took a turn around the room, picked up one of little Jack's shoes,

and cried over it.

"So I married his mother--little Jack's mother, a mountain lass that

hid me and befriended me. She died when the boy was born. His granny

kep' him while I was on my raids--nobody knowed it was my son. His

granny died two years ago. This has been our home ever sence, an' not

once, sence little Jack has been with me, have I done a wrong deed.

Often an' often we've slipt up to hear you preach--what you've said

went home to me."

"Jack," said the old man suddenly aroused--"was that you--was it you

been puttin' them twenty dollar gol' pieces in the church

Bible--between the leds, _ever'_ month for the las' two years? By it

I've kep' up the po' of Cottontown. I've puzzled an' wonder'd--I've

thought of a dozen fo'ks--but I sed nothin'--was it you?"

The outlaw smiled: "It come from the rich an' it went to the po'.

Come," he said--"that's somethin' we must settle."

He took up the lantern and led the way into the other room. Under a

ledge of rocks, securely hid, sat, in rows, half a dozen common water

buckets, made of red cedar, with tops fitting securely on them.

The outlaw spread a blanket on the sand, then knelt and, taking up a

bucket, removed the top and poured out its contents on the blanket.

They chuckled and rolled and tumbled over each other, the yellow

eagles and half eagles, like thoroughbred colts turned out in the

paddocks for a romp.

The old man's knees shook under him. He trembled so that he had to

sit down on the blanket. Then he ran his hand through them--his

fingers open, letting the coins fall through playfully.

Never before had he seen so much gold. Poor as he was and had ever

been--much and often as he had suffered--he and his, for the

necessities of life, even, knowing its value and the use he might

make of it, it thrilled him with a strange, nervous longing--a

childish curiosity to handle it and play with it.

Modest and brave men have looked on low-bosomed women in the glitter

of dissipative lights with the same feeling.

The old man gazed, silent--doubtless with the same awe which Keats

gave to Cortez, when he first looked on the Pacific and stood

"Silent, upon a peak in Darien."

The outlaw lifted another bucket and took off the lid. It also was

full. "There are five mo'," he said--"that last one is silver an'

this one--" He lifted the lid of a small cedar box. In it was a large

package, wrapped in water-proof. Unravelling it, he shoved out

packages of bank bills of such number and denomination as fairly made

the old preacher wonder.

"How much in all, Jack?"

"A little the rise of one hundred thousand dollars."

He pushed them back and put the buckets under their ledge of rocks.

"I'd give it all just to have little Jack here agin--an'--an'--start

out--a new man. This has cost me ten years of outlawry an' fo'teen

bullets. Now I've got all this an'--well--a hole in the groun' an'

little Jack in the hole. If you wanter preach a sermon on the folly

of pilin' up money," he went on half ironically, "here is yo' tex'.

All me an' little Jack needed or cu'd use, was a few clothes, some

bac'n an' coffee an' flour. Often I'd fill my pockets an' say: 'Well,

I'll buy somethin' I want, an' that little Jack will want.' I'd go to

town an' see it all, an' think an' puzzle an' wonder--then I'd come

home with a few toys, maybe, an' bac'n an' flour an' coffee."

"With all our money we can't buy higher than our source, an' when we

go we leave even that behind," he added.

"The world," said the old man quaintly, "is full of folks who have

got a big pocket-book an' a bac'n pedigree."

"Do you know who this money belongs to?" he asked the outlaw.

"Every dollar of it," said Jack Bracken. "It come from railroads,

banks and express companies. I didn't feel squirmish about takin' it,

for all o' them are robbers. The only diff'r'nce betwix' them an' me

is that they rob a little every day, till they get their pile, an' I

take mine from 'em, all at onct."

He thought awhile, then he said: "But it must all go back to 'em,

Jack. Let them answer for their own sins. Leave it here until next

week--an' then we will come an' haul it fifty miles to the next town,

where you can express it to them without bein' known, or havin'

anybody kno' what's in the buckets till you're safe back here in this

town. I'll fix it an' the note you are to write. They'll not pester

you after they get their money. The crowd you've named never got hot

under a gold collar. A clean shave will change you so nobody will

suspect you, an' there's a good openin' in town for a blacksmith, an'

you can live with me in my cabin."

"But there's one thing I've kept back for the las'," said Jack, after

they had gone into the front part of the room and sat down on the

deer skins there.

"That sword there"--and he pointed to the wall where it hung.

The Bishop glanced up, and as he did so he felt a strange thrill of

recognition run through him--"It belongs to Cap'n Tom," said Jack

quietly.

The old man sprang up and took it reverently, fondly down.

"Jack--" he began.

"I was at Franklin," went on Jack proudly. "I charged with old Gen.

Travis over the breastworks near the Carter House. I saw Cap'n Tom

when he went under."

"Cap'n Tom," repeated the old man slowly.

"Cap'n Tom, yes--he saved my life once, you know. He cut me down when

they were about to hang me for a spy--you heard about it?"

The Bishop nodded.

"It was his Company that caught me an' they was glad of any excuse to

hang me. An' they mighty nigh done it, but Cap'n Tom came up in time

to cut me down an' he said he'd make it hot for any man that teched

me, that I was a square prisoner of war, an' he sent me to Johnson

Island. Of course it didn't take me long to get out of that hole--I

escaped."

The Bishop was silent, looking at the sword.

"Well, at Franklin, when I seed Cap'n Tom dyin' as I tho'rt, shunned

by the Yankees as a traitor----"

"As a traitor?" asked the old man hotly--"what, after Shiloh--after

he give up Miss Alice for the flag he loved an' his old grand sire

an' The Gaffs an' all of us that loved him--you call that a traitor?"

"You never heard," said Jack, "how old Gen'l Travis charged the

breastworks at Franklin and hit the line where Cap'n Tom's battery

stood. Nine times they had charged Cap'n Tom's battery that

night--nine times he stood his ground an' they melted away around it.

But when he saw the line led by his own grandsire the blood in him

was thicker than water and----"

"An' whut?" gasped the Bishop.

"Well, why they say it was a drunken soldier in his own battery who

struck him with the heavy hilt of a sword. Any way I found the old

Gen'l cryin' over him: 'My Irish Gray--my Irish Gray,' he kept

sayin'. 'I might have known it was you,' and the old Gen'l charged on

leaving him for dead. An' so I found him an' tuck him in my arms an'

carried him to my own cabin up yonder on the mountain--carried him

an'----"

"An' whut?"--asked the old man, grasping the outlaw's

shoulder--"Didn't he die? We've never been able to hear from him."

Jack shook his head. "It 'ud been better for him if he had"--and he

touched his forehead significantly.

"Tell me, Jack--quick--tell it all," exclaimed the old man, still

gripping Jack's shoulder.

"There's nothin' to tell except that I kept him ever

sence--here--right here for two years, with little Jack an' Ephrum,

the young nigger that was his body servant--he's been our cook an'

servant. He never would leave Cap'n Tom, followed me offen the field

of Franklin. An' mighty fond of each other was all three of 'em."

The old man turned pale and his voice trembled so with excitement he

could hardly say:

"Where is he, Jack? My God--Cap'n Tom--he's been here all this time

too--an' me awonderin'--"

"Right here, Bishop--kind an' quiet and teched in his head, where the

sword-hilt crushed his skull. All these years I've cared for him--me

an' Ephrum, my two boys as I called 'em--him an' little Jack. An'

right here he staid contented like till little Jack died last

night--then--"

"In God's name--quick!--tell me--Jack--"

"That's the worst of it--Bishop--when he found little Jack was dead

he wandered off--"

"When?" almost shouted the old man.

"To-day--this even'. I have sent Eph after him--an' I hope he has

found him by now an' tuck him somewhere. Eph'll never stop till he

does."

