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An Unofficial Patriot

by Helen H. Gardener · English · Gutenberg #42328 · 383,618 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: An Unofficial Patriot

Author: Helen H. Gardener


        
Release date: March 13, 2013 [eBook #42328]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN UNOFFICIAL PATRIOT ***

AN UNOFICIAL PATRIOT

By Helen Gardener

Author of "Is This Your Son, My Lord?" "Pray You, Sir, Whose Daughter?"
"Pushed by Unseen Hands," "A Thoughtless Yes," "Men, Women and Gods,"
"Facts and Fictions of Life," Etc., Etc.

Eighth Edition

R. F. Fenno & Company

16 East Seventeenth Street, New York

1894




AN UNOFFICIAL PATRIOT.




CHAPTER I.--A SON OF VIRGINIA.


Griffith Davenport was a clergyman. I tell you this at the outset, so
that you may be prepared to take sides with or against him, as is your
trend and temperament. Perhaps, too, it is just as well for me to
make another statement, which shall count in his favor or to his
disadvantage, according to your own prejudices or convictions. He was a
Southern man. He had been a slave-owner, and now he was neither the
one nor the other. But in connection with, and in explanation of these
last-mentioned facts, I may say that he had been a law-breaker in his
native State, and was, at the very time of which I tell you, evading the
law in the State of his adoption.

Both of these facts were the direct results of having been born to
slave-ownership, and, at the same time, with a conscience which was of,
and in harmony with, a different latitude and heredity. I trust that you
will not infer from this last remark that I am of the opinion that the
conscience of the Northern habitant is of more delicate fiber than
is that of his Southern brother, who is of the same mental and social
grade; for nothing could be farther from either the facts or my
intentions herein. But that it is of a different type and trend is
equally beyond controversy. The prickings of the one are as regular and
as incessant, no doubt, as are those of the other; but the stimulating
causes have different roots. Perhaps, too, it may sound strange to
you to hear of one who can be spoken of as having a somewhat sensitive
conscience and at the same time as being both a law-breaker and a
law-evader. But certain it is, that with a less primitive conception
of laws and of men, you will be able to adjust, to a nicety, the
ideas therein conveyed, and also to realize how true it is that times,
conditions, and environment sometimes determine the standard by which
the rightfulness or wrongfulness of conduct is measured, and that it is
quite within the possibilities for a man to be at once a law-breaker and
a good man, or a law-keeper and a bad one.

But I am not intending to warp your judgment in advance, and you are to
remember that whatever my opinion of the quality of the Rev. Griffith
Davenport's conduct may be, there is another side to the matter, and
that I shall not take it greatly to heart if you should find yourself on
the other side.

But if, as I have sometimes heard readers say--who looked upon
themselves as of a somewhat superior order--you do not take an interest
in people who have placed themselves outside of the beaten pathway of
legal regularity, it will be just as well for you to lay this little
story aside now, for, as I have said, it is a story of a clergyman, a
slave-holder, a law-breaker, and a law-evader, which, I admit, does not
at the first blush present a picture to the mind of a person in whom you
and I, my lofty and immaculate friend, would be greatly interested, or
with whom we would care to associate for any protracted period. Still,
I intend to tell the story, and in order to give you a perfectly clear
idea of how all the more important events in this curiously complicated
life came about, I shall be compelled to go back to the boyhood of young
Davenport, so that you may catch a glimpse of the life and training,
which were a prelude and a preparation--if you do not wish to look upon
them as exactly a justification--of and for the later years of the life,
which experienced such strange trials, complications and vicissitudes.

It was in the year eighteen hundred and twenty-four that the great sea
of Methodism first began to beat with a force that was like that of a
succession of mighty tidal waves upon the previously placid State of
Virginia. Young Davenport had, at that time, just turned his fifteenth
year, but it was not until nearly four years later, when the tide of
interest and excitement had swept with a power and influence impossible
to picture in these days of religious indifference and critical inquiry,
into the homes and over the barriers of long-established things, that
young Griffith's home felt the invasion to be a thing which it behooved
gentlemen to consider seriously, or even to recognize as existing, if
one may so express it, in an official sense.

As I suggested before, it would be difficult, in these later and less
emotional days, when every school-boy knows of doubts and questionings
in the minds of his elders, to picture adequately the serene lack of all
such doubts and questionings in Griffith Davenport's boyhood.

To be sure there were, and, I venture to assume, always had been,
disagreement and disputes over forms, methods, and meanings; but these
were not fundamental doubts of fundamental beliefs, of which it would be
entirely safe to say that young Davenport had never in his whole life
heard one little doubt expressed or intimated, or that a question
existed that could tend to make any one suspect that there were or could
be unsettled realms in the system and plan of salvation as laid down by
Christianity. He supposed, of course, that Christianity was an
incontrovertible, fixed, and final religion. Different sects he knew
there were, but all of these accepted the basic principle of
Christianity. All sprang from the same root. Some grew eastward, some
westward, and some made straight for heaven like the center shaft of a
great oak; but each and all were true limbs of the same healthful trunk
whose roots found anchorage in the bed-rock of eternal truth. He did not
know that there were other trees quite as vigorous and even more
expansive, each of which had sprung from the seed of human longing to
solve the unsolvable. The "heathen" he had heard of, of course, in a
condemnatory or pitying way, but he did not know or think of their
worship as "religion." It was "fetichism," idolatry, superstition. Of
Deists, he had heard, if at all, but vaguely; for it must be remembered
that in the year of our blessed Lord eighteen hundred and twenty-seven
the name of that famous Deist, Thomas Paine, who had done so much for
the liberty and dignity of the great new nation, was not honored as it
is to-day, and, indeed, so dense was the philosophical ignorance of that
time, that the mention of the name of the author-hero of the Revolution
was seldom made except in execration and contumely. Even of the Jews,
from whom his religion came, Griffith had heard no good. They had slain
the Christ, had they not? Their own God condemned the act, did he not?

Young Davenport supposed that this was all true. He also supposed that
because of a blunder, made in ignorance and passion, in an age long
past, a whole race had ever since been under the chastising hand of a
just Jehovah, who had decreed that their humiliation and the expiation
of the fatal blunder should be eternal. That there were Jews who were
to-day good, devout and religious who still approved the attitude
of Pilate toward the Christ, he did not know. He counted this class,
therefore, as in some sort, Christians also. Mistaken in method, no
doubt; superstitious and blundering perhaps; but still secretly filled
with sorrow and shame for the awful crime of their race, and accepting
the verdict of God and the disciplining punishment of time, he had
no doubt of their final acceptance of what he believed established
as eternal Truth, and their consequent redemption and salvation. The
easy-going, gentle Episcopalianism of his home-training, with its
morning and evening, perfunctory, family prayers, its "table grace" and
its Sunday service, where all the leading families of the county were
to be seen, and where the Rector read with so much finish and the choir
sang so divinely, the same old hymns, week after week, had so far been
as much a part of his life,--and were accepted as mechanically,--as were
the daily meals, the unpaid negro labor, and the fact that his father,
the old "Squire," sat in the best pew, because he had built and endowed
the finest church in the State.

All these things had come to Griffith as quite a matter of course; as
some equally important things have come to you and to me--and not at all
as matter of surprise or as questions for argument.

That his father, the old major, swore roundly, from time to time, at
the slaves, did not appeal to the boy's mind as either strange or
reprehensible; so true is it that those things which come to us
gradually, and in the regular order of events, do not arouse within
us doubts and questionings as do sudden or startling additions to our
development or intellectual equipment, when thrust unexpectedly in
upon our ordinary surroundings. Such moral or social questions as were
involved in the ownership of slaves had, up to that time, produced
no more mental qualms in the boy than have the same questions as to
ownership of lands or of horses upon you or me at the present time.

Jerry had been Griffith's own particular "boy" ever since he could
remember, and, although Jerry was the older of the two, it would be
wholly unfair to all parties concerned not to state clearly and fully
that the righteousness and inevitability of the relationship of owned
and owner, had no more sinister meaning for Jerry than it had for his
young "Mos' Grif." So prone are we all to accept as a finality that to
which custom has inured us.

Was Jerry an Episcopalian? Most assuredly! Were not all of the
Davenports members of the established order in all things? And was not
Jerry a Davenport? Not one negro on the whole plantation had ever for
one little moment thought of himself as other than an Episcopalian,--in
so far as the Almighty would permit one whose skin was black to be of
the elect. They one and all felt a real and eager pride in the social
and religious status of the Davenports, and had never even harbored
a doubt that they would be permitted to polish the harps and hold the
horses of that fortunate family when all should again be reunited in
that better world, where all might be free but not equal--for "as one
star differed from another," etc. No different dreams had ever, so far,
visited master or slave.

"I could never be happy in heaven without Jerry," had settled the
question in Griffith's mind, for of course his own destination was sure.
And the negro felt equally secure when he thought, "Mos' Grif ain't
gwine ter go nowhah widout me. Nobody else ain't gwine ter take cahr ob
him. Nobody else know how."

But the unsettling times which brought Methodism, in a great and
overwhelming wave, into the ranks of established things, brought also
mutterings and perplexities and awakenings of another sort. Aroused
energies, stimulated consciences, excited mentalities are ever likely to
find varying outlets. Progressive movements seldom travel singly, and
so it came about that, mingled with the new religious unrest, there
were other and, perhaps you will say, graver questions so inextricably
joined, in some minds that the one appeared to be the root and cause of
the other.

"Is slavery right? If it is right for the laity, at least, is it not
wrong for one who is an apostle of the Son of God, who had not where
to lay His head? Should black men be free men?" and all the disturbing
horde of questions which followed in the train of the new religion,
began to float, at first in intangible ways, in the air. A little later
they took form in scowl or hasty word, and at last crept into sermons,
social discussions and legislative deliberations, as by degrees the echo
of these latter floated down from Washington or filtered through other
sources, from the Border States, where the irrepressible conflict had
arisen in a new form to vex the souls and arouse the passions of men.
The pressing question of free soil or slave extension had already begun
to urge itself upon the public mind and to harass the Border States,
finding utterance for or against that Congressional measure known as
the Missouri Compromise Bill. Young Griffith Davenport had spent his
seventeen years in an atmosphere of scholarly investigation and calm,
where little of even the echoes of these disturbing influences had come.
His home was a comfortable one--indeed, the finest in all that part of
the valley; the library quite unusual in extent and quality for the
time and place. Grif's tutor was a University man, his pleasures those
of a country 'squire; for in Virginia, as in England, the office of
"esquire," or justice of the peace, was wont to pass from father to
eldest son, in families of consideration; and, indeed, at that early age
Grif's father had, by degrees, turned the duties of the office over to
the boy, until now no one expected to consult the "old 'squire" upon any
ordinary topic. The "young 'squire" settled it, whether it were a dispute
over dog-slain sheep or a misunderstanding about the road tax.

