THE horse-faced Andy precedes the coming of his two friends to that
supper by two hours. As he moves up the street toward the Rowan House,
fair faces beam on him and fair hands wave him a salutation from certain
Salisbury verandas. In return he doffs his hat with an exaggerated
politeness, which becomes him as the acknowledged beau of the town. One
cannot blame those beaming fair faces and those saluting hands. Slim,
elegant, confident with a kind of polished cockyness that does not ill
become his years, our horse-faced one possesses what the world calls
“presence.” No one will look on him without being impressed; he is
congenitally remarkable, and to see him once is to ever afterward expect
to hear him. Besides, for all his foppishness, there is a scar on his
sandy head, and a second on his hand, which were made by an English
saber when he had no more than entered upon his teens. Also he has shed
English blood to pay for those scars; and in a day which still heaves
and tosses with the ground swells of the Revolution, such stark matters
brevet one to the respect of men and the love of women.
The foppish, horse-faced Andy strides into the Rowan House. In the
long-room he meets mine host Brown, who has fame as a publican, and none
as a sinner, throughout North Carolina.
“Supper in my rooms, Mr. Brown,” commands our hero; “supper for three.
Have it hot and ready at sharp seven. Also let us have plenty of whisky
and tobacco.”
Mine host Brown says that all shall be as ordered.
The foppish Andy, with that grave manner of dignity which laughs at his
boyish twenty years, explains to his landlord that he will call for his
bill in the morning.
“Have my horse, Cherokee,” he says, “well groomed and saddled. To-morrow
I leave Salisbury.”
“Going West?”
“West,” returns Andy.
“As to the bill,” ventures mine host Brown, “would you like to play a
game of all-fours, and make it double or nothing?”
Andy the horse-faced hesitates.
“You have such vile luck,” he says, as though remonstrating with mine
host Brown for a fault. “It seems shameful to play with you, since you
never win.”
Mine host Brown looks sheepishly apologetic.
“For one as eager to play as I am,” he responds, “it does look as though
I ought to know more about the game. However, since it's your last
night, we might as well preserve a record.”
Andy the horse-faced yields to the rabid anxiety of mine host Brown
to gamble. The game shall be played presently; meanwhile, there is an
errand which takes him to his rooms.
Andy goes to his rooms; mine host Brown, after preparing a table in
the long-room for the promised game, saunters fatly--being rotund as
a publican should be--into the kitchen, to leave directions concerning
that triangular supper. There he encounters his wife, as rotund as
himself, supervising the energies of a phalanx of black Amazons, who
form the culinary forces of the Rowan House.
“Young Jackson leaves in the morning, mother,” observes mine host Brown
to Mrs. Brown, whom he always addresses as “mother.”
“For good?” asks Mrs. Brown, who is singeing the pin feathers from a
chicken of much fatness, and exceeding yellow as to leg.
“Oh, I knew he was going,” returns mine host Brown, rather irrelevantly.
“Spruce Mc-Cay told me that he was about to advise him to emigrate to
the western counties. Spruce says the Cumberland country is just the
place for him.”
“And now I suppose,” remarks Mrs. Brown, “you'll let him win a good-by
game of cards, to square his bill.”
“Why not?” returns mine host Brown. “He's got no money; never had any
money. You yourself said, when he came here, to give him his board free,
because you knew and loved his dead mother. Now the Christian thing is
to let him win it. In that way his pride is saved; at the same time it
gives me amusement.”
“Well, Marmaduke,” says Mrs. Brown, moving off with the yellow-legged
fowl, “I'm sure I don't care how you manage, only so you don't take his
money.”
“There never was a chance, mother. He never has any money, after his
clothes are bought.”
The game of all-fours is played; and is won by Andy of the horse face,
who thereby rounds off a run of card-luck that has continued unbroken
for two years.
“It looks as though I'd never beat you!” exclaims mine host Brown,
pretending sadness and imitating a sigh.
“You ought never to gamble,” advises the horse-faced Andy solemnly.
Mine host Brown produces his bill, wherein the charges for board,
lodging, laundry, tobacco, and whisky in pints, quarts and gallons are
set down on one side, to be balanced and acquitted by divers sums lost
at all-fours, the same being noted opposite.