"We must find him, Jack. Cap'n Tom alive--thank God--alive, even if

he is teched in his head. Oh, God, I might a knowed it--an' only

to-day I was doubtin' You."

He fell on his knees and Jack stood awed in the presence of the great

emotion which shook the old man.

Finally he arose. "Come--Jack--let us go an' hunt for Cap'n Tom."

But though they hunted until the moon went down they found no trace

of him. For miles they walked, or took turn about in riding the old

blind roan.

"It's no use, Bishop," said Jack. "We will sleep a while and begin

to-morrow. Besides, Eph is with him. I feel it--he'll take keer o'

him."

That is how it came that at midnight, that Saturday night, the old

Bishop brought home a strange man to live in the little cabin in his

yard.

That is how, a week later, all the South was stirred over the

strange return of a fortune to the different corporations from which

it had been taken, accompanied by a drawling note from Jack Bracken

saying he returned ill-gotten gain to live a better life.

It ended laconically:

"_An' maybe you'd better go an' do likewise._"

The dim starlight was shining faintly through the cracks of the

outlaw's future home when the old man showed him in.

"Now, Jack," he said, "it's nearly mornin' an' the old woman may be

wild an' raise sand. But learn to lay low an' shoe hosses. She was

bohn disapp'inted--maybe because she wa'n't a boy," he whispered.

There was a whinny outside, in a small paddock, where a nearby stable

stood: "That's Cap'n Tom's horse," said the old man--"I mus' go see

if he's hungry."

"I've kept his horse these ten years, hopin' maybe he'd come back

agin. It's John Paul Jones--the thoroughbred, that the old General

give him."

"I remember him," said Jack.

The great bloodlike horse came up and rubbed his nose on the old

man's shoulder.

"Hungry, John Paul?"

"It's been a job to get feed fur him, po' as I've

been--but--but--he's Cap'n Tom's. You kno'--"

"An' Cap'n Tom will ride him yet," said Jack.

"Do you believe it, Jack?" asked the old man huskily "God be

praised!"

That Saturday night was one never to be forgotten by others beside

Jack Bracken and the old preacher of Cottontown.

When Helen Conway, after supper, sought her drunken father and

learned that he really intended to have Lily and herself go into the

cotton mills, she was crushed for the first time in her life.

An hour later she sent a boy with a note to The Gaffs to Harry

Travis.

He brought back an answer that made her pale with wounded love and

grief. Not even Mammy Maria knew why she had crept off to bed. But in

the night the old woman heard sobs from the young girl's room where

she and her sister slept.

"What is it, chile?" she asked as she slipped from her own cot in the

adjoining little room and went in to Helen's.

The girl had been weeping all night--she had no mother--no one to

whom she could unbosom her heart--no one but the old woman who had

nursed her from her infancy. This kind old creature sat on the bed

and held the girl's sobbing head on her lap and stroked her cheek.

She knew and understood--she asked no questions:

"It isn't that I must work in the mill," she sobbed to the old

woman--"I can do that--anything to help out--but--but--to think that

Harry loves me so little as to give me up for--for--that."

"Don't cry, chile," said Mammy soothingly--"It ain't registered that

you gwine wuck in that mill yit--I ain't made my afferdavit yit."

"But Harry doesn't love me--Oh, he doesn't love me," she wept. "He

would not give me up for anything if he did."

"I'm gwine give that Marse Harry a piece of my mind when I see

him--see if I don't. Don't you cry, chile--hold up yo' haid an' be a

Conway. Don't you ever let him know that yo' heart is bustin' for him

an' fo' the year is out we'll have that same Marse Harry acrawlin' on

his very marrow bones to aix our forgiveness. See if we won't."

It was poor consolation to the romantic spirit of Helen Conway.

Daylight found her still heart-broken and sobbing in the old woman's

lap.

PART THIRD--THE GIN

CHAPTER I

ALICE WESTMORE

It is remarkable how small a part of our real life the world

knows--how little our most intimate friends know of the secret

influences which have proven to be climaxes, at the turning points of

our existence.

There was no more beautiful woman in Alabama than Alice Westmore; and

throughout that state, where the song birds seem to develop,

naturally, along with the softness of the air, and the gleam of the

sunshine, and the lullaby of the Gulf's soft breeze among the pine

trees, there was no one, they say, who could sing as she sang.

And she seemed to have caught it from her native mocking-birds, so

natural was it. Not when they sing in the daylight, when everything

is bright and joyous and singing is so easy; but when they waken at

midnight amid the _arbor vitae_ trees, and under the sweet, sad

influence of a winter moon, pour out their half awakened notes to the

star-sprays which fall in mist to blend and sparkle around the soft

neck of the night.

For like the star-sprays her notes were as clear; and through them

ran a sadness as of a mist of moonlight. And just as moonbeams, when

they mingle with the mist, make the melancholy of night, so the

memory of a dead love ran through everything Alice Westmore sang.

And this made her singing divine.

Why should it be told? What right has a blacksmith to pry into a

grand piano to find out wherein the exquisite harmony of the

instrument lies? Who has the right to ask the artist how he blended

the colors that crowned his picture with immortality, or the poet to

explain his pain in the birth of a mood which moved the world?

Born in the mountains of North Alabama, she grew up there and

developed this rare voice; and when her father sent her to Italy to

complete her musical education, the depth and clearness of it

captured even that song nation of the world.

The great of all countries were her friends and princes sought her

favors. She sang at courts and in great cathedrals, and her genius

and beauty were toasts with society.

"Still, Mademoiselle will never be a great singer, perfect as her

voice is,"--said her singing master to her one day--a famous Italian

teacher, "until Mademoiselle has suffered. She is now rich and

beautiful and happy. Go home and suffer if you would be a great

singer," he said, "for great songs come only with great suffering."

If this were true, Alice Westmore was now, indeed, a great singer;

for now had she suffered. And it was the death of a life with her

when love died. For there be some with whom love is a separate life,

and when love dies all that is worth living dies with it.

From childhood she and Cousin Tom--Captain Thomas Travis he lived to

be--had been sweethearts. He was the grandson of Colonel Jeremiah

Travis of "The Gaffs," and Tom and Alice had grown up together. Their

love was one of those earthly loves which comes now and then that we

may not altogether lose our faith in heaven.

Both were of a romantic temperament with high ideals, and with keen

and sensitive natures.

Their love was the poem of their lives.

And though a toast in society, and courted by the nobility of the old

world, Alice Westmore remembered only a moon-lighted night when she

told Cousin Tom good-bye. For though they had loved each other all

their lives, they had never spoken of it before that night. To them

it had been a thing too sacred to profane with ordinary words.

Thomas Travis had just graduated from West Point, and he was at home

on vacation before being assigned to duty. To-night he had ridden

John Paul Jones--the pick of his grandfather's stable of

thoroughbreds--a present from the sturdy old horse-racing,

fox-hunting gentleman to his favorite grandson for graduating first

in a class of fifty-six.

How handsome he looked in his dark blue uniform! And there was the

music of the crepe-myrtle in the air--the music of it, wet with the

night dew--for there are flowers so delicate in their sweetness that

they pass out of the realm of sight and smell, into the unheard world

of rhythm. Their very existence is the poetry of perfume. And this

music of the crepe-myrtle, pulsing through the shower-cooled leaves

of that summer night, was accompanied by a mocking-bird from his nest

in the tree.

Never did the memory of that night leave Alice Westmore. In after

years it hurt her, as the dream of childhood's home with green fields

about, and the old spring in the meadow, hurts the fever-stricken one

dying far away from it all.