Upon this placid, "established" finality of existence it was, then,
which descended a cyclone. Formalism in religion had run its course. The
protest was swift, impassioned, sincere. Vigorous, earnest, but often
unlearned men sprang into prominence at a single bound. Arguments arose.
Men began to ask if the Almighty was pleased with forms in which the
soul was dead--if mere words, and not sincere emotion of the heart,
gratified God. Was it worship to simply read or repeat the words of
another? Must not one's own soul, mind and heart furnish the key, as
well as the medium, to aid in real devotion? Had the letter killed the
spirit?

Young Griffith heard. The ideas fascinated him. Oaths from his father's
lips struck him with a new meaning and a different force. Whereas they
had been mere vocal emphasis, now they were fearful maledictions--and
from a leading Christian, _the_ leading Christian of the county!

Griffith pondered, trembled, listened again to the new religious
teachers--to whose meetings he had, at first, gone in a spirit of
mild fun, not in the least reprobated by his father--and had, at last,
tremblingly, passionately believed.




CHAPTER II.


_"I paint him in character."_--Shakespeare


That a Davenport should seriously contemplate leaving the "Mother
Church." as the devotees of the Anglican establishment were given to
calling their branch of the real Roman mother, was a proposition
too absurd to be considered; and the old Major met his son's first
suggestions, wherein this tendency was indicated, as the mere vaporings
of a restless, unformed boy. He laughed loudly, guyed his son openly,
and inquired jocosely which one of the pretty Methodist girls had struck
his fancy.

"If it turns out to be serious, Grif, and you marry her, she will, as a
matter of course, transfer her membership to the Mother Church. A true
wife always follows her husband in all things. 'Thy people shall be
my people, and thy God my God,' you know, Grif. Good old saying. Bible
truth, my son. But who is the happy girl, you young scamp? There is
rather a paucity of thoroughbreds among the Methodists, as they call
this new craze. Don't make _that_ kind of a mistake, my boy, whatever
else you do. Better keep inside the paddock."

The old Major chuckled, and, turning on his heel, left his son covered
with confusion, and with a sense of impotent zeal and conviction to
which he could not or dared not give voice.

That this question of a truer, warmer, more personally stirring
religious life did not touch a single responsive chord in the Major's
nature, filled the son, anew, with misgivings. At first, these
questionings led him to doubt himself, and to wonder if it could, after
all, be possible that his own youth, inexperience and provincialism
might really not lie at the root of his new unrest. He went to the
Methodist meetings with a fresh determination to be serenely critical,
and not to yield to the onrush of emotion which had grown so strong
within him as he had listened, in the past, to the passionate and often
ruggedly-eloquent appeals of the pioneers of the new faith--or, perhaps,
it were better to say, to the new expression of the old faith. He gave
up his extra Latin lessons, which had been his delight and the pride
of his tutor and of his family, that he might have these hours for the
study of the Bible and the few other books carried by the colporteurs or
the circuit riders, who were beginning to overrun the State.

The old Major disapproved, but it was not his way to discuss matters
with his family; and it may be doubted, indeed, if the Major grasped the
significance and force of the tide which had overtaken his son, as it
had rushed with the power of a flood over his beloved Virginia and left
in its wake a tremendous unrest, and carried before it many of the most
sincere and forceful characters and questions. Beyond a few twittings
and an occasional growl, therefore, the old Major had ignored his son's
gradual withdrawal from the ancient forms and functions and the fact
that almost every Sunday morning, of late, had found the boy absent from
the family pew and present two miles up the valley at the little log
meeting-house of the Methodists. He was unprepared, therefore, to face
the question seriously, when finally told by the boy's mother that Grif
had decided that on his nineteenth birthday he would be baptized, and
that he intended to enter the ministry as a circuit rider.

The joke struck the Major as good above the average. He laughed long and
loud. He chuckled within himself all day. When evening came and Griffith
appeared at the table the Major was too full of mirth and derision to
content himself with his usual banter.

"Your mothah inforhms me," he began with the ironical touch in his tone
held well under the sparkle of humor. "Your mothah inforhms me that
to-morrow is your nineteenth birthday, you long-legged young gosling,
and that you contemplate celebrating it by transmuting yourself into a
Methodist ass with leather lungs and the manners, sir,--and the habits,
sir, of--of--of a damned Yankee!"

As the Major had halted for words and the picture of his son as a
circuit rider arose before him as a reality and not as a joke, his ire
had gotten the better of his humor. The picture he had conjured up in
his own mind of this son of his in the new social relations sure to
result from the contemplated change of faith swamped the old Major's
sense of the absurdity of the situation in a sudden feeling of
indignation and chagrin, and the sound of his own unusual words did the
rest.

Griffith looked up at his father in blank surprise. His mother said,
gently, "Majah! Majah!" But the old 'squire's sudden plunge into anger
had him in its grip. He grew more and more excited as his own words
stirred him.

"Yes, sir, like a damned northern tackey that comes down here amongst
respectable people to talk to niggers, and preach, as they call their
ranting, to the white trash that never owned a nigger in their whole
worthless lives, and tell'em about the 'unrighteousness' of slavery! Why
don't they read their Bibles if they know enough to read? _It_ teaches
slavery plain enough--'Servants obey your masters in all things,' and
'If a man sell his servant,' and 'His servant is his money,' and a good
many more! Why don't they read their Bibles, I say, and shout if they
want to, and attend to their own business? Nobody wants their long noses
down here amongst reputable people, sowing seeds of riot and rebellion
among the niggers!" The Major had forgotten his original point but it
came back to him as Grif began to speak.

"But, sir-"

"But, sir!" he said, rising from his chair in his excitement, "don't
'but, sir,' me! I'm disgusted and ashamed, sir! Ashamed from the bottom
of my hawt, that a son of mine--a Davenport--could for one moment
contemplate this infernal piece of folly! A circuit rider, indeed! A
damned disturber of niggers! A man with, no traditions! Shouting and
having fits and leading weak-minded women and girls, and weaker-minded
boys and niggers into unpardonable, disgraceful antics and calling
it religion! Actually having the effrontery to call it religion! It's
nothing but infernal rascality in half the cases and pitiable insanity
in the other half, and if I'd been doing my duty as a 'squire I'd have
taken the whole pestiferous lot up and put one set in jail and the other
set in an asylum, long ago! Look at'em! Ducking 'converts,' as they call
their dupes, in the creek! Perfectly disgraceful, sir! I forbid you to
go about their meetings again, sir! Yes, sir, once and for all, I forbid
it!"

The Major brought his fist down on the table with a bang that set
the fine china rattling and added the last straw of astonishment and
discomfort to the unusual family jar; for few indeed had ever been the
occasions upon which even a mild degree of paternal authority had
not been so quickly followed by ready and willing compliance that an
outbreak of anything like real temper or authoritative command--other
than at or toward the slaves--had been hardly within Grif's memory.

The boy arose, trembling and pale, and leaving his untouched plate of
choice food before him turned to leave the room.

"Come back here, sir!" commanded the old Major. "Take your seat, sir,
and eat your supper, sir, and--"

Mrs. Davenport burst into tears. The boy hesitated, parted his lips as
if to speak, looked at his mother, and with a sudden movement of his
hand toward a little book which he always carried these later days in
his breast-pocket, he stepped to his mother's side. There was a great
lump in his throat. He was straggling for mastery of himself but his
voice broke into a sob as he said:

"'He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me. And
he that taketh not his cross and followeth after Me, is not worthy of
Me.'" He kissed his mother's forehead and passed swiftly out of the
room. His horse stood at the front gate waiting the usual evening
canter. Griffith threw his long leg over the saddle, and said to Jerry,
who stood holding the bridle of his own horse, ready to follow as
was his custom: "I don't want you to-night, Jerry. Stay at home.
Good-night," and rode away into the twilight.

It would be difficult to say just what Griffith's plan was. Indeed, it
had all been so sudden and so out of the ordinary trend of his life,
that there was a numb whirl of excitement, of pain and of blind impulse
too fresh within him to permit of anything like consecutive thought.
But, with Grif, as with most of us when the crises of our lives come,
fate or chance or conditions have taken the reins to drive us. We are
fond of saying--and while we are young we believe--that we decided
thus or thus; that we converted that condition or this disaster into
an opportunity and formed our lives upon such and such a model. All of
which is--as a rule--mere fond self-gratulation. The fact is, although
it may wound our pride to acknowledge it, that we followed the line of
least resistance (all things being considered, our own natures included)
and events did the rest. And so when Grif turned an angle in the road,
two miles from home, and came suddenly upon the circuit rider, who was
to baptize the new converts on the following day, and when Brother Prout
took it for granted that Grif was on his way to the place of gathering
in order to be present at the preliminary meeting, it seemed to Grif
that he had originally started from home with that object in view. His
thoughts began to center around that idea. The pain and shock of the
home-quarrel, which he had simply started out to ride off, to think
over, to prepare to meet on the morrow, gradually faded into a dull
hurt, which made the phrases and quotations and exhortations of Brother
Prout sound like friendly and personal utterances of soothing and
of paternal advice, and so the two miles stretched into ten and the
camp-ground was reached, and for Griffith, the die was cast.




CHAPTER III.--THE IRONY OF FATE.


It has been well said that the heresies of one generation are the
orthodox standards of the next; and it is equally true that the great
convulsive waves of emotion, belief, patriotic aspiration or progressive
emulation of the leaders of thought of one age, for which they are
martyred by the conventionally stupid majority, become the watchwords
and uncontrovertible basis of belief for the succeeding generation of
the respectably unthinking, and furnish afresh, alas! the means, the
motives and the power for the crucifixion of the prophets and thinkers
of the new cycle. Mediocrity is forever sure that nothing better or
loftier is in store. Genius sees eternal progress in perpetual change.

Much of the doings and many of the sayings of the new religious sect
seemed to the people about them full of heresy, dangerous in tendency,
and, indeed, blasphemous in its enthusiasms and its belief in and effort
for an intimate personal relationship with a prayer-answering and a
praise-loving God. To Grif, Brother Prout's fervor and enthusiasm of
expression, his prayers which seemed the friendly communications of
one who in deed and in truth walked with his God, instead of the old,
perfunctory, formal reading of set phrases arranged for special days,
which had to be hunted up in a book and responded to by all in exactly
the same words, and with the same utter want of personal feeling, to
Grif, these fervid, passionate, sincere and simple appeals of the kind
old enthusiast seemed like the very acme and climax of a faith which
might, indeed, move mountains.