“There you are! All square!” says mine host Brown.
“But the charges for to-night's supper?”
“Mother”--meaning Mrs. Brown--“says the supper is to be with her
compliments.”
Steaming hot, the supper comes promptly at seven. It is followed,
steaming hot, by unlimited whisky punch. Pipes are lighted, and, with
glasses at easy hand, the three boys draw about the fire. The punch, the
pipes, and the crackling log fire are very comfortable adjuncts on an
October night.
“And now,” cries Crawford, who is full of life and interest, “now for
the news and the proposition!”
McNairy nods owlish assent to the words of his volatile friend. He
intends one day to be a judge, and, while quite as lively as Crawford,
seizes on occasions such as this to practice his features in a
formidable woolsack gravity.
“First,” observes Andy, soberly sipping his punch, “let me put a
question: What is my standing in Rowan County?”
“You are the recognized authority,” cries Crawford, “on dog fighting,
cockfighting, and horse racing.”
McNairy nods.
“Humph!” says Andy. Then, on the heels of a pause: “And what should you
say were my chief accomplishments?”
Again Crawford takes it upon himself to reply.
“You ride, shoot, run, jump, wrestle, dance and make love beyond
expression.”
McNairy the judicial nods.
“Humph!” says Andy.
The trio puff and sip in silence.
“You say nothing for my knowledge of law?” This from the disgruntled
Andy, with a rising inflection that is like finding fault.
“No!” cry the others in hearty concert.
“You wouldn't believe us if we did,” adds McNairy of the future
woolsack.
“Neither would the Judge,” returns Andy cynically. “The Judge” is the
title by which the three designate their master, Spruce Mc-Cay. Andy
goes on: “The news I promised is this. To-morrow I leave Salisbury. The
Judge has recommended my admission to the bar, and I shall take the oath
and get my license before I start. I shall transfer myself to the region
along the Cumberland, where I am told a barrister of my singular lack of
ability should find plenty of practice.”
“Why do you leave old Rowan?” asks woolsack McNairy, beginning to take
an interest.
“Because I have no education, less law, and still less money. It seems
that these are conditions precedent to staying in Rowan with credit.”
“Well,” cries McNairy the judicial, grasping Andy's long bony hand, “you
have as much education, as much law, and as much money as I. Under the
circumstances I shall go with you.”
“And I,” breaks in the lively Crawford, “since I have none of those
ignorant and poverty-eaten qualifications you name, but on the contrary
am rich, wise and learned--I shall remain here. When the wilderness
casts you fellows out, come back and I shall welcome you. Pending
which--as Parson Hicks would say--receive my blessing.”
The evening wears on amid clouds of tobacco smoke and rivers of punch.
At the close the three take hold of hands, and sing a farewell song very
badly. Then, since they look on the evening as a sacred one, they wind
up by breaking the pipes they have smoked and the glasses they have
drunk from, to save them in the hereafter from profane and vulgar uses.
At last, rather deviously, they make their various ways to bed.
The next day, young Andrew Jackson, barrister and counselor at law, with
all his belongings--save the rifle he carries, and the pistols in
his saddle holsters--crowded into a pair of saddlebags, rides out of
Salisbury on his bay horse Cherokee. He will stop at Martinsville for a
space, awaiting the judicial McNairy.
Then the pair are to set their willing, hopeful faces for the
Cumberland.
As Andy the horse-faced rides away that October afternoon, Henry Clay
is a fatherless boy of nine, living with his mother at the Virginia
Slashes; Daniel Webster, a sickly child of six, is toddling about his
father's New Hampshire farm; John C. Calhoun is a baby four years old
in a South Carolina farmhouse; John Quincy Adams, nineteen and just home
from a polishing trip to France, is a Harvard student; Martin Van Buren,
aged four, is playing about the tap room of his Dutch father's tavern at
Kinder-hook; while Aaron Burr, fortunate, foremost and full of promise,
has already won high station at the New York bar. None of these has ever
heard of Andy the horse-faced, nor he of them; yet one and all they are
fated to grow well acquainted with one another in the years to come,
and before the curtain is rung finally down on that tragedy-comedy-farce
which, played to benches ever full and ever empty, men call Existence.