How long they sat on the rustic bench under the crepe-myrtle they did

not know. At parting there was the light clasp of hands, and Cousin

Tom drew her to him and put his lips reverently to hers. When he had

ridden off there was a slender ring on her finger.

There was nothing in Italy that could make her forget that night,

though often from her window she had looked out on Venice,

moon-becalmed, while the nightingale sang from pomegranate trees in

the hedgerows.

Where a woman's love is first given, that, thereafter, is her heart's

sanctuary.

Alice Westmore landed at home again amid drum beats. War sweeps even

sentiment from the world--sentiment that is stronger than common

sense, and which moves the world.

On the retreat of the Southern army from Fort Donelson, Thomas

Travis, now Captain of Artillery, followed, with Grant's army, to

Pittsburgh Landing. And finding himself within a day's journey of his

old home, he lost no time in slipping through the lines to see Alice,

whom he had not seen since her return.

He went first to her, and the sight of his blue uniform threw Colonel

Westmore into a rage.

"To march into our land in that thing and claim my daughter--" he

shouted. "To join that John Brown gang of abolitionists who are

trying to overrun our country! Your father was a Southern gentleman

and the bosom friend of my youth, but I'll see you damned before you

shall ever again come under my roof, unless you can use your pistols

quicker than I can use mine."

"Oh, Tom," said Alice when they were alone--"how--how could you do

it?"

"But it is my side," he said quietly. "I was born, reared, educated

in the love of the Union. My grandfather himself taught it to me. He

fought with Jackson at New Orleans. My father died for it in Mexico.

I swore fidelity to it at West Point, and the Union gave me my

military education on the faith of my oath. Farragut is a

Tennessean--Thomas a Virginian--and there are hundreds of others, men

who love the Union more than they do their State. Alice--Alice--I do

not love you less because I am true to my oath--my flag."

"Your flag," said Alice hotly--"your flag that would overrun our

country and kill our people? It can never be my flag!"

She had never been angry before in all her life, but now the hot

blood of her Southern clime and ancestry surged in her cheeks. She

arose with a dignity she had never before imagined, even, with Cousin

Tom. "You will choose between us now," she said.

"Alice--surely you will not put me to that test. I will go--" he

said, rising. "Some day, if I live, you can tell me to come back to

you without sacrificing my conscience and my word of honor--my sacred

oath--write me and--and--I will come."

And that is the way it ended--in tears for both.

Thomas Travis had always been his grandsire's favorite. His other

grandson, Richard Travis, was away in Europe, where he had gone as

soon as rumors of the war began to be heard.

That night the old man did not even speak to him. He could not. Alone

in his room, he walked the floor all night in deep sorrow and

thought.

He loved Thomas Travis as he did no other living being, and when

morning came his great nature shook with contending emotions. It

ended in the grandson receiving this note, a few minutes before he

rode away:

"All my life I taught you to love the Union which I helped to make,

with my blood in war and my brains in peace. I gave it my beloved

boy--your father's life--in Mexico. We buried him in its flag. I sent

you to West Point and made you swear to defend that flag with your

life. How now can I ask you to repudiate your oath and turn your back

on your rearing?

"Believing as I do in the right of the State first and the Union

afterwards, I had hoped you might see it differently. But who, but

God, controls the course of an honest mind?

"Go, my son--I shall never see you again. But I know you, my son, and

I shall die knowing you did what you thought was right."

The young man wept when he read this--he was neither too old nor too

hardened for tears--and when he rode away, from the ridge of the

Mountain he looked down again--the last time, on all that had been

his life's happiness.

It was an hour afterwards when the old General called in his

overseer.

"Watts," he said, "in the accursed war which is about to wreck the

South and which will eventually end in our going back into the Union

as a subdued province and under the heel of our former slaves, there

will be many changes. I, myself, will not live to see it. I have two

grandsons, as you know, Tom and Richard. Richard is in Europe; he

went there following Alice Westmore, and is going to stay, till this

fight is over. Now, I have added a codicil to my will and I wish you

to hear it."

He took up a lengthy document and read the last codicil:

"_Since the above will was written and acknowledged, leaving The

Gaffs to be equally divided between my two grandsons, Thomas and

Richard Travis, my country has been precipitated into the horrors of

Civil War. In view of this I hereby change my will as above and give

and bequeath The Gaffs to that one of my grandsons who shall

fight--it matters not to me on which side--so that he fights. For The

Gaffs shall never go to a Dominecker. If both fight and survive the

war, it shall be divided equally between them as above expressed. If

one be killed it shall go to the survivor. If both be killed it shall

be sold and the money appropriated among those of my slaves who have

been faithful to me to the end, one-fifth being set aside for my

faithful overseer, Hillard Watts._"

In the panel of the wall he opened a small secret drawer, zinc-lined,

and put the will in it.

"It shall remain there unchanged," he said, "and only you and I shall

know where it is. If I die suddenly, let it remain until after the

war, and then do as you think best."

CHAPTER II

THE REAL HEROES

The real heroes of the war have not been decorated yet. They have not

even been pensioned, for many of them lie in forgotten graves, and

those who do not are not the kind to clamor for honors or emoluments.

On the last Great Day, what a strange awakening for decorations there

will be, if such be in store for the just and the brave: Private

soldiers, blue and gray, arising from neglected graves with tattered

clothes and unmarked brows. Scouts who rode, with stolid faces set,

into Death's grim door and died knowing they went out unremembered.

Spies, hung like common thieves at the end of a rope--hung, though

the bravest of the brave.

Privates, freezing, starving, wounded, dying,--unloved, unsoothed,

unpitied--giving their life with a last smile in the joy of

martyrdom. Women, North, whose silent tears for husbands who never

came back and sons who died of shell and fever, make a tiara around

the head of our reunited country. Women, South, glorious Rachels,

weeping for children who are not and with brave hearts working amid

desolate homes, the star and inspiration of a rebuilded land. Slaves,

faithfully guarding and working while their masters went to the

front, filling the granaries that the war might go on--faithful to

their trust though its success meant their slavery--faithful and

true.

O Southland of mine, be gentle, be just to these simple people, for

they also were faithful.

Among the heroic things the four years of the American Civil War

brought out, the story of Captain Thomas Travis deserves to rank with

the greatest of them.

The love of Thomas Travis for the preacher-overseer was the result of

a life of devotion on the part of the old man for the boy he had

reared. Orphaned as he was early in life, Thomas Travis looked up to

the overseer of his grandfather's plantation as a model of all that

was great and good.

Tom and Alice,--on the neighboring plantations--ran wild over the

place and rode their ponies always on the track of the overseer. He

taught them to ride, to trap the rabbit, to boat on the beautiful

river. He knew the birds and the trees and all the wild things of

Nature, and Tom and Alice were his children.

As they grew up before him, it became the dream of the

preacher-overseer to see his two pets married. Imagine his sorrow

when the war fell like a thunderbolt out of a harvest sky and, among

the thousand of other wrecked dreams, went the dream of the overseer.

The rest is soon told: After the battle of Shiloh, Hillard Watts,

Chief of Johnston's scouts, was captured and sent to Camp Chase.

Scarcely had he arrived before orders came that twelve prisoners

should be shot, by lot, in retaliation for the same number of Federal

prisoners which had been executed, it was said, unjustly, by

Confederates. The overseer drew one of the black balls. Then happened

one of those acts of heroism which now and then occur, perhaps, to

redeem war of the base and bloody.

On the morning before the execution, at daylight, Thomas Travis

arrived and made arrangements to save his friend at the risk of his

own life and reputation. It was a desperate chance and he acted

quickly. For Hillard Watts went out a free man dressed in the blue

uniform of the Captain of Artillery.

The interposition of the great-hearted Lincoln alone saved the young

officer from being shot.