"Amen! amen!"

"Praise the Lord, O my soul!"

"Thanks be to Almighty Godt" echoed along the banks of the river, the
loved Opquan, that had been to Grif a friend and companion from his
earliest boyhood. He had never stood by its banks without an onrush
of feeling that had tended to burst into a song of joy! From his
grandfather's front porch and from the windows of his own room at home
he could see it winding through the rocky hills and struggling for its
right to reach the sea. He had skipped pebbles on it and waded across it
at low tide, and had stood in awe at its angry and impetuous swirl when
the spring rains had swollen it to a torrent of irresistible force. It
seemed to Grif now that its waters smiled at him, and his eyes filled
with tears that were of happiness not unmixed with a tender pain and
regret--regret for he knew not what.

"Joy to the world, the Lord has come!" rang out with a volume and an
impassioned sincerity which gave no room for the critical ear of the
musician nor for the carping brain of the skeptic, had either been there
to hear. "Let earth receive her King!" The hills in the distance took
up the melody, and it seemed to the overwrought nerves of the boy
that nothing so beautiful in all the world had ever been seen or heard
before. "Let every heart prepare Him room, and heaven and nature sing!"
Ah, was not heaven and nature, indeed, singing the most glorious song
the earth had ever heard or seen when she made this valley? When she
built these mountains, and threaded that little river over the stones?
Griffith was lost in an intoxication of soul and sense. He was looking
across the valley to the old home. His hands were clenched until the
nails were marking the palms, and his voice rang out so clear and true
that the neighborhood boys touched each other and motioned toward the
young fellow with almost a sense of envy. Neither cultured musician nor
cynic was there, and the softness of the air lent charm to the simple
exercises which some of the youths had come in a spirit of fun to
deride. It was restful to the weary, stimulating to the sluggish and
soothing to the unhappy. They were carried out of their narrow and
monotonous lives. If Griffith's heart had been sore and in a condition
to be soothed by the words and prayers of Father Prout, how much more
were his nerves and emotions in that unstrung and vaguely wounded
and impressionable state where physical change and reaction is easily
mistaken for religious fervor or exaltation, how much more was he in
that state where melody joined to nature's most profligate mood of
beauty in scene leads captive the soul!

During the meeting which had followed his arrival at the camp-ground
Grif had passed through that phase of physical reaction which meant to
him a "leading of the spirit" and, as he stood now on the banks of his
beloved river pouring out his young heart in the hymn of his boyish
fancy, he no longer doubted that he had, indeed, been "called" to be
a circuit rider and to cast his lot with the new order of religions
enthusiasts. He looked now upon his previous doubts as temptations of
the devil and put, once and for all, their whisperings behind him and
accepted the new lot as heaven and God-sent and intended.

Father Prout gave to all of his converts a choice in the form of
their baptism. Leaning, himself, toward immersion, he still held that
sprinkling was sufficient and with a lingering memory of his father's
fling at "ducking converts in the creek," Griffith had determined to be
sprinkled; but, as the last echoes of the old hymn died away, he stepped
to the bank and indicated that he would be immersed. As he arose from
the water his face was radiant, and when he had removed his immersion
robe his eyes filled with happy tears as his father rode up to the edge
of the grounds and held out his arms to the boy.

"My son," he said tremulously, "my son, forgive me. I have been unhappy
all night. I did not realize that I was swearing at you until your
mothah told me. Come home, my boy, and your new friends will be welcome
at Rock Hall. God bless you, my son, come home, your mothah is unhappy."

Mr. Lengthy Patterson, a long-legged, cadaverous mountaineer who had
wended his way from the distant fastnesses of the high perched log
cabin which he called home and wherein he ate and slept when he was
not engaged in those same occupations out under the stars where
night--during his hunting and fishing expeditions--chanced to overtake
him, had been watching Grif all day. The boy's radiant face the past
hour had fascinated him. In his absorption he had stepped so close to
the old Major as he and Grif stood making ready for the homeward ride,
that Mr. Davenport made an instinctive gesture of impatient disapproval
which called the naturally deferential woodsman back to his normal
mental state.

"It is Lengthy Patterson, father," said Griffith, with his ever-ready
impulse to cover the confusion of the unlucky or ignorant who were
intrusive without a knowledge of the fact until a recognition of
disapproval made self-consciousness painful.

Mr. Davenport moved as if to make amends for his previous manner by an
offer to shake hands with the mountaineer--an unheard-of proceeding on
the 'Squire's part.

"Oh, it's Lengthy Patterson, is it? I beg your pahrdon, Mr. a--Lengthy.
I did not recognize you at--"

The long legs had moved slowly away. He turned around, tilted his half
rimless hat further on to the back of his head, in lieu of lifting
it, and in a voice as evenly graded to one single note as is that of a
flying loon, remarked, as he kept on his way:

"No excuse. Say nothin'. Few words comprehends the whole."

"What did that fellow say, Grif?" asked his father, as they mounted.

Griffith laughed rather hysterically. The reaction was coming.

"It's just a phrase he has, father. They say he never was known to say
anything else; but I expect that is a joke. He's an honest fellow and
a splendid woodsman. He knows every crack in the mountains, and is a
perfect terror to rattlesnakes. Don't you remember? He is the fellow
who saved the old Randolph house that time it took fire, and got the
children out. They say when Mrs. Randolph went away up to his cabin to
thank him, he remarked that 'a few words comprehended the whole,' and
fled the mountain until he was sure she had gone. He appears to be
afraid of the English language and of nothing else on earth."

There was a long silence. The old Major was turned half out of his
saddle, as was a habit of his, to rest himself. The horses were taking
their own gait. Presently they turned a curve in the road and Grif
suddenly threw his arm across his father's shoulder and leaned far over
toward him. "Kiss me, father," he said, and before the moisture had
dried out of their eyes and the great lump left their throats, both
laughed a little in that shame-faced fashion men have when, with each
other, they have yielded to their natural and tender emotions. But
both horses understood and broke into a steady lope, and the chasm was
bridged.

"Dars Mos' Grif! Dars Mos' Grif an' ole Mos'!" exclaimed Jerry as he saw
the two horsemen in the distance. "Dey comin', Mis' Sallie, dey is dat!
Lawsy me, Mis' Sallie, dey want no uste fer yo' ter be skeered dat a
way 'bout Mos' Grif. He's des dat staidy dat yo' c'd cahry wattah on he
haid, let er 'lone Selim ain't gwine ter let no trouble come ter Mos'
Grif. But I dus 'low dat'e oughter a tuck dis chile erlong wid'im ter
look arter'im, dough. Dat's a fack. I knows dat. Run inter de kitchen,
Lippy Jane, an' tell yo' maw dat Mos' Grif an' ole Mos' mose heah, an'
she better git dem dar chicken fixins all raidy quick as ebber she kin.
Dey gwine ter be hongry, sho's yo' bohn, dey is dat."

Lippy Jane sped away on her errand with that degree of enthusiasm which
sprang from a consciousness of bearing a welcome message to expectant
listeners, when suddenly, as she passed a group of idle compeers, one
of the boys flung upon her lower lip, where it lodged and dangled in
squirming response to her every motion, a long yellow apple peeling. She
did not pause in her onward course, but called back in belligerent tones
at the offender:

"I des gwine ter lef dat erlone dar, now, an' show hit ter Mos' Grif! I
is dat! You nasty little nigger!" and she reappeared, after giving her
message in the kitchen, with the pendant peel still reposing upon the
superfluous portion of the feature to which she was indebted for her
name.




CHAPTER IV.--THE REV. GRIFFITH DAVENPORT.


So desirable a candidate was speedily ordained, and Brother Prout
himself rode with the boy on his two first rounds of the not far-distant
circuit which was soon to be placed in charge of this youth who had so
suddenly taken on the duties, responsibilities and desires of a man.
Grif s temperament had always been so merry and frank and full of
the joyful side of life that he found himself at once ill at ease and
hampered by the feeling that he must curb his spirits. Brother Prout,
whose own nature was only less buoyant, patted Grif on the back and
advised against the change which he clearly saw the boy was trying to
compass.

"Don't grow dull, Brother Davenport," he said one day, as they were
riding toward the home of one of their members to make a pastoral visit.
"Don't grow dull and old before your time. Religion is joy, not gloom.
Your message to these people is happiness. Let your bright young face
and voice bear testimony for the Lord, and prove to them that all His
ways are ways of pleasantness, and all His paths are paths of peace. Let
your neighbors see that in forsaking your old life you have not lost the
best and most glorious part of it. You take that with you in addition to
the rest. Laugh with them that laugh, and weep with them that weep. I'm
an old man, now, and I never did have your spirits; but we need just
that in our labors, my son. Don't allow yourself to grow dull. With your
nature you will win and not drive souls to the Lord."

Such advice cheered the boy and made him feel less strongly the great
change in his life. The long hours of riding his fine horse over the
roads and by-paths of his beloved and beautiful valley; the talks with
friends or strangers who were never strangers for long, since mutual
acquaintance or intermarriage had made of the whole state almost one
family, proved attractive and interesting to him. He found in this new
work a real and fresh happiness. Fording swollen streams, searching for
obscure mountain passes, riding alone or with a chance companion through
extensive stretches of woodland, listening to, and often answering the
notes of birds or the cry of some animal, were congenial occupations
to the young parson, and his form rounded out and his face gradually
settled into mature but gentle and kindly lines, and it was now grown to
be his invariable rule to compose his sermons as he rode. He never wrote
them. Some text would fix itself in his mind as he read his little black
Testament night or morning, and upon that text he would build a simple
and kindly talk which reached and touched his handful of listeners as no
elaboration of rhetoric could have done.

Some days he would ride along for miles, humming or singing a single
tune, while a train of thought for his next sermon was building itself
up in his mind. Selim, the fine young sorrel, knew quite well what to
do, and fell into a walk or a gentle canter, according to the
briskness or volume of the notes that rose over his back. If
"How-tedious-and-tasteless-the-hours, when-Jesus-no-longer-I-see,"
trailed out softly, with long and undevised breaks in the continuity of
sound and sense, Selim walked demurely, and saw no ghosts or interesting
things whatsoever in woods or stream or distant valley. But when "Joy
to the world! The Lord has come!" rang out, continuous and clear, Selim
knew that he might even shy at a stone, and make believe a set state of
terror at sight of a familiar old post or a startled groundhog; or that
if he were to break into an unexpected gallop, no harm would be done,
and that he would be pretty sure of some playful remarks and a bit
of teasing from the rider, whose sermon, Selim knew full well, was
finished. But so long as "Joy to the mm-mmmm-mmmmm-mmm-Let earth
mmmm--mmmmmmmmher King," greeted his ears, Selim knew that the
responsibility of ford or path rested with him, and many a ford did
Selim take before his rider realized that he had come to it. If swimming
were necessary, Selim struck out with a powerful stroke, and came up on
the other bank with a proud stamp of his feet and a whinny that bid for
the recognition of his prowess that he knew was sure to come to him.

