I was awakened, after the breakfast hour, by a tap on my door. Why it
gave me consternation I could not have told; I dare say my inveracities
of the day before had failed to digest. "Come in," I called, and in
stepped my two fishermen.
Their good mornings were pleasant, but, "Fact is," said one, "we're
bothered about your client."
"The lady who passed through here last evening?"
"Yes, it looks as though----"
"Go on while I dress. Looks as though--what?"
"As though she wa'n't what you thought, or else----"
I smiled aggressively: "Pardon, I _know_ that lady. 'Or else,' you
say? What else? Go on."
"Oh, you go on dressing. Do you know them darkies are hers?"
"Hoh! Are your teeth yours? Why do you ask?"
He handed me a newspaper clipping:
Two Hundred Dollars Reward. Ran away from my plantation in ---- county
of this State, on the ------ day of ------ the following named and
described slaves; father, mother, daughter, and son: . . . A reward of
fifty dollars will be paid to any person for the capture and
imprisonment in any jail, of each or either of the above named. Etc.
With a laugh I returned the thing and went on dressing. "It doesn't,"
I said aloud to my busy image in the mirror, "describe my client's
darkies at all." I faced round: "Why, gentlemen, if this isn't the
most astonishing----"
"Ho-old on. Ho-old on! Finish your dressing. We're told it does
describe two of them and we thought we'd just come and see for
ourselves."
"And you followed the unprotected lady?"
"We followed four runaway niggers, sir! Else why did they take to the
woods inside of a mile from that house where you left the coach? Oh,
you're dressed; come along; time's flying!"
Determined to waste all the time I could, "Wait," I said, strapping on
my pistol. "Now, gentlemen, we'll follow this matter to the end,
beginning now, instantly. But it must be done as----"
"Oh, as privately as possible! Certainly!"
"Certainly. You want the reward and you want it all. But understand,
I know you're in error, and I go with you solely to prove you are.
Now, by your theory----"
"Oh, come along!" We went. I killed time over my coffee, and in
getting a saddle for one of my hired span. "You must excuse us if
we're not polite," my friends apologized after another flash of
impatience. "Of course those niggers are not on the run in broad day,
but their trail's getting cold!"
"You're not as bad-mannered as I am," I laughed as we mounted, but
their allusion to hounds made me enjoy the burden of my six-shooter.
As we ambled off, "What were you going to say," one asked me, "about
our 'theory,' or something?"
"Oh! I see you think Mrs. Southmayd must have met up with company and
left her servants to follow on to the next station alone."
"Exactly. We tracked the darkies along the edge of the road; but her
horse tracks--we could only see that no horse tracks left the road
where any of their man tracks left it."
When we had gone a mile or so one of the boys turned to leave us by a
neighborhood road, saying: "I'll rejoin you, 'cross fields, where you
turned back last night. I'm going for the dogs."
"Stop! Gentlemen, this is too high-handed. Do you reckon I'll let you
run down those four innocent creatures with hounds? I _swear_ you
shan't do it, sirs."
"See here," said the one still with me, "come on. We'll show you the
very spots where those innocents left the road one by one, and if you
don't say they've used every trick known to a nigger to kill their
trail, we'll just quit and go home. Does that suit you?"
"Not by a long chalk!" I retorted as I moved with him up the pike.
"Those poor simpletons--alone in a strange land, maybe without a pass,
at any moment liable to meet a patrol--how easy for them to make the
fatal mistake of leaving the road and hiding their tracks!"
"All right, come ahead, you'll see fair play."
We passed the scene of the breakdown and then the house to which the
coach had been drawn. I saw the coach in a stable door. By and by a
turn in the pike revealed the other clerk and a tall, slim horseman
just dismounting among four lop-eared, black-and-brown dogs coupled two
and two by light steel breast-yokes. With a heavy whip and without a
frown this man gave one of them a quick cut over the face as the brute
ventured to lift a voice as hollow and melodious as a bell.
"He's a puppy I'm breaking in," said the man. "Now here, you see"--he
pointed to the middle of the road--"is where you, sir, met up with the
madam and her niggers, and given her yo' hoss and taken her span.
Here's the tracks o' the span, you takin' 'em back; you can see they're
the same as these comin' this way. T'other critter's tracks I don't
make out, but no matter, here's the niggers' along here--and here, see?
and here--here--there." We rode for ten minutes or so. Then halting
again:
"Look yonder in that lock o' fence. There's where one went over into
the brush."
Beyond the high worm fence grew a stubborn tangle of briers, vines, and
cane. "Mind you," I began to call after the nigger-chaser, but one of
my companions spoke for me:
"Mr. Hardy, we got to be dead sure they're runaways before we put the
dogs on."
"No, we ain't," Hardy called through the back of his head. "Dandy and
Charmer'll tell us if they're not, before we've gone three hundred
yards, and I can call 'em off so quick it'll turn 'em a somerset." He
dismounted, and, while unyoking the two older hounds, spoke softly a
few words of gusto that put them into a dumb ecstasy. One of the boys
pressed his horse up to mine.
"There's the place," he said. "Now watch the dogs find it."
As the pair sprang from Hardy's hands one began to nose the air, the
other the earth, to left, to right, and to cross each other's short,
swift circuits. With stony face while assuming a voice of wildest
eagerness he cried in searching whispers: "Niggeh thah, Dandy! Niggeh
thah, Charmer! Take him, my lady!"
Skimming the ground with hungry noses, the dogs answered each cry with
a single keen yap of preoccupied affirmation. Almost at once Charmer
came to the spot pointed out to me, reared her full length upon the
rails and let out a new note; long, musical, fretful, overjoyed. Hardy
mounted breast-high to the fence's top, wreathed two fingers in the
willing brute's collar, lifted her, and dropped her on the other side.
There she instantly resumed her search.
At the same time her yoke-mate's deep bay pealed like a trumpet, from a
few yards up the roadway. He had struck the broad, frank trail of the
other three negroes. The "puppy," still in leash, replied in a note
hardly less deep and mellow, but the whip of cool discipline cut him
off. From an ox-horn the master blew a short, sharp recall and at once
Dandy returned and began his work over, knowing now which runaway to
single out.
Hardy remained on the fence, watching his favorite, over in the brush.
By a stir of the bushes, now here, now there, we could see how busy she
was, and every now and then she sent us, as if begging our patience,
her eager promissory yelp.
Suddenly her master had a new thought. He stepped onward to the next
lock of the fence, scrutinized its top rail, moved to, the next lock,
examining the top rail there, then to the next, the next, the next, and
at the seventh or eighth beckoned us.
"See, here?" he asked. "Think that ain't a runaway nigger? Look." A
splinter had been newly rubbed off the rail. "What you reckon done
that, sir; a bird or a fish? That's where he jumped. Look yonder,
where he landed and lit out."
The merest fraction of a note from the horn brought the two free dogs
to their master, and before he could lift Dandy over the fence Charmer
was on the trail. She threw her head high and for the first time
filled the resounding timber with the music of her bay.
["Mr. Chester," murmured Mlle. Chapdelaine, and once more he ceased to
read. Mme. Castanado had laid her hands tightly to her face. Yet now
she smilingly dropped them, saying: "Seraphine--Marcel--please to pazz
around that cake an' wine. Well, I su'pose there are yet in the
worl'--in Afrique--Asia--even Europe--several kin' of cuztom mo' wicked
than that. And still I'm sorry that ever tranzpire. But, Mr. Chezter,
if you'll resume?"