The yellow military order bearing the words of the martyred President

is preserved to-day in the library of The Gaffs:

"_I present this young man as a Christmas gift to my old friend, his

grandsire, Colonel Jeremiah Travis. The man who could fight his guns

as he did at Shiloh, and could offer to die for a friend, is good

enough to receive pardon, for anything he may have done or may do,

from_

"A. LINCOLN."

Afterwards came Franklin and the news that Captain Tom had been

killed.

CHAPTER III

FRANKLIN

But General Jeremiah Travis could not keep out of the war; for toward

the last, when Hood's army marched into Tennessee the Confederacy

called for everything--even old age.

And so there rode out of the gates of The Gaffs a white-haired old

man, who sat his superb horse well. He was followed by a negro on a

mule.

They were General Jeremiah Travis and his body-servant, Bisco.

"I have come to fight for my state," said General Travis to the

Confederate General.

"An' I am gwine to take keer of old marster suh," said Bisco as he

stuck to his saddle girth.

It was the middle of the afternoon of the last day of November--and

also the last day of many a gallant life--when Hood's tired army

marched over the brow of the high ridge of hills that looked down on

the town of Franklin, in front of which, from railroad to river,

behind a long semicircular breastwork lay Schofield's determined

army. It was a beautiful view, and as plain as looking down from the

gallery into the pit of an amphitheatre.

Just below them lay the little town in a valley, admirably situated

for defense, surrounded as it was on three sides by the bend of a

small river, the further banks of which were of solid rocks rising

above the town. On the highest of these bluffs--Roper's Knob--across

and behind the town, directly overlooking it and grimly facing Hood's

army two miles away, was a federal fort capped with mighty guns,

ready to hurl their shells over the town at the gray lines beyond.

From the high ridge where Hood's army stood the ground gradually

rolled to the river. A railroad ran through a valley in the ridge to

the right of the Confederates, spun along on the banks of the river

past the town and crossed it in the heart of the bend to the left of

the federal fort. From that railroad on the Confederate right, in

front and clear around the town, past an old gin house which stood

out clear and distinct in the November sunlight--on past the Carter

House, to the extreme left bend of the river on the left--in short,

from river to river again and entirely inclosing the town and facing

the enemy--ran the newly made and hastily thrown-up breastworks of

the federal army, the men rested and ready for battle.

There stands to-day, as it stood then, in front of the town of

Franklin, on the highest point of the ridge, a large linden tree, now

showing the effects of age. It was half-past three o'clock in the

afternoon, when General Hood rode unattended to that tree, threw the

stump of the leg that was shot off at Chickamauga over the pommel of

his saddle, drew out his field glasses and sat looking for a long

time across the valley at the enemy's position.

Strange to say, on the high river bluff beyond the town, amid the

guns of the fort, also with field glass in hand anxiously watching

the confederates, stood the federal general. A sharp-shooter in

either line could have killed the commanding general in the other.

And now that prophesying silence which always seems to precede a

battle was afloat in the air. In the hollow of its stillness it

seemed as if one could hear the ticking of the death-watch of

eternity. But presently it was broken by the soft strains of music

which floated up from the town below. It was the federal band playing

"Just Before The Battle, Mother."

The men in gray on the hill and the men in blue in the valley

listened, and then each one mentally followed the tune with silent

words, and not without a bit of moisture in their eyes.

"Just before the battle, Mother,

I am thinking most of thee."

Suddenly Hood closed his glasses with that nervous jerk which was a

habit with him, straightened himself in the saddle and, riding back

to General Stewart, said simply: "We will make the fight, General

Stewart."

Stewart pressed his General's hand, wheeled and formed his corps on

the right. Cheatham formed his on the left. A gun--and but few were

used by Hood in the fight for fear of killing the women and children

in the town--echoed from the ridge. It was the signal for the battle

to begin. The heavy columns moved down the side of the ridge, the

brigades marching in echelon.

At the sound of the gun, the federal army, some of whom were on duty,

but the larger number loitering around at rest, or engaged in

preparing their evening meal, sprang noiselessly to their places

behind the breastworks, while hurried whispers of command ran down

the line.

General Travis had been given a place of honor on General Hood's

staff. He insisted on going into the ranks, but his commander had

said: "Stay with me, I shall need you elsewhere." And so the old man

sat his horse silently watching the army forming and marching down.

But directly, as a Mississippi regiment passed by, he noticed at the

head of one of the companies an old man, almost as old as himself,

his clothes torn, and ragged from long marching; shoeless, his feet

tied up in sack-cloth and his old slouch hat aflop over his ears. But

he did not complain, he stood erect, and gamely led his men into

battle. As the company halted for a moment, General Travis rode up to

the old man whose thin clothes could not keep him from shivering in

the now chill air of late afternoon, for it was then past four

o'clock, saluted him and said:

"Captain, will you do me the favor to pull off this boot?"

Withdrawing his boot from the stirrup and thrusting it towards the

old man, the latter looked at him a moment in surprise but sheathed

his sword and complied with the request. "And now the other one?"

said Travis as he turned his horse around. This, too, was pulled off.

"Just put them on, Captain, if you please," said the rider. "I am

mounted and do not need them as much as you do?" and before the

gallant old Captain could refuse, he rode away for duty--in his

stocking feet!

And now the battle began in earnest.

The confederates came on in splendid form. On the extreme right,

Forrest's cavalry rested on the river; then Stewart's corps of

Loring, Walthall, French, from right to left in the order named. On

the left Cheatham's corps, of Cleburne, Brown, Bate, and Walker.

Behind Cheatham marched Johnston's and Clayton's brigade for support,

thirty thousand and more of men, in solid lines, bands playing and

flags fluttering in the afternoon wind.

Nor had the federals been idle. Behind the breastworks lay the second

and third divisions of the 23rd Corps, commanded in person by the

gallant General J. D. Cox. From the railroad on the left to the

Carter's Creek pike on the right, the brigades of these divisions

stood as follows: Henderson's, Casement's, Reilly's, Strickland's,

Moore's. And from the right of the Carter's Creek pike to the river

lay Kimball's first division of the Fourth Corps. In front of the

breastworks, across the Columbia pike, General Wagner, commanding the

second division of the Fourth Corps, had thrown forward the two

brigades of Bradley and Lane to check the first assault of the

confederates, while Opdyck's brigade of the same division was held in

the town as a reserve. Seven splendid batteries growled along the

line of breastworks, and showed their teeth to the advancing foe,

while three more were caged in the fort above and beyond the town.

Never did men march with cooler courage on more formidable lines of

defense. Never did men wait an attack with cooler courage.

Breastworks with abatis in front through which the mouth of cannon

gaped; artillery and infantry on the right to enfilade; siege guns in

the fort high above all, to sweep and annihilate.

Schofield, born general that he was, simply lay in a rock-circled,

earth-circled, water-circled, iron-and-steel-circled cage, bayonet

and flame tipped, proof against the armies of the world!

But Hood's brave army never hesitated, never doubted.

Even in the matter of where to throw up his breastworks, Schofield

never erred. On a beautiful and seemingly level plain like this, a

less able general might have thrown them up anywhere, just so that

they encircled the town and ran from river to river.

But Schofield took no chances. His quick eye detected that even in

apparent level plains there are slight undulations. And so, following

a gentle rise all the way round, just on its top he threw up his

breastworks. So that, besides the ditch and the abatis, there was a

slight depression in his immediate front, open and clear, but so

situated that on the gentle slope in front, down which the

confederates must charge, the background of the slope brought them in

bold relief--gray targets for the guns. On that background the hare

would loom up as big as the hound.