"Whoa, old fellow! Stop and get your wind! Steady! That was a pretty
stiff current, wasn't it? There, take a nibble! Been some pretty heavy
rains around here, haven't there? But what do you and I care about rains
and currents? Whoa, there, you rascal, keep your nose off my sleeve! O,
you will, will you? Well, there, there, there, I've wiped it all off as
good as ever. T-h-a-t's right; nip off some of these fresh buds. Here,
let's take our bit out. Tastes better, doesn't it? Oh, you will, will
you, old wet nose? Ha! ha! ha! Selim, you know more than most folks, you
old hum-bug!"

If his master sat down and became absorbed in thought, or in his little
black book, Selim would browse about for an hour; but at the first note
of a hymn the faithful fellow came to have his bridle replaced, and was
ready for a gallop or a walk, as his rider should indicate.

At first the young circuit rider would take a swollen ford, when a safer
one could have been found a mile or two farther on, or he would ride
miles out of his way to make a pass in the mountains, when, had he known
the fact, an obscure but safe one was near at hand. But, as the years
passed by, both Selim and his master would have scorned a guide, and,
night or day, the country became to them like the fields of one's own
estate, so familiar were they with it all. In this pass was a great
nesting place, where, year after year, the circuit rider talked aloud to
the birds, and fancied that they knew him. Many a friendly note of reply
to his whistle or call gained a hearty laugh.

"Feel jokey to-day, do you, you ridiculous Bob White? Wish I could
translate that into English. Know it was a good joke from the twist you
gave it, but I'm no linguist. You'll have to excuse me if I don't reply
intelligently," he would call out to some unusually individualized note,
and Selim would whisk his tail in utter disapproval of a man who would
so foolishly converse with birds--such little insignificant things as
they were--when here was a full-grown, blooded horse, right under his
nose! The pride and arrogance of species is great within us all--and
Selim had associated much with man.

"Hello! Where's that great-grandfather of yours that I saw here the last
time we crossed jour ford?" Griffith remarked aloud to a frisky little
trout, as it whisked past Selim's feet. "Hope nobody's caught him. Give
him my regards when you get home."

Just then Selim's feet struck the bank, and, as he scrambled up, he
shied a little, and his master recognized the long legs before him as
those of the mountaineer in homespun trousers and hickory shirt, who had
vexed the old Major at the baptizing in the Opquan that now seemed so
long ago.

"Good-morning----" began the young minister, when Lengthy's gun went
suddenly to his shoulder, there was a flash, a report, Selim sprang to
one side, and the mountaineer poked with his gun where the horse had
stood. "Look down. Say nothin'." Few words comprehend th' whole he
remarked to the astonished circuit rider, as he held up on the end of
his gun a still writhing, ugly, dying snake, which had been coiled to
spring. He was too confused, or too mentally embryonic to do more than
grin in gratified silence at the thanks and compliments from the young
preacher; for it was somewhat infrequently that Lengthy was addressed by
one of Griffith's type, and the very sincerity of his evident admiration
for the circuit rider still farther handicapped his already abnormally
developed awkwardness of manner. It is possible that the vocabulary of
this swarthy mountaineer (whose six feet and seven inches of bone and
sinew had fixed upon him the only name that Pastor Davenport had ever
heard applied to him), it is possible, I say, that his vocabulary may
have been fuller than it was generally supposed to be. Among his fellows
it is just possible that he may have ventured upon language with more
freedom; but certain it is that when Lengthy was in the presence of
what he was pleased to call "quality," the limitations were painfully
apparent, and there was a legend---which appeared to have as solid
a basis as belongs to most--that whatever slight variations he might
venture upon as an opening remark, the _finale_, if one may so express
it, was sure to be the same.

Mr. Davenport asked after his health, that of his family, the
neighborhood in general and finally, unable to extract anything beyond a
nod or a single word from the giant who had pitched the still squirming
rattlesnake from the end of his gun into the river, Griffith took
another tack.

"River seems to be unusually high. Selim had all he could do, didn't
you, old fellow? Been having a freshet here, haven't you?"

Lengthy pointed with his gun, to the remnants of a rail fence, now high
on the bank, in the top rails of which clung half-dry weeds and river
refuse.

"Look there. Few words comprehend th' whole."

Griffith smiled, gave up the task of conversing with his admirer, shook
the bridle on Selim's neck and with a cheery "Well, I'm glad to have met
you. Good-bye," rode on toward the village where he was soon to begin
his first year's pastorate as a "located" preacher. As he rode along
he almost regretted the change. These had been happy years to the
simple-hearted, but ardent young fellow; but he was consoled when he
saw before him in mental vision the home in which pretty, black-eyed
Katherine LeRoy was to preside--for the young circuit rider had found
his fate and, alas! it had not been inside the Episcopal paddock nor
even in the Methodist fold--such pranks does Fate play with us, such
liberties does Cupid take, even with the hearts of those whose mission
it is to deal with other things! Very early in the new life Griffith had
stayed one night at the hospitable home of Katherine's father. In spite
of all, his heart was lonely and his face less bright than in the old
days. Miss Katherine saw. Miss Katherine was kind--and Miss Katherine's
sweet face traveled many a mile with the young preacher after he, as
Selim was well aware, should have been humming a hymn and composing that
sermon for the morrow. But Selim was discreet; and when he shook his
head or whinnied or changed his gait and Griffith did not heed, Selim
plodded demurely on and waited. But as the months had gone by and
Selim had carried the young master up the same lane a few times and had
observed the same silent abstraction after each visit, he had grown to
know very well indeed that this was a marked house and that Griffith
liked to go there. So it came to pass that after the dark eyes had
traveled with the young preacher and peered over his shoulder into his
Testament and interfered sadly with the trend of his thoughts on sacred
things, it had grown to be very certain to Griffith that something would
have to be done. Then it was that for the first time he thought how
little he had to offer. Not even a home! Not even his own companionship!
For all these six years he had traveled his different circuits and slept
where he found himself as night came on, and preached here or there as
he had been directed. His home had been literally in his saddle, and his
salary had been too insignificant to mention. The old Major, who to a
degree, had become reconciled to the new order of things, had at first
insisted that Jerry follow and care for the young master; but Griffith
had argued that it ill became one who had taken such a step to take
with him a body servant, and it had almost broken Jerry's heart to be
compelled to stay at the old home-place and allow young Mos' Grif
to saddle and feed Selim, if need be, and care for and brush his own
clothes. This latter had, indeed, led to the loss of most of his limited
wardrobe, for he had left behind him, at the house of some "member" a
piece of clothing or some toilet article very often, at the first; but
as it never failed to be returned to him on his next round, the leather
saddle-bags retained about the same proportions from month to month,
replenished as they were by his mother and Jerry on his frequent visits
home.

But it was when the thought of a wife and a home of his own first came
to Griffith that the life of a circuit rider grew less attractive and he
wondered if it would be right to ask to be "located" or "stationed"
as some of the married men were. To be sure they must change their
"station" year by year and so tear up the little roots they could strike
in so brief a period, but at least it gave something like a home and a
"charge" to the preacher, and he--not his family--was the sole subject
of solicitude and consideration to the authorities who governed his
movements. Had not the Lord said to those whom He sent forth to preach
that they must go from place to place leaving behind all family ties?
Had not He so lived? Had not Paul and Timothy and the twelve? Later on
had it not been so with the many until wealth and love of ease and the
things of this world undermined the true faith?

But human nature is strong, and all faiths in the past have--as all in
the future will continue to do--accommodated themselves to the human
needs and demands of those who sustain the theory as infallible,
immutable, unchangeable and unchanging; but modify it to fit the times,
the natures and the conditions in which they strike root. If Mohammed
will not go to the mountain, the mountain will come to Mohammed.

So when the young circuit rider had stopped again, as had grown to be
his habit, with the family of Katherine LeRoy, and when she, with quaint
coquetry, had met his equally quaint courtship by finally accepting him
on condition that he "take a charge" he had asked the presiding elder
to locate him as a married man for the next year since he was about to
marry. Brother Prout had approved, and the matter had been settled with
little difficulty.

The courtship was unique. The young parson had grown to be so great a
favorite where-ever he went that his cheerfulness, his kindly, simple
and sincere nature insured him hearty welcome even outside of his own
flock. His superior birth and breeding made him a marked man within
his denomination. Many were the speculations as to which rosy-cheeked
Methodist girl he would find nearest his ideal, and jokes were many at
the expense of this or that one if he but stopped twice at her father's
house.

At last it became plain that in one neighborhood he preferred to stay
overnight with the family of Bernard LeRoy, a staunch and uncompromising
Presbyterian, and it did not take long for others to discover why; but
so sure was Mr. LeRoy, himself, that it was to his own superiority to
his neighbors that the visits were due, that the times when a few words
alone with Miss Katherine were possible were few indeed. The large,
ready, hearty hospitality of the time and of Virginia were exemplified
in this household. All welcomed him. Old, young, white and black alike;
and the wide porch or great rooms and halls gave space and hearty
invitation to family and neighborly gatherings. So it came about that at
last Griffith felt that he could wait no longer. He must know his fate.
The demure Katherine had reduced him to a mere spirit of unrest in spite
of the presence of others, and while all sat talking of crops, politics,
religion, neighborhood happenings, rains, swollen streams and the recent
freaks of lightning, the young minister took from his pocket the little
black Testament and drew a line around the words, "Wilt thou go with
this man?" and handing it to Miss Katherine he asked: "Will you read
and answer that question for me, Miss Katherine?" Their eyes met, and
although Griffith returned to his seat and essayed to go on with the
conversation with her father, they both understood.

Her dark eyes ran over the words, her color rose and fell, but, contrary
to the hope of the young preacher, she did not mark and return the
reply. She carelessly turned the leaves and his heart sank. He gave
abstracted replies to her father and twice failed to hear what was said,
and still Miss Katherine turned the leaves. At last he believed that she
had either not understood or that she did not intend to reply, and with
a sinking heart he rose to go. Selim had been put away. The circuit
rider was always expected to stay overnight. He explained in a vague way
that this time it would be best for him to go to a Methodist neighbor's
two miles farther on. Was it that reply which decided darkeyed Katherine
not to farther tease her lover? Did she fear the wiles of the plump,
demure girl in the quaint, unribboned bonnet who looked such open
admiration into the eyes of the young preacher. However that may be,
certain it is that at this juncture and under cover of the general
movement to send for the guest's horse, Miss Katherine took from her
belt a pansy and putting it between the pages to mark where she had
drawn a line, she gave the little book back to its owner. He saw the
movement and glanced within: "Why have I found grace in thine eyes that
thou shouldst take knowledge of me--seeing I am a stranger?" He read and
his heart leaped. "A stranger!" She was not of his fold! It was _that_
she thought of! He looked at her and both understood. He could ride away
now and both would be content, even though he were under the roof with
the quaint little Methodist bonnet.

As they moved toward the door the two young people managed to pass out
alone and Griffith took her in his arms for one brief instant and kissed
her lips.

"Thank God!" he whispered. "Thank God, for this last and holiest
blessing! I love you next to my Saviour, Katherine. Sometimes I pray it
may not be more than I love Him."

She laughed, a soft little ripple, and drew back just as her father
appeared at the door.

"I shall not pray that," she said, as he mounted, and the young preacher
rode away into the darkness with no disapproval of the heresy upon his
radiant face. Selim knew that this was a strange proceeding--this late
departure--and he shook his head so violently that the buckles of his
bridle rattled. The young minister made no sign, but when, a little
farther on, there suddenly arose over his back, the notes of a
long-forgotten song, Selim cast one eye backward and started at the
break-neck pace of his youth.

     "The moon is beaming brightly, love.
     Te tom te turn te te!
     A trusty crew is waiting, love,
     Away, away with me!"

Selim's surprise knew no bounds. He had not beard that song since before
the day his young master went, for some strange reason, into the Opquan
river, with Brother Prout. Something unusual had happened, that was very
clear. Something that carried the young preacher quite out of himself
and into a world where sermons and hymns were not; and, although the
song was gay, Selim felt a tag at his bridle that meant a slower pace.

"Yea! old fellow, y-e-a!" Selim was surprised again. He stopped short.

"G'ap! g'lang!

     "Far o'er the deep, o'er the deep, o'er the d e-e-o p,
     Far o'er the deep blue sea!
     Far o'er the deep, o'er the deep, o'er the d-o-o-o-p,
     Far o'er the deep blue sea!
     Oh, come and share a sailor's heart--for o'er the deep blue sea!"

Perhaps Selim was not exactly scandalized, but he felt that it would
not be judicious to reach the home of the quaint Methodist bonnet too
prematurely. And Selim walked.




CHAPTER V.--A man's conscience.


But all this was away back in the years when you and I were not born,
my friend, and, therefore, the only reason I tell you about it or expect
you to be interested in such simple and far-off lives is that you may
know something of the early habits and surroundings of the man who,
I began by warning you, became a lawbreaker; for, I hold it to be a
self-evident fact that however true it is that heredity stamps the
character with its basic principles and qualities, it is never wise to
forget that it is to environment, circumstance and education that we owe
its modifications and the direction of its final development. But now
that you will be able to picture to yourself the man as he then was, and
his surroundings and conditions, I will tell you as directly as I can
the story of his offense; but first I must explain that when his coming
marriage to Miss Katherine LeRoy was announced at his home, the old
Major objected again, but this time more mildly, to the choice his son
had made.

"Her people are good, wholesome, respectable folks, my son," he said;
"but--but, Grif, why couldn't you have found a girl of--well, one of the
families you were brought up with. Mind, boy, I'm not saying anything
against Miss Katherine. I've heard--and I don't doubt it--that she is a
mighty nice sort of a girl; but----"

The Major had grown milder in his methods with his son, and he hesitated
to speak words which might cause pain hereafter.

"Of course, Grif," he went, on after an awkward pause, "of course, if
you love each other--and--and--well, if the thing is settled, I have
only to congratulate you, and to say that I am truly glad to have
you settle down, so I'll be able to know where you are. It's deucedly
disagreeable not to know from week to week where to put a finger on
you--such a tacky sort of shifty sensation about it. I can know now
at least a year at a time. Perfectly ridiculous custom it is to move a
preacher just when he gets acquainted with the people, and they begin
to trust him! Infernal habit! I'd as soon live on a boat and just anchor
from time to time in another stream and call it home--and--and living.
I've come to respect your sincerity, Grif, but I can't respect the sense
of a denomination that has no idea of the absolute value of stability,
of continuity of association, between its pastor and its people. Why,
just look at the thing! It uproots the best sentiments in both, and
makes a wanderer of one who ought to be, not only by precept, but by
example, stable and faithful and continuously true to those who look up
to him. Why, a scamp can pose for a year or two as a saint; but it takes
real value to live a lifetime in a community and be an inspiration and
a guide to your members. Then just look at it! Nobody who has any
self-respect is going to talk of his inner life to a stranger! We
are all alike in that. We pose and pretend and keep our shutters up,
mentally and morally, with a new-comer. Gad! I can't see the wisdom nor
the sense of any such rules."

"Has its good points, father," said Grif, whose quiet chuckle from time
to time had stirred the Major to unusual earnestness. He wanted to get
at his son's real views on the subject. "Has some redeeming qualities,
after all, father, quite aside from the Bible teaching upon which
the leaders of our church base it. There are men--even ministers, I'm
afraid, whom one enjoys much better when they are on another circuit;
and I may as well confess to you that there are circuits a man enjoys a
good deal better when he's not on them--after he has left."

"Some of the old boy in you yet, Grif," laughed the Major, slapping his
son on the back. "Better not say that to Father Prout, or he will keep
you on one of that kind for discipline." Jerry was filled with delight
when told of the coming marriage of Mos' Grif. Jerry's own wife had long
since presented him with twins, and it was his delight to show off the
antics of these small ebony creatures to Griffith whenever he was at
home. It was at first arranged that this family only should go to form
the new household.

The mutterings born in a different clime and under other conditions had
now reached proportions which could not be wholly ignored. In many a
long ride oyer the mountain or valley paths in the past few years had
Griffith pondered the question, and he had definitely decided in his
own mind that for one who had cast his lot with the itinerant Methodist
clergy, at least, the ownership of slaves was wrong. He would never
buy nor sell a human being. Upon that point his mind was clearly and
unalterably made up. But Jerry and his family were to be a part of
the new household while yet they remained, as before, the old Major's
property. To this Griffith had consented readily, for Miss Katherine
must have an efficient cook and Jerry would be of infinite use. Griffith
had drawn a picture of a small house in the village in which this
beautiful dream of his was to be realized; but, as the time drew near,
the old Major developed his own plans with such skill as to carry his
point.

When the house was to be looked for he said: "See here, Grif, you are
a good deal younger than I am, and some of the older slaves are pretty
hard to manage. They can't work a great deal, and they get into mischief
one way and another. Look at that set oyer in the end cabin--they always
did like you best--and since you have been gone so much they are a good
deal of trouble to me. They've got to be cared for somehow. I wish you'd
take them. They can do a lot of useful things if they are away from the
others, and you can get twice as much work out of them as I can. They
are stubborn with me, and it wears my soul out to deal with'em. I've
needed your help a good many times since you've been away, but I did not
like to say much. I think, now you are going to settle down, that you
ought to think of your father's needs a little, too."

Grif winced. He recalled that he had always pushed his father's problem
aside in his thoughts when he had settled or solved his own. He realized
how unfair that was. He felt the force of the Major's complaint.

"Of course, I'll do anything I can, father, to help you; but I can't
take a lot of negroes to a village and--"

"That's just it! Just it, exactly! Of course you can't. I didn't intend
to ask you just yet, but I want you to give up that foolish idea of
taking Katherine to town to live. She can't stand it. You are asking
enough of a woman, God knows, to ask her to put up with your sort of
life anyhow, let alone asking a girl that has been respectably brought
up on a plantation to give all that up and go to a miserable little
village. It is not decent to live that way! Cooped up with a lot of
other folks in a string of narrow streets! I'd a good deal rather go to
jail and done with it. Now, what I want and what I need you to do, is
to take that other plantation--the one down, on the river--your
grandfather's place--and take some of the hands down there and you can
let them work the place. How in the name of thunder do you suppose you
and Katherine are going to live on your ridiculous salary? Salary! It
isn't enough to dignify by the name of wages--let alone salary! Y' can't
live on it to save your lives. Katherine can't----"

"But, father----"

"That farm down there is plenty near enough to town for you to ride in
every single day if you want to and--look here, boy, don't you think you
owe a little something to your father? I'm getting old. You don't begin
to realize how hard it is on me to meet all these difficulties that
other men's sons help them with."

The Major had struck that chord with full realization of its probable
effect, and he watched with keen relish the troubled and shamed look on
the face before him. Griffith made a movement to speak, but the Major
checked him with a wave of the hand.

"That farm is just going to wreck and ruin, and I haven't the strength
to attend to that and this both. Besides, these negroes have got to be
looked after better. Pete is growing more and more sullen every year,
and Lippy Jane's temper is getting to be a holy terror. She and Pete
nearly kill each other at times. They had a three-cornered fight with
Bradley's mulatto, Ned, the other day, and nearly disabled him. Bradley
complained, of course. Now, just suppose Ned dies and Bradley sues me?
It seems to me it is pretty hard lines when a man has a son and--"

"But, father----"

"Now, look here, Grif, don't 'but' me any more. I've had that house on
the other place all put in order and the negro quarters fixed up-. The
negroes can belong to me, of course, if you still have that silly idea
in your head about not wanting to own them, but you have got to help me
with them or---- Then damn it all, Grif, I don't intend it to be said
that a daughter-in-law of _mine_ has to live in a nasty little rented
house without so much as a garden patch to it. It is simply disgraceful
for you to ask her to do it! I------"

"Father, father!" said Grif, with his voice trembling; "I--you are
always so good to me, but I--I----"

The old Major looked over his glasses at his son. Each understood,
and each feigned that he did not. The Major assumed wrath to hide his
emotion. "Now, look here, Grif, I don't want to hear anything more about
this business! You make me mad! Who am I to go to for help in managing
my land and my niggers if I can't depend on you for a single thing?
That's the question. Confound it all! I'm tired out, I tell you, looking
after the lazy lot, and now you can take your share of the work. What
am I going to do with the gang if I've got to watch'em night and day,
to see that they are kept busy enough not to get into trouble with each
other, and get me in trouble with my neighbors. Just suppose Pete had
killed Bradley's Ned, then what? Why, I'd have been sued for a $1,000
and Pete would have been hung besides! I tell you, boy, I'm too old for
all this worry, and I think it's about time I had a little help from
you. I----"

The young preacher winced again under the argument, although he knew
that in part, at least, it was made for a purpose other than the one on
the surface. In part he knew it was true. He knew that his father had
found the task heavy and irksome. He knew that the negroes preferred his
own rule, and that they were happier and more tractable with him than
with the old 'Squire. He knew that as the times had grown more and more
unsettled and unsettling, his father had twice had recourse to a hired
overseer and that the results had been disastrous for all. He knew that
other sons took much of this care and responsibility from the aging
shoulders of their fathers. He hesitated--and was lost. He would take
the negroes with him and live on the other place--at least one year!