There were really two federal lines, an outer and an inner one. The

outer one consisted of Bradley's and Lane's brigades which had

retired from Spring Hill before the Confederate army, and had been

ordered to halt in front of the breastworks to check the advance of

the army. They were instructed to fire and then fall back to the

breastworks, if stubbornly charged by greatly their superiors in

numbers. They fired, but, true to American ideas, they disliked to

retreat. When forced to do so, they were swept away with the enemy on

their very heels and as they rushed in over the last line at the

breastworks on the Columbia pike the eager boys in gray rushed over

with them, swept away portions of Reilly's and Strickland's troops,

and bayoneted those that remained.

It was then that Schofield's heart sank as he looked down from the

guns of the fort. But Cox had the forethought to place Opdyck's two

thousand men in reserve at this very point. These sprang gallantly

forward and restored the line.

They saved the Union army!

The battle was now raging all around the line. There was a succession

of yells, a rattle, a shock and a roar, as brigade after brigade

struck the breastworks, only to be hurled back again or melt and die

away in the trenches amid the abatis. Clear around the line of

breastworks it rolled, at intervals, like a magazine of powder

flashing before it explodes, then the roar and upheaval, followed

anon and anon by another. The ground was soon shingled with dead men

in gray, while down in the ditches or hugging the bloody sides of the

breastworks right under the guns, thousands, more fortunate or daring

than their comrades, lay, thrusting and being thrust, shooting and

being shot. And there they staid throughout the fight--not strong

enough to climb over, and yet all the guns of the federal army could

not drive them away. Many a gray regiment planted its battle-flag on

the breastworks and then hugged those sides of death in its efforts

to keep it there, as bees cling around the body of their queen.

"I have the honor to forward to the War Department nine stands of

colors," writes General Cox to General Geo. L. Thomas; "these flags

with eleven others were captured by the Twenty-third Army Corps along

the parapets."

Could Bonaparte's army have planted more on the ramparts of Mount St.

Jean?

The sun had not set; yet the black smoke of battle had set it before

its time. God had ordained otherwise; but man, in his fury had shut

out the light of heaven against the decree of God, just as, equally

against His decree, he has now busily engaged in blotting out many a

brother's bright life, before the decree of its sunset. Again and

again and again, from four till midnight--eight butchering hours--the

heart of the South was hurled against those bastions of steel and

flame, only to be pierced with ball and bayonet.

And for every heart that was pierced there broke a dozen more in the

shade of the southern palmetto, or in the shadow of the northern

pine. After nineteen hundred years of light and learning, what a

scientific nation of heart-stabbers and brother-murderers we

Christians are!

It was now that the genius of the confederate cavalry leader,

Forrest, asserted itself. With nearly ten thousand of his intrepid

cavalry-men, born in the saddle, who carried rifles and shot as they

charged, and whom with wonderful genius their leader had trained to

dismount at a moment's notice and fight as infantry--he lay on the

extreme right between the river and the railroad. In a moment he saw

his opportunity, and rode furiously to Hood's headquarters. He found

the General sitting on a flat rock, a smouldering fire by his side,

half way down the valley, at the Winstead House, intently watching

the progress of the battle.

"Let me go at 'em, General," shouted Forrest in his bluff way, "and

I'll flank the federal army out of its position in fifteen minutes."

"No! Sir," shouted back Hood. "Charge them out! charge them out!"

Forrest turned and rode back with an oath of disgust. Years

afterwards, Colonel John McGavock, whose fine plantation lay within

the federal lines and who had ample opportunity for observation, says

that when in the early evening a brigade of Forrest's cavalry

deployed across the river as if opening the way for the confederate

infantry to attack the federal army in flank and rear, hasty

preparations were made by the federal army for retreat. And thus was

Forrest's military wisdom corroborated. "Let me flank them out," was

military genius. "No, charge them out," was dare-devil blundering!

The shock, the shout and the roar continued. The flash from the guns

could now plainly be seen as night descended. So continuous was the

play of flame around the entire breastwork that it looked to the

general at headquarters like a circle of prairie fire, leaping up at

intervals along the breastworks, higher and higher where the

batteries were ablaze.

In a black-locust thicket, just to the right of the Columbia turnpike

and near the Carter House, with abatis in front, the strongest of the

batteries had been placed. It mowed down everything in front. Seeing

it, General Hood turned to General Travis and said: "General, my

compliments to General Cleburne, and say to him I desire that battery

at his hands."

The old man wheeled and was gone. In a moment, it seemed, the black

smoke of battle engulfed him. Cleburne's command was just in front of

the old gin house, forming for another charge. The dead lay in heaps

in front. They almost filled the ditch around the breastworks. But

the command, terribly cut to pieces, was forming as coolly as if on

dress parade. Above them floated a peculiar flag, a field of deep

blue on which was a crescent moon and stars. It was Cleburne's battle

flag and well the enemy knew it. They had seen and felt it at Shiloh,

Murfreesboro, Ringgold Gap, Atlanta. "I tip my hat to that flag,"

said General Sherman years after the war. "Whenever my men saw it

they knew it meant fight."

As the old man rode up, the division charged. Carried away in the

excitement he charged with them, guiding his horse by the flashes of

the guns. As they rushed on the breastworks a gray figure on a

chestnut horse rode diagonally across the front of the moving column

at the enemy's gun. The horse went down within fifty yards of the

breastwork. The rider arose, waved his sword and led his men on foot

to the very ramparts. Then he staggered and fell, pierced with a

dozen minie balls. It was Cleburne, the peerless field-marshal of

confederate brigade commanders; the genius to infantry as Forrest was

to cavalry. His corps was swept back by the terrible fire, nearly

half of them dead or wounded.

Ten minutes afterwards General Travis stood before General Hood.

"General Cleburne is dead, General"--was all he said. Hood did not

turn his head.

"My compliments to General Adams," he said, "and tell him I ask that

battery at his hands."

Again the old man wheeled and was gone. Again he rode into the black

night and the blacker smoke of battle.

General Adams's brigade was in Walthall's division. As the aged

courier rode up, Adams was just charging. Again the old man was swept

away with the charge. They struck the breastworks where Stile's and

Casement's brigades lay on the extreme left of the federal army.

"Their officers showed heroic examples and self-sacrifice," wrote

General Cox in his official report, "riding up to our lines in

advance of their men, cheering them on. One officer, Adams, was shot

down upon the parapet itself, his horse falling across the

breastworks." Casement himself, touched by the splendor of his ride,

had cotton brought from the old gin house and placed under the dying

soldier's head. "You are too brave a man to die," said Casement

tenderly; "I wish that I could save you."

"'Tis the fate of a soldier to die for his country," smiled the dying

soldier. Then he passed away.

It was a half hour before the old man reached Hood's headquarters

again, his black horse wet with sweat.

"General Adams lies in front of the breastworks--dead! His horse half

over it--dead"--was all he said.

Hood turned pale. His eyes flashed with indignant grief.

"Then tell General Gist," he exclaimed. The old man vanished again

and rode once more into the smoke and the night. Gist's brigade led

the front line of Brown's division, Cheatham's corps. It was on the

left, fronting Strickland's and Moore's, on the breastworks. The

Twenty-fourth South Carolina Infantry was in front of the charging

lines. "In passing from the left to the right of the regiment,"

writes Colonel Ellison Capers commanding the South Carolina regiment

above named, "the General (Gist) waved his hat to us, expressed his

pride and confidence in the Twenty-fourth and rode away in the smoke

of battle never more to be seen by the men he had commanded on so

many fields. His horse was shot, and, dismounting, he was leading the

right of the brigade when he fell, pierced through the heart. On

pressed the charging lines of the brigade, driving the advance force

of the enemy pell-mell into a locust abatis where many were captured

and sent to the rear; others were wounded by the fire of their own

men. This abatis was a formidable and fearful obstruction. The entire

brigade was arrested by it. But Gist's and Gordon's brigade charged

on and reached the ditch, mounted the works and met the enemy in

close combat. The colors of the Twenty-fourth were planted and

defended on the parapet, and the enemy retired in our front some

distance, but soon rallied and came back in turn to charge us. He

never succeeded in retaking the line we held. Torn and exhausted,

deprived of every general officer and nearly every field officer, the

division had only strength enough left to hold its position."