But when Miss Katherine brought with her her father's gift of
slaves--which Mr. LeRoy had tried hard to make sufficiently numerous to
impress the old Major--Grif, to his dismay, found himself overseer and
practically the owner of twenty-two negroes--and he on a salary of
$200 per year! With a plantation to work, the matter of salary was, of
course, of minor importance. But Griffith had not failed to see glimpses
of a not far-distant future, in these past few years as he had read or
heard the urgent questions of political policy which had now become so
insistent in the newer border states--a future in which this life must
be changed. Riots and bloodshed, he knew, had followed in the train of
argument and legislative action. Slaves had run away and been tracked
and returned to angry masters. But the basic question as to whether it
was right for man to hold property in man had, so far, been presented to
his mind in the form of a religious scruple and with a merely personal
application. _Should ministers of his Church_ buy and sell black men?
Griffith had definitely settled in his own mind that they should not.
But whether they should inherit or acquire by marriage such property,
had, until now, hardly presented a serious face to him. And now, in
the form in which they came to him, he saw no present way out of the
difficulty even had he greatly desired it.

I have no doubt that to you, my friend, who were not born in these
troublous times, and to you, my neighbor, who lived in another latitude,
the problem looks simple enough. "He could free the slaves which were
in his power," will be your first thought. "I would have done that," is
your next, and yet it is dollars to doughnuts that you would have done
nothing of the kind. Oh, no! I am not reflecting upon your integrity,
nor your parsimony--although I have not observed any tendency you may
have toward dispensing with your property by gift--but to other and more
complicated and complicating questions with which you would have found
yourself surrounded, and with which your private inclinations would
have come into violent collision, as Griffith Davenport discovered; and
surely, my friend, you would not care to be written up in future years
as a violator of the law--you who value so lightly "that class of
people" that you have often said, quite openly, that you cared very
little to even read about them, and deplored the fact that writers
_would_ thrust them into respectable literature!

Griffith had watched the coming storm in the southwest. He had hoped and
prayed (and until now he had believed) that for himself, at least, the
question was settled. He would never own slaves, therefore he would not
be called upon to bear any personal part in the coming struggle. But a
wife's property was a husband's property in Virginia, in those far-off
barbaric days, and so Griffith found himself in an anomalous position,
before he knew it, for Mr. LeRoy had given Katherine her slaves as a
marriage portion, and had striven to make sure that their number and
quality should do honor to the daughter-in-law of her prospective
husband's father. Mr. LeRoy had an exalted opinion of the position and
importance of the old Major--or as he always called him, of "old 'Squiah
Davenpoaht."

But so matters stood until, a few years later, an accident happened,
which resulted in the death of the old Major. When the will was opened,
Griffith found himself forced to confront the question of ownership of
slaves, fairly if not fully. The will left "to my beloved son, Griffith,
all the slaves now living with him, together with the farm upon which
he now lives and the old homestead; with the admonition that he care for
and protect the old slaves and train and employ the young." His other
property was devised in accordance with his wishes, leaving to his
grandchildren and distant relatives the other slaves and live stock.

Meantime, as this would indicate, there had been born to Griffith several
children--three boys and a little baby girl--which now filled the hearts
and home with life and joy.

The exigencies of his ministerial life had so far made it necessary for
him to leave the plantation but twice. Father Prout had managed to have
his "stations" rotate from one small town to another in the immediate
vicinity, and, with his growing stoutness, Mr. Davenport had taken to
driving, chiefly, since Selim had been retired from active service, to
and from his places of meeting week after week. Twice, for a year each
time, he had been compelled to leave the plantation in charge of
Jerry and remove to a more distant town, where the small house and
unaccustomed conditions had resulted in ill health for Katherine and the
children. But now they were on the "place" again and were owners of
much that required that they face larger and more complicated
responsibilities--and what was to be done? Griffith had made up
his mind, definitely, that he did not want his sons to grow up in a
slave-owning atmosphere. He had read and thought much of the struggle
over the Missouri Compromise Bill. He had hoped great things from
it, and had beheld its final repeal with dismay. He had seen, so he
believed, in it the arm that was destined to check if not to wipe out
human slavery. How this was to be done he did not know; but that he
hoped for it, for all men, he knew. For himself he was quite sure that
as a preacher, if not as a man, it was wrong. He had determined to so
educate his sons that they would not blame him for shutting them out
from at least the inherited possibilities of the institution which
had fallen upon him. But now, what could be done? The Major's will
had thrown the task definitely upon him and had greatly increased the
difficulties. He knew that it was against the laws of his state to free
the negroes and leave them within its borders. Exactly what the terms of
the law were, he did not know; but it was easy to realize its need and
force. Free negroes were at once a menace to all parties concerned, both
white and black. They had no work, no homes, no ties of restraint
and responsibility. They were amenable to no one and no one was their
friend. They could starve, or they could steal, or they could go North.
If they did the first--in a land of plenty--they were not made of that
stuff out of which human nature is fashioned, be that nature encased in
a white or in a black skin. If they did the second they fared far
worse than slaves--the chain-gang for home and the law for a driver has
horrors worse than even slavery--at least so thought the colored man
of 1852. But if they attempted to achieve the last of the three
alternatives their lot was hardest of all. They must leave home, family,
wife, children, parents and friends--all that made life endurable to a
patient, affectionate, simple nature--and find what? Neither friends,
welcome nor work! A climate in which they suffered, a people amongst
whom their rarity and the strangeness of their speech and color made
of them objects of curiosity and aversion--where the very children fled
from them in fright--little children like those whom they had nursed
and fondled and who always had loved them! They would find the prejudice
against their color intense beyond belief, for few indeed were the men
or women in the free states who would give work of any kind to these
strange-looking and stranger-speaking creatures. Indeed, no one was more
shocked to learn than was Griffith, that in some of the border states it
was illegal to give employment to these ex-slaves. All this Griffith was
destined to learn to his cost. He knew, already, that slaves trained as
his father's were, had no conception of hard and constant work such as
was demanded of the northern laborer. He knew that they could not hope
to compete with white workmen in a far-away field of labor even could
they get the work to do. He knew that they would be the sport--where
they were not the game and victims--of those white laborers. He knew
that the employer (were they so fortunate as to find one) would not be
slow to learn that they accomplished less and ate more than did their
white rivals. That alone would, of course, settle their chances of
competition, and starvation or crime would again become their only
alternative.

A freed slave, in a country where slavery still existed, was a sorry and
unhappy spectacle; but a freed slave in competition with freemen was a
tragedy in black!

Griffith had fought his battle alone. It is true that he had talked much
with his wife on the subject, and it is also true that her faith in and
love for him made her ready acquiescence in his final decision a matter
of course; but with no outlook into the political world, with no mental
scope beyond the horizon prescribed as suitable for women, she could
give him nothing but loyalty. She could echo his sentiments. She could
not stimulate or aid his thought. Attuned to follow, she could not lead,
and was equally unfitted to keep even step with him side by side. She
did not share, nor could she understand, her husband's acute mental
misgivings and forebodings. The few times she had spoken to her father
of them, he had said that she need not worry. "Griffith is no fool.
He'll get over this idiotic notion before long. It is reading those
damned Yankee speeches that is the trouble with him. You just be
patient. He'll get over it. The old 'Squire knew how to cure him. Like
to know what he'd do with all those niggers? But Griffith is no fool,
I tell you, if he is a Methodist." Katherine had not relished the last
remark, and she did not believe that her father quite comprehended how
deep a hold on Griffith the idea of freedom for the blacks--and freedom
from ownership of them for himself--had taken; but she was silenced.




CHAPTER VI.


_"My conscience whispers."_--Shakespeare.


But at last the crisis came. One of the girls--Sallie, a faithful
creature--had married "Bradley's John," and now John was about to be
sold and sent to Georgia. Either John must be separated from his wife
and child, or Sallie must be sold, or Mr. Davenport must buy John and
keep him here! The final issue had come! John begged to be bought.
Sallie pleaded not to be allowed to be sold, nor to be separated from
her husband. Katherine agreed to plead for Sallie, who had been her own
playmate ever since she could remember.

"Git Mos' Grif ter buy John, Mis' Kate! Fo' God's sake, Mis' Kate,
git'im ter buy John! Yoh kin. I knows mon'sous well dat yoh kin! He
gwine ter do jes' what yoh tell 'im ter. I knows dat he is, Mis' Kate!"

Mr. Davenport was in his study. Katherine had explained the case to him
fully, and Sallie's black face peered in behind him, with anxious eyes,
watching and listening to her mistress.

"Katherine, I cannot! I cannot pay money for a human being. I have
yielded, step by step, to what I felt was wrong long ago, until now I
am caught in the tangled threads of this awful system--but I cannot! I
_cannot_ pay money for a human soul!"

Suddenly Sallie fell at his feet, and, swaying to and fro, swung her
sturdy frame like a reed in the wind.

"Oh, Mos' Grif, fo' God's sake, buy John! Ain't yo' got no mussy, Mos'
Grif? Don' let dat Mos' Bradley sen' John 'way off dar! I gwine ter die
right heah, if yo' don' hep me, Mos' Grif! Ain't I been a good girl?
Ain't I nus de chillun good, an' did'n I pull Mos' Beverly outen de
crick when he fall in an' wus mose drownded? Oh, fo' Christ's sake, Mos'
Grif, buy my John! He gwine ter wuk fo' yoh all his life long, an' he
gwine ter be good!"

She swayed and wept and moaned. She held her baby to her breast and
cried out for John, and then she held it out toward Griffith and stared
through streaming eyes at his face to see if he had relented. And still
Griffith was silent. His teeth were set tight together, and his nails
cut his palms, but he said not a word.

"Mos' Grif, Mos' Grif! what did God A'mighty gib yoh all dis lan' an'
houses an' money fo'? What He gib yoh my Mis' Katherine fo'?'Cause He
know yoh gwine ter be good an' kine, an'--an' dat yoh gwine ter be
good ter _us!_ Mos' Grif, de good Lawd ain't fo'got we alls des kase we
black!"

She rolled the baby on the floor beside her and grasped both of her
master's clenched hands, and struggled to open them as she talked. She
seemed to think if they would but relax that he would yield.

"Mos' Grif, we bofe gwine ter wuk fo' yoh, an' pray fo' yoh, and dat
baby, dar, gwine ter wuk an' pray fo' yoh all ouh lifes long--all de
days ob ouh lifes, des fo' dat little, teenchy six hund'ud dollahs, what
Mos' Bradley got ter hab fo' John! All ouh lifes long! All ouh lifes
long, we gwine ter wuk and pray fo' yoh, des fo' dat little, teenchy six
hund'ud dollahs!!"

Mrs. Davenport put her hand on her husbond's shoulder. Her eyes were wet
and her lips trembled.

"Griffith, what harm can it do? And see how _much_ good! Griffith, we
will _all_ love you better if you will. I can't bear to see Sallie the
way she has been these last two months--ever since it was decided to
sell John to that man when he comes. It is heart-breaking. You know,
darling, she played with me ever since we were babies, and she has been
_so_ good to my children--_our_ children, Griffith!" She lowered her
voice to a mere whisper: "Can God want you to be so cruel as this,
Griffith?"

Mr. Davenport had never dreamed that anything he might feel it his duty
to do would seem to his wife like cruelty. It hurt him sorely. He looked
up at her with a drawn face.

"Katherine," he said, "let us give Sallie her freedom, and let her go
with John."

"No, no, no, no! I ain't gwine ter go wid dat man! I ain't gwine ter
be no free wife nigger, 'pendin' on him! I ain't gwine ter leabe Mis'
Kath'rine, nedder!" She arose in her fear, which was turning to wrath.
"Mis' Kate, yoh ain't gwine ter let him gib me away, is yoh? I don'
belong to nobody ter gib away, but des ter my Mis' Kate, an' she ain't
gwine ter gib me 'way arter I done nus her chillun an' save de life of
Mos' Beverly! Dat ain't dekine o' lady my Mis' Kate is! O Mis' Kate,
Mis' Kate! I done wisht yoh'd a-gone and married dat Mos' Tom Harrison
dat time wat'e ax you! _He_ don't lub money dat much dat he can't spahr
a little six hund'ud dollahs ter sabe me an' John an'--an'--an' dis heah
baby!"

She caught up the baby from the floor again and held it toward her
master.

"Dar! take hit an' kill hit fus' as well as las'! kase _I_ gwine ter
die, an' hit gwine ter be my Mos' Grif dat kill bofe of us. God gwine
ter know'bout dat! John gwine ter tell'im! Jesus gwine ter know dat six
little hund'ud dollahs is wuf more ter my Mos' Grif dan me an' yoh an'
John," she moaned, holding the baby up in front of her. "All free, bofe
ob us, ain't wuf dat little much t' ouh Mos' Grift All free, bofe ob
us! A little, teenchy, ugly six hund'ud dollahs! He radder hab hit in
de bank er in de desk er in he pocket--dat little six hund'ud dollahs
what's mo' bigger dan _all_ ob us--an' mo' bigger dan Mis' Kate's lub!"
She fell to sobbing again. "Des dat little much! Des dat little much!"
she moaned. "All ob us got ter die fer des dat little much! An' Mos'
Grif, he don' care. He lub dat little much money mo' dan wat he do _all_
ob us, countin' in Mis' Kate's lub wid de res'!"

His wife had gone to her chair and was holding a handkerchief to her
face. He could see her lips and chin tremble.

"I will buy John, Sallie, if------"

Sallie grasped the two hands again. They were relaxed and cold.

"I knowed hit! I knowed hit! O good, kind Jesus! O Lord, Saviour! dey
ain't no _if!_ Dey ain't no if! My Mos' Grif gwine ter do hit. Dey ain't
no if lef in dem han's! My Mos' Grif gwine ter buy John!" and she fell
on her knees again and sobbed for joy. She caught the little black baby
up from the floor where it lay, laughing and kicking its toes in the
air, and crushed it so close to her breast that it cried out and then
set up a wail. Sallie stopped weaving her body to and fro, and tried to
smile through her tears.

"Des listen ter dat fool baby! Hits oryin' fo' des a little hu't like
dat, an' I only des choke hit wif my arms! Mos' Grif done choke my hawt
out vrid grief, an' now he done strangle me wid joy, befo' I got ter
cry, chile! Yoah po' mammy's hawt done bus' wide open wid joy now. Dat's
what make I can't talk no sense, Mos' Grif. I des wants ter yell. But
Mis' Katherine, she know. I des kin see dat she do. _She_ know dat I
feel des like I gwine ter bos' plum' down ter my chist. She know!"

She laid the baby down again and suddenly held up both arms toward her
master. Her voice was a wail.

"Tell me dat dey ain't no _if_ lef in your hawt, Mos' Grif! I knows dat
dey ain't, but I got ter heah yo' _say_ dat dey ain't, an' den I kin
go!"

"I will buy John, Sallie. There is no if," he said; and Katherine threw
her arms around his neck and looked at him through tears of joy.

That night the Rev. Griffith Davenport prayed long and earnestly that he
might be forgiven for this final weakness. He felt that his moral fiber
was weakening. He had broken the vow taken so long ago. He felt that the
bonds were tightening about him, and that it would be harder than
ever to cleanse his soul from what he had grown to feel was an awful
wrong--this ownership, and now this money purchase, of a human soul.

"I have gone the whole length," he sighed to himself. "I have at last,
with my eyes open, with my conscience against me, done this wrong! I
have paid money for a human being. I know it is a wrong--I know--I know,
and yet I have done it! God help me! God forgive me! I cannot see my
way! I cannot see my way!"

In the distance, as he arose from his knees, there floated in through
the open window the refrain from Sallie's song, as she moved about the
quarters:--

     An' deys no mo' trouble, an' deys no mo' pain,
     An' deys no mo' trouble fo' me, fo' me!
     An' deys no mo' sorrer, an' no mo' pain--
     Oh, deys no mo' trouble fo' me, f-o-h-h m-e-e-e!

     I libs on de banks ob de golden shoah,
     Oh, I libs in de promise' lan'!
     An' I sez to de Lawd, when He opens the doah,
     Dat deys no mo' trouble fo' me!

     De Lawd He says, when he took my han',
     "Enter into de gates ob res'!"
     An' He gib me a harp, an' I jines de ban',
     Fo' deys no mo' sorrer fer me!

Lippy Jane was dancing, on the back porch, to the rhythm of the distant
song, and two of the black boys stopped in their race with Beverly, over
the lawn, to take up the chorus--"Oh, deys no mo' trouble fo' me, f-o-h
m-e!"

But, in spite of his prayer for "light and leading," as he would
have called it, Mr. Davenport felt that his moral fiber was, indeed,
weakening, and yet he could not see his way out of the dilemma. He had
definitely decided so long ago now that he could not remember when he
had thought otherwise, that for one in his position, at least, even the
mere ownership of slaves could not be right. He recalled that it had
come to him at first in the form of purchase and sale, and it had seemed
to him that under no conditions could he be forced into that form of the
complication; but a little later on he decided that the mere ownership
involved moral turpitude for one of his denomination, at least, if he
was in deed and in truth following the leadership of the Christ.

When first he had agreed to take part of his father's slaves, therefore,
he had made himself feel that it was right that he should assume a part
of the old Major's burdens as his son and trustee, only, and that there
was to be no transfer of property. That this service was his father's
due and that he should give it freely seemed plain to him. Katherine's
slaves he had always thought of as hers alone--not at all as his; but
ever since the old Major had died and the will had settled beyond a
quibble that the Rev. Griffith Davenport was himself, in deed and in
truth "Mos' Grif" to all these dependent creatures, it had borne more
and more heavily upon his conscience. He had tried to think and plan
some way out of it and had failed, and now he had been forced to face
the final issue--the one phase which he had felt could never touch
him,--the purchase for money of a black man, and he had yielded at
the first test! His heart had outweighed his head and his conscience
combined, and the line he had fixed so long ago as the one boundary of
this evil which _he_ could never pass, and which, thank God, no one else
could thrust upon him, was obliterated, and he stood on the far side
condemned by his whole nature! In this iniquity from which he had felt
his hands should forever be free, they were steeped! He felt wounded and
sore and that a distinct step downward had been taken, and yet he asked
himself over and over again what he could have done in the matter that
would not have been far worse. He slept little. The next day when he
went to Mr. Bradley to buy John his whole frame trembled and he felt
sick and weak.

His neighbor noticed that he was pale, and remarked upon it, and then
turned the subject to the matter in hand which Sallie had duly reported
an hour after she had won and her master had lost the great moral
contest. For it cannot be denied that, all things considered.

Sallie had won a distinct victory for the future moral life of herself
and for John and the baby.

So complicated are our relations to each other and to what we are
pleased to call right and wrong in this heterogeneous world, that in
doing this Sallie had forced her master into a position which seemed to
him to cancel his right to feel himself a man of honor and a credit to
the religion in which he believed he had, so far, found all his loftiest
ideals. He could plainly see, now, that this phase of the terrible
problem would be sure to arise and confront him again and again as time
went on, and his heart ached when he felt that he had lost his grasp
upon the anchor of his principles and that the boundary lines of his
ethical integrity were again becoming sadly confused in a mind he had
grown to feel had long ago clearly settled and defined them.

"You look as pale as a ghost. Better try a little of Maria's blackberry
cordial? No? Do you good, I'm sure, if you would," said Mr. Bradley.
"You're taking this thing altogether too much to heart, sir. What
possible difference can it make to John whether you pay for him or
whether he had come to you as the others did? If yo'll will allow me to
say so, I think it is a ridiculous distinction. Somebody paid for the
ones you've got. If you'll allow an old neighbor to make a suggestion,
I think you read those Yankee papers altogether too much and too
seriously. It perverts your judgment. It's a good sight easier for those
fellows up there to settle this question than it is for us to do it.
They simply don't know what they are talking about, and we do. With them
it's all theory. Here it's a cold fact. What in the name of common sense
would they have? Suppose we didn't own and provide for and direct all
these niggers, what on earth would become of'em? Where would they get
enough to eat? You know as well as I do there is nothing on this earth
as helpless and as much to be pitied as a free nigger. They don't know
how to take care of themselves, and nobody is going to hire one. What in
thunder do people want us to do? Brain 'em?"

"Oh, I know, I know," said Mr. Davenport, helplessly, looking far off
into the beautiful valley, with its hazy atmosphere and its rich fields
of grain. "I've thought about it a thousand times, and a thousand times
it has baffled me. I'm not judging, now, for you, Mr. Bradley, not in
the least. I feel myself too thoroughly caught in the meshes of our
social fabric to presume to unravel it for other people. But--but in
_my_ position--for myself--it seems a monstrously wrong thing for me
to count out this money and pay it over for John, just as if he were a
horse. It makes me feel sick--as I fancy a criminal must feel after his
first crime." Mr. Bradley laughed.