The charging became intermittent. Then out of the night, as Hood sat

listening, again came the old man, his face as white as his long

hair, his horse once black, now white with foam.

"General Gist too, is dead," he said sadly.

"Tell Granbury, Carter, Strahl--General! Throw them in there and

capture that battery and break that line."

The old man vanished once more and rode into the shock and shout of

battle.

General Strahl was leading his brigade again against the breastworks.

"Strahl's and Carter's brigade came gallantly to the assistance of

Gist's and Gordon's" runs the confederate report sent to Richmond,

"but the enemy's fire from the houses in the rear of the line and

from guns posted on the far side of the river so as to enfilade the

field, tore their line to pieces before it reached the locust

abatis."

General Carter fell mortally wounded before reaching the breastworks,

but General Strahl reached the ditch, filled with dead and dying men,

though his entire staff had been killed. Here he stood with only two

men around him, Cunningham and Brown. "Keep firing" said Strahl as he

stood on the bodies of the dead and passed up guns to the two

privates. The next instant Brown fell heavily; he, too, was dead.

"What shall I do, General?" asked Cunningham.

"Keep firing," said Strahl.

Again Cunningham fired. "Pass me another gun, General," said

Cunningham. There was no answer--the general was dead.

Not a hundred yards away lay General Granbury, dead. He died leading

the brave Texans to the works.

To the commanding General it seemed an age before the old man

returned. Then he saw him in the darkness afar off, before he reached

the headquarters. The General thought of death on his pale horse and

shivered.

"Granbury, Carter, Strahl--all dead, General," he said. "Colonels

command divisions, Captains are commanding brigades."

"How does Cheatham estimate his loss?" asked the General.

"At half his command killed and wounded," said the old soldier sadly.

"My God!--my God!--this awful, awful day!" cried Hood.

There was a moment's silence and then: "General?" It came from

General Travis.

The General looked up.

"May I lead the Tennessee troops in--I have led them often before."

Hood thought a moment, then nodded and the horse and the rider were

gone. It was late--nearly midnight. The firing on both sides had

nearly ceased,--only a desultory rattling--the boom of a gun now and

then. But O, the agony, the death, the wild confusion! This was

something like the babel that greeted the old soldier's ears as he

rode forward:

"The Fourth Mississippi--where is the Fourth Mississippi?" "Here is

the Fortieth Alabama's standard--rally men to your standard!" "Where

is General Cleburne, men? Who has seen General Cleburne?" "Up, boys,

and let us at 'em agin! Damn 'em, they've wounded me an' I want to

kill some more!"

"Water!--water--for God's sake give us water!" This came from a pile

of wounded men just under the guns on the Columbia pike. It came from

a sixteen year old boy in blue. Four dead comrades lay across him.

"And this is the curse of it," said General Travis, as he rode among

the men.

But suddenly amid the smoke and confusion, the soldiers saw what many

thought was an apparition--an old, old warrior, on a horse with black

mane and tail and fiery eyes, but elsewhere covered with white sweat

and pale as the horse of death. The rider's face too, was deadly

white, but his keen eyes blazed with the fire of many generations of

battle-loving ancestors.

The soldiers flocked round him, half doubting, half believing. The

terrible ordeal of that bloody night's work; the poignant grief from

beholding the death and wounds of friends and brothers; the weird,

uncanny groans of the dying upon the sulphurous-smelling night air;

the doubt, uncertainty, and yet, through it all, the bitter

realization that all was in vain, had shocked, benumbed, unsettled

the nerves of the stoutest; and many of them scarcely knew whether

they were really alive, confronting in the weird hours of the night

ditches of blood and breastworks of death, or were really dead--dead

from concussion, from shot or shell, and were now wandering on a

spirit battle-field till some soul-leader should lead them away.

And so, half dazed and half dreaming, and yet half alive to its

realization, they flocked around the old warrior, and they would not

have been at all surprised had he told them he came from another

world.

Some thought of Mars. Some thought of death and his white horse. Some

felt of the animal's mane and touched his streaming flanks and cordy

legs to see if it were really a horse and not an apparition, while

"What is it?" and "Who is he?" was whispered down the lines.

Then the old rider spoke for the first time, and said simply:

"Men, I have come to lead you in."

A mighty shout came up. "It's General Lee!--he has come to lead us

in," they shouted.

"No, no, men,"--said the old warrior quickly. "I am not General Lee.

But I have led Southern troops before. I was at New Orleans. I was--"

"It's Ole Hick'ry--by the eternal!--Ole Hick'ry--and he's come back

to life to lead us!" shouted a big fellow as he threw his hat in the

air.

"Ole Hickory! Ole Hickory!" echoed and re-echoed down the lines, till

it reached the ears of the dying soldiers in the ditch itself, and

many a poor, brave fellow, as his heart strings snapped and the

broken chord gurgled out into the dying moan, saw amid the blaze and

light of the new life, the apparition turn into a reality and a smile

of exquisite satisfaction was forever frozen on his face in the mould

of death, as he whispered with his last breath:

"It's Old Hickory--my General--I have fought a good fight--I come!"

Then the old warrior smiled--a smile of simple beauty and grandeur,

of keen satisfaction that such an honor should have been paid him,

and he tried to speak to correct them. But they shouted the more, and

drowned out his voice and would not have it otherwise. Despairing, he

rode to the front and drew his long, heavy, old, revolutionary sword.

It flashed in the air. It came to "attention"--and then a dead

silence followed.

"Men," he said, "this is the sword of John Sevier, the rebel that led

us up the sides of King's Mountain when every tyrant gun that belched

in our face called us--rebels!"

"Old Hick'ry! Old Hick'ry, forever!" came back from the lines.

Again the old sword came to attention, and again a deep hush

followed.

"Men," he said, drawing a huge rifled barreled pistol--"this is the

pistol of Andrew Jackson, the rebel that whipped the British at New

Orleans when every gun that thundered in his face, meant death to

liberty!"

"Old Hickory! Old Hickory!!" came back in a frenzy of excitement.

Again the old sword came to attention--again, the silence. Then the

old man fairly stood erect in his stirrups--he grew six inches

taller and straighter and the black horse reared and rose as if to

give emphasis to his rider's assertion:

"Men," he shouted, "rebel is the name that tyranny gives to

patriotism! And now, let us fight, as our fore-fathers fought, for

our state, our homes and our firesides!" And then clear and distinct

there rang out on the night air, a queer old continental command:

"Fix, pieces!"

They did not know what this meant at first. But some old men in the

line happened to remember and fixed their bayonets. Then there was

clatter and clank down the entire line as others imitated their

examples.

"Poise, fo'k!" rang out again more queerly still. The old men who

remembered brought their guns to the proper position. "Right

shoulder, fo'k!"--followed. Then, "Forward, March!" came back and

they moved straight at the batteries--now silent--and straight at the

breastworks, more silent still. Proudly, superbly, they came on, with

not a shout or shot--a chained line with links of steel--a moving

mass with one heart--and that heart,--victory.

On they came at the breastworks, walking over the dead who lay so

thick they could step from body to body as they marched. On they

came, following the old cocked hat that had once held bloodier

breastworks against as stubborn foe.

On--on--they came, expecting every moment to see a flame of fire run

round the breastworks, a furnace of flame leap up from the batteries,

and then--victory or death--behind old Hickory! Either was honor

enough!

And now they were within fifty feet of the breastworks, moving as if

on dress parade. The guns must thunder now or never! One step

more--then, an electrical bolt shot through every nerve as the old

man wheeled his horse and again rang out that queer old continental

command, right in the mouth of the enemy's ditch, right in the teeth

of his guns:

"Charge, pieces!"

It was Tom Travis who commanded the guns where the Columbia Pike met

the breastworks at the terrible deadly locust thicket. All night he

had stood at his post and stopped nine desperate charges. All night

in the flash and roar and the strange uncanny smell of blood and

black powder smoke, he had stood among the dead and dying calling

stubbornly, monotonously:

"Ready!"

"Aim!"

"Fire!"

And now it was nearly midnight and Schofield, finding the enemy

checked, was withdrawing on Nashville.

Tom Travis thought the battle was over, but in the glare and flash he

looked and saw another column, ghostly gray in the starlight, moving

stubbornly at his guns.

"Ready!" he shouted as his gunners sprang again to their pieces.

On came the column--beautifully on. How it thrilled him to see them!

How it hurt to think they were his people!

"_Aim!_" he thundered again, and then as he looked through the gray

torch made, starlighted night, he quailed in a cold sickening fear,

for the old man who led them on was his grandsire, the man whom of

all on earth he loved and revered the most.

Eight guns, with grim muzzles trained on the old rider and his

charging column, waited but for the captain's word to hurl their

double-shotted canisters of death.

And Tom Travis, in the agony of it, stood, sword in hand, stricken in

dumbness and doubt. On came the column, the old warrior leading

them--on and:--

"The command--the command! Give it to us, Captain," shouted the

gunners.

"_Cease firing!_"

The gunners dropped their lanyards with an oath, trained machines

that they were.

It was a drunken German who brought a heavy sword-hilt down on the

young officer's head with:

"You damned traitor!"

A gleam of gun and bayonet leaped in the misty light in front, from

shoulder to breast--a rock wall, tipped with steel swept crushingly

forward over the trenches over the breastworks.

Under the guns, senseless, his skull crushed, an upturned face

stopped the old warrior. Down from his horse he came with a weak,

hysterical sob.

"O Tom--Tom, I might have known it was you--my gallant, noble boy--my

Irish Gray!"

He kissed, as he thought, the dead face, and went on with his men.

It was just midnight.

"At midnight, all being quiet in front, in accordance with orders

from the commanding Generals," writes General J. D. Cox in his

official report, "I withdrew my command to the north bank of the

river."

"The battle closed about twelve o'clock at night," wrote General

Hood, "when the enemy retreated rapidly on Nashville, leaving the

dead and wounded in our hands. We captured about a thousand prisoners

and several stands of colors."

Was this a coincidence--or as some think--did the boys in blue

retreat before they would fire on an old Continental and the spirit

of '76?

An hour afterwards a negro was sadly leading a tired old man on a

superb horse back to headquarters, and as the rider's head sank on

his breast he said:

"Lead me, Bisco, I'm too weak to guide my horse. Nothing is left now

but the curse of it."

And O, the curse of it!

Fifty-seven Union dead beside the wounded, in the little front yard

of the Carter House, alone. And they lay around the breastworks from

river to river, a chain of dead and dying. In front of the

breastworks was another chain--a wider and thicker one. It also ran

from river to river, but was gray instead of blue. Chains are made of

links, and the full measure of "the curse of it" may have been seen

if one could have looked over the land that night and have seen where

the dead links lying there were joined to live under the roof trees

of far away homes.

But here is the tale of a severed link: About two o'clock lights

began to flash about over the battle-field--they were hunting for the

dead and wounded. Among these, three had come out from the Carter

House. A father, son and daughter; each carried a lantern and as they

passed they flashed their lights in the faces of the dead.

"May we look for brother?" asked the young girl, of an officer. "We

hope he is not here but fear he is. He has not been home for two

years, being stationed in another state. But we heard he could not

resist the temptation to come home again and joined General Bate's

brigade. And O, we fear he has been killed for he would surely have

been home before this."

They separated, each looking for "brother." Directly the father heard

the daughter cry out. It was in the old orchard near the house. On

reaching the spot she was seated on the ground, holding the head of

her dying brother in her lap and sobbing:

"Brother's come home! Brother's come home!" Alas, she meant--gone

home!

"Captain Carter, on staff duty with Tyler's brigade," writes General

Wm. B. Bate in his official report, "fell mortally wounded near the

works of the enemy and almost at the door of his father's home. His

gallantry I witnessed with much pride, as I had done on other fields,

and here take pleasure in mentioning it especially."

The next morning in the first light of the first day of that month

celebrated as the birth-month of Him who declared long ago that war

should cease, amid the dead and dying of both armies, stood two

objects which should one day be carved in marble--One, to represent

the intrepid bravery of the South, the other, the cool courage of the

North, and both--"the curse of it."

The first was a splendid war-horse, dead, but lying face forward,

half over the federal breastworks. It was the horse of General Adams.

The other was a Union soldier--the last silent sentinel of

Schofield's army. He stood behind a small locust tree, just in front

of the Carter House gate. He had drawn his iron ram-rod which rested

under his right arm pit, supporting that side. His gun, with butt on

the ground at his left, rested with muzzle against his left side,

supporting it. A cartridge, half bitten off was in his mouth. He

leaned heavily against the small tree in front. He was quite dead, a

minie ball through his head; but thus propped he stood, the wonder of

many eyes, the last sentinel of the terrible night battle.

* * * * *

But another severed link cut deepest of all. In the realization of

her love for Thomas Travis, Alice Westmore's heart died within her.

In the years which followed, if suffering could make her a great

singer, now indeed was she great.

PART FOURTH--THE LINT

CHAPTER I

COTTONTOWN

Slavery clings to cotton.

When the directors of a cotton mill, in a Massachusetts village,

decided, in the middle '70's, to move their cotton factory from New

England to Alabama, they had two objects in view--cheaper labor and

cheaper staple.

And they did no unwise thing, as the books of the company from that

time on showed.

In the suburbs of a growing North Alabama town, lying in the

Tennessee Valley and flanked on both sides by low, regularly rolling

mountains, the factory had been built.

It was a healthful, peaceful spot, and not unpicturesque. North and

south the mountains fell away in an undulating rhythmical sameness,

with no abrupt gorges to break in and destroy the poetry of their

scroll against the sky. The valley supplemented the effect of the

mountains; for, from the peak of Sunset Rock, high up on the

mountain, it looked not unlike the chopped up waves of a great river

stiffened into land--especially in winter when the furrowed rows of

the vast cotton fields lay out brown and symmetrically turned under

the hazy sky.

The factory was a low, one-story structure of half burnt bricks.

Like a vulgar man, cheapness was written all over its face. One of

its companions was a wooden store house near by, belonging to the

company. The other companion was a squatty low-browed engine room,

decorated with a smoke-stack which did business every day in the week

except Sunday. A black, soggy exhaust-pipe stuck out of a hole in its

side, like a nicotine-soaked pipe in an Irishman's mouth, and so

natural and matter-of-fact was the entire structure that at evening,

in the uncertain light, when the smoke was puffing out of its stack,

and the dirty water running from its pipes, and the reflected fire

from the engine's furnace blazed through the sunken eyes of the

windows, begrizzled and begrimed, nothing was wanted but a little

imagination to hear it cough and spit and give one final puff at its

pipe and say: "Lu'd but o'ive wur-rek hard an' o'im toired to-day!"

Around it in the next few years had sprung up Cottontown.

The factory had been built on the edge of an old cottonfield which

ran right up to the town's limit; and the field, unplowed for several

years, had become sodded with the long stolens of rank Bermuda grass,

holding in its perpetual billows of green the furrows which had been

thrown up for cotton rows and tilled years before.

This made a beautiful pea-green carpet in summer and a comfortable

straw-colored matting in winter; and it was the only bit of sentiment

that clung to Cottontown.

All the rest of it was practical enough: Rows of scurvy three-roomed

cottages, all exactly alike, even to the gardens in the rear, laid

off in equal breadth and running with the same unkept raggedness up

the flinty side of the mountain.

There was not enough originality among the worked-to-death

inhabitants of Cottontown to plant their gardens differently; for all

of them had the same weedy turnip-patch on one side, straggling

tomatoes on another, and half-dried mullein-stalks sentineling the

corners. For years these cottages had not been painted, and now each

wore the same tinge of sickly yellow paint. It was not difficult to

imagine that they had had a long siege of malarial fever in which the

village doctor had used abundant plasters of mustard, and the disease

had finally run into "yaller ja'ndice," as they called it in

Cottontown.

And thus Cottontown had stood for several years, a new problem in

Southern life and industry, and a paying one for the Massachusetts

directors.

In the meanwhile another building had been put up--a little cheaply

built chapel, of long-leaf yellow pine. It was known as the Bishop's

church, and sat on the side of the mountain, half way up among the

black-jacks, exposed to the blistering suns of summer and the winds

of winter.

It had never been painted: "An' it don't need it," as the Bishop had

said when the question of painting it had been raised by some of the

members.

"No, it don't need it, for the hot sun has drawed all the rosin out

on its surface, an' pine rosin's as good a paint as any church needs.

Jes' let God be, an' He'll fix His things like He wants 'em any way.

He put the paint in the pine-tree when He made it. Now man is mighty

smart,--he can make paint, but he can't make a pine tree."

It was Sunday morning, and as the Bishop drove along to church he was

still thinking of Jack Bracken and Captain Tom, and the burial of

little Jack. When he arose that morning Jack was up, clean-shaved and

neatly dressed. As Mrs. Watts, the Bishop's wife, had become used, as

she expressed it, to his "fetchin' any old thing, frum an old hoss to

an old man home, wharever he finds 'em,"--she did not express any

surprise at having a new addition to the family.

The outlaw looked nervous and sorrow-stricken. Several times, when

some one came on him unexpectedly, the Bishop saw him feeling

nervously for a Colt's revolver which had been put away. Now and

then, too, he saw great tears trickling down the rough cheeks, when

he thought no one was noticing him.

"Now, Jack," said the Bishop after breakfast, "you jes' get on John

Paul Jones an' hunt for Cap'n Tom. I know you'll not leave no stone

unturned to find him. Go by the cave and see if him an' Eph ain't

gone back. I'm not af'eard--I know Eph will take care of him, but we

want to fin' him. After meetin' if you haven't found him I'll join in

the hunt myself--for we must find Cap'n Tom, Jack, befo' the sun goes

down. I'd ruther see him than any livin' man. Cap'n Tom--Cap'n

Tom--him that's been as dead all these years! Fetch him home when you

find him--fetch him home to me. He shall never want while I live.

An', Jack, remember--don't forget yo'se'f and hold up anybody. I'll

expec' you to jine the church nex' Sunday."

"I ain't been in a church for fifteen years," said the other.

"High time you are going, then. You've put yo' hands to the

plough--turn not back an' God'll straighten out everything."

Jack was silent. "I'll go by the cave fus' an' jus' look where little

Jack is sleepin'. Po' little feller, he must ha' been mighty lonesome

last night."

It was ten o'clock and the Bishop was on his way to church. He was

driving the old roan of the night before. A parody on a horse, to one

who did not look closely, but to one who knows and who looks beyond

the mere external form for that hidden something in both man and

horse which bespeaks strength and reserve force, there was seen

through the blindness and the ugliness and the sleepy, ambling,

shuffling gait a clean-cut form, with deep chest and closely ribbed;

with well drawn flanks, a fine, flat steel-turned bone, and a

powerful muscle, above hock and forearms, that clung to the leg as

the Bishop said, "like bees a'swarmin'."

At his little cottage gate stood Bud Billings, the best slubber in

the cotton mill. Bud never talked to any one except the Bishop; and

his wife, who was the worst Xanthippe in Cottontown, declared she had

lived with him six months straight and never heard him come nearer

speaking than a grunt. It was also a saying of Richard Travis, that

Bud had been known to break all records for silence by drawing a

year's wages at the mill, never missing a minute and never speaking

a word.

Nor had he ever looked any one full in the eye in his life.

As the Bishop drove shamblingly along down the road, deeply

preoccupied in his forthcoming sermon, there came from out of a hole,

situated somewhere between the grizzled fringe of hair that marked

Bud's whiskers and the grizzled fringe above that marked his

eyebrows, a piping, apologetic voice that sounded like the first few

rasps of an old rusty saw; but to the occupant of the buggy it meant,

with a drawl:

"Howdy do, Bishop?"

A blind horse is quick to observe and take fright at anything

uncanny. He is the natural ghost-finder of the highways, and that

voice was too much for the old roan. To him it sounded like something

that had been resurrected. It was a ghost-voice, arising after many

years. He shied, sprang forward, half wheeled and nearly upset the

buggy, until brought up with a jerk by the powerful arms of his

driver. The shaft-band had broken and the buggy had run upon the

horse's rump, and the shafts stuck up almost at right angles over his

back. The roan stood trembling with the half turned, inquisitive

muzzle of the sightless horse--a paralysis of fear all over his face.

But when Bud came forward and touched his face and stroked it, the

fear vanished, and the old roan bobbed his tail up and down and

wiggled his head reassuringly and apologetically.

"Wal, I declar, Bishop," grinned Bud, "kin yo' critter fetch a

caper?"

The Bishop got leisurely out of his buggy, pulled down the shafts and

tied up the girth before he spoke. Then he gave a puckering hitch to

his underlip and deposited in the sand, with a puddling _plunk_, the

half cup of tobacco juice that had closed up his mouth.

He stepped back and said very sternly:

"Whoa, Ben Butler!"

"Why, he'un's sleep a'ready," grinned Bud.

The Bishop glanced at the bowed head, cocked hind foot and listless

tail: "Sof'nin' of the brain, Bud," smiled the Bishop; "they say when

old folks begin to take it they jus' go to sleep while settin' up

talkin'. Now, a horse, Bud," he said, striking an attitude for a

discussion on his favorite topic, "a horse is like a man--he must have

some meanness or he c'udn't live, an' some goodness or nobody else c'ud

live. But git in, Bud, and let's go along to meetin'--'pears like it's

gettin' late."

This was what Bud had been listening for. This was the treat of

the week for him--to ride to meetin' with the Bishop. Bud, a

slubber-slave--henpecked at home, brow-beaten and cowed at the mill,

timid, scared, "an' powerful slow-mouthed," as his spouse termed it,

worshipped the old Bishop and had no greater pleasure in life, after his

hard week's work, than "to ride to meetin' with the old man an' jes'

hear him narrate."

The Bishop's great, sympathetic soul went out to the poor fellow, and

though he had rather spend the next two miles of Ben Butler's slow

journey to church in thinking over his sermon, he never failed, as he

termed it, "to pick up charity even on the roadside," and it was

pretty to see how the old man would turn loose his crude histrionic

talent to amuse the slubber. He knew, too, that Bud was foolish about

horses, and that Ben Butler was his model!

They got into the old buggy, and Ben Butler began to draw it slowly

along the sandy road to the little church, two miles away up the

mountain side.