"You don't look it, Davenport! Criminal! Ha, ha, ha, ha! that's rich!"

Griffith moved uneasily and did not join the laugh which still convulsed
his neighbor.

"For _me_ it is wrong--distinctly, absolutely wrong. It is a terrible
thing for me to say--and still do it--I, a preacher of God! For you, I
cannot judge. 'Judge not, that ye be not judged,' is what I always think
in this matter. But for me, for _me_ it is not right--and yet what can I
do?"

Mr. Bradley laughed again, partly in amusement and partly in derision,
at what he looked upon as the preacher's unworldly view, and what he
spoke of with vexation to others as "Davenport's damned foolishness,"
which had, of late, grown to be a matter of real unrest to the
neighborhood, in which it was felt that the influence of such opinions
could not fail to be dangerous to social order and stability. It was as
if you or I were to spring the question of free land or free money in
a convention of landlords and bankers. Or, if you please, like the
arguments for anarchy or no government addressed to the "Fourth
ward," or the members of Congress. It was, in short, subversive of the
established order of things, and neither you, nor I, nor they,
accept quite gracefully such propositions, if in their application to
ourselves, they would be a sore and bitter loss--if it would render less
secure and lofty our seat on the social or political throne. We revolt
and we blame the disturber of the old established order of things--the
order, which having been good enough for our fathers is surely good
enough for you and for me. In short, was not the way in religion and in
social order of our fathers far the better way? Is not the better way
always that of the man who owns and rides in the carriage? If you will
ask him--or if you are he--you will learn or see that there is not the
least doubt of the fact. If you should happen to ask the man who
walks, you may hear another story--if the man who walks happens to be
a philosopher; but as all pedestrians are not philosophers and since
acquiescence is an easy price to pay for peace, it may happen that the
man in the carriage will be corroborated by the wayfarer whom his wheels
have run down.

And so, my friend, in the year 1852, had you been sitting counting out
the six hundred dollars which must change hands to enable John to play
with the little black baby on his knee, after his day's work was done,
and to keep Sallie from the pitiful fate she dreaded, it is to be
questioned if you would not have agreed with Mr. Bradley in his covert
opinion that "Davenport's squeamishness was all damned nonsense," and
that he might far better stop reading those Yankee newspapers. But be
that as it may, the deed was done. The transfer was made, and the Rev.
Griffith Davenport rode home with a sad heart and troubled conscience.
He did not sing nor even hum his favorite hymns as he rode. His usually
radiant face was a study in perplexity. When he passed the cross-roads
he did not whistle to the robin who always answered him.

Selim's successor and namesake slackened his gait and wondered. Then he
jogged on, and when he stopped at the home "stile" and Griffith still
sat on his back, apparently oblivious of the fact that the journey was
at an end, Selim whinnied twice before the responsive pat fell upon his
glossy neck.

Jerry ran out. "Dinnah's raidy, Mos' Grif. Mis' Kath'rine she been a
waitin' foh yoh."

The rider roused himself and dismounted, more like an old man than like
his cheery, jovial, alert self.

"Is that so? Is it dinner-time already?" he asked absently. "Feed him,
but don't put him up. I may want him again after dinner."

"You ain't sick, is you, Mos' Grif?"

"No, no, boy, I'm not sick," he said, and then recognizing the look of
anxiety on the faithful fellow's face: "What made you ask that?"

"Yoh look so monst'ous lemoncholly, Mos' Grif. Hit ain't seem like
yo'se'f. I des fought dey mus' be somp'in de mattah wid yo' insides."

Mr. Davenport laughed and snapped the riding whip at the boy. Jerry
dodged the stroke, but rubbed the place where it was supposed to fall.

"Lemoncholly, am I? I'll lemoncholly you, you rascal, if you don't just
knock off and go fishing this afternoon. I shan't need you with me."

He was half way to the house when he called back: "Bring me a nice mess
of trout, boy, and you'll see my insides, as you call'em, will be all
right. It's trout I need. Now mind!"

And Jerry was comforted.




CHAPTER VII.--WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE DONE?


It was a year later before the Rev. Griffith Davenport found himself in
a position to carry out, even in part, a long-cherished plan of his. For
some time past, he had been strengthening himself in the belief that in
the long run he would have to flee from the problem that so perplexed
him. That he would have to make one supreme effort which should,
thereafter, shield him against himself and against temptation. This
determination had cost him the severest struggle of his life, and it had
resulted in the rupture of several lifelong friendships and in strained
relations with his own and his wife's near kinsmen. It had divided his
church and made ill-feeling among his brother clergymen, for it had
become pretty generally known and talked about, that the Rev. Griffith
Davenport had definitely determined to leave his old home and take his
sons to be educated "where the trend of thought is toward freedom" as he
had expressed it, and as his neighbors were fond of quoting derisively.
He had finally secured a position in connection with a small college
somewhere in Indiana, together with an appointment as "presiding elder"
in the district in which the college was located. He had arranged for
the sale of his property, and he was about to leave.

To those whose traditions of ancestry all center about one locality, it
costs a fearful struggle to tear up root and branch and strike out
into unknown fields among people of a different type and class; with
dissimilar ideas and standards of action and belief. To such it is
almost like the threat or presence of death in the household. But to
voluntarily disrupt and leave behind all of that which has given color
and tone and substance to one's daily life, and at its meridian, to
begin anew the weaving of another fabric from unaccustomed threads on
a strange and unknown loom, to readjust one's self to a different
civilization--all this requires a heroism, a fidelity to conscience and,
withal, a confidence in one's own judgment and beliefs that surpass the
normal limit. But, if in addition to all this, the contemplated change
is to be made in pursuance of a moral conviction and will surely result
in financial loss and material discomfort, it would not be the part of
wisdom to ask nor to expect it of those who are less than heroic. In
order to compass his plans Mr. Davenport knew that it would be necessary
to dispose of his slaves. But how?

He hoped to take with him to his new home--although they would be freed
by the very act--several of the older ones and Jerry and his little
family. He knew that these would, by their faithful services, be a
comfort and support to his wife and of infinite use and advantage to
the children, whose love and confidence they had. To take all into his
employ in the new home would, of course, be impossible. He would no
longer have the estate of an esquire. At first, at least, he must live
in a small town. There would be no land to till and no income to so
support them. The house would no longer be the roomy mansion of a
planter. His income would be too meager to warrant the keeping of even
so many servants as they were planning to take--and there would be
little work for them to do. The others must be disposed of in some other
way. But how? They are yours, my friend, for the moment. How will you
dispose of them? What would you have done?

"Free them and leave them in the state of their birth and of their love
where their friends and kinsmen are?" But you cannot! It is against the
law! If you free them you must take them away. Sell them? Of course not!
give them to your wife's and your own people? Would that settle or
only perpetuate and shift the question for which you are suffering and
sacrificing so much? And it would discriminate between those you take
and thus make free and those you leave and farther fix in bondage, and
the Rev. Griffith Davenport had set out to meet and perform, and not
merely to shift and evade, what he had grown to look upon as his duty to
himself and to them. It was this which had burdened and weighed upon him
all these last months, until at last he had determined to meet it in
the only way that seamed to settle it once and for all. He would go.
He would free all of them and take them with him into the state of his
adoption. He would then give hired employment to those he needed in his
household and the others would have to shift for themselves. This he
prepared to do. Some of them would not want to go into a homeless and
strange new land. This he also knew. Pete was, as the negroes phrased
it, "settin' up to" Col. Phelps' Tilly. Pete would, therefore, resist,
and wish to remain in Virginia. Old Milt and his wife had seven children
who were the property of other people in the neighborhood, and their
grandchildren were almost countless. It would go hard with Milt and
Phillis to leave all these. It would go even harder with them to
be free--and homeless. Both were old. Neither could hope to be
self-supporting. My friend, have you decided what to do with Milt and
Phillis? Add Judy and Mammy and five other old ones to your list when
you have solved the problem.

Mr. Bradley had spoken to Griffith of all these things--of the hardships
to both black and white--and of the possible outcome.

Over and over during the year, when they had talked of the proposed new
move, he had urged these points.

"It seems to me, Mr. Davenport, that you are going to tackle a pretty
rough job. You say you will take all of them as far as Washington,
anyhow. Now you ought to know that there are no end of free niggers in
Washington, already, with no way to support themselves. Look at Milt
and Phillis and Judy and Dan, and those other old ones in the two end
cabins! They've all served you and your father before you faithfully
all of their lives, and now you are proposing to turn them out to
die--simply to starve to death. That's the upshot of your foolishness.
You know they won't steal, and they can't work enough to support
themselves. All the old ones are in the same fix, and the young ones
will simply be put on the chain-gang for petty thefts of food before you
get fairly settled out west. Lord, Lord, man, you don't know what you
are doing! I wish the old Major was here to put a stop to it. You're
laying up suffering for yourself, you're laying up sorrow and crime for
them, you are robbing your children of their birthright, and of what
their grandfathers have done for them, you are making trouble among
other people's niggers here who hear of it, and think it would be a fine
thing to be a free nigger in Washington or Indiana--and what good is it
all going to do? Just answer me that? It would take a microscope to see
any good that _can_ come out of it. It's easy enough to see the harm.
Look at 'Squire Nelson's Jack! He undertook to run off last week, and
Nelson had him whipped within an inch of his life. Yes, bad policy, and
cruel, of course, but that's the kind of a man Nelson is. Now your move
is going to stir up that sort of thing all around here. It does it every
time. You know that. What in thunder has got into the heads of some of
you fellows, I can't see. It started in about the time you Methodists
began riding around here. Sometimes I think they were sent down here
just for that purpose, and that the preaching was only a blind." Mr.
Davenport laughed. "Ha, ha, ha, ha! Bradley, you are a hopeless case! If
I didn't know you so well, I'd feel like losing my temper; but--"

"Oh, I don't mean you, of course. I know _you_ got to believing in the
new religion and got led on. I mean those fellows who came down here and
started it all when you were a good, sensible boy. And how do they get
their foolishness, anyhow? Your Bible teaches the right of slavery plain
enough, in all conscience, and even if it didn't, slavery is here and
we can't help ourselves; and what's more we can't help the niggers by
turning some of 'em loose to starve, and letting them make trouble for
both the masters and the slaves that are left behind. I just tell you,
Mr. Davenport, it is a big mistake and you are going to find it out
before you are done with it."

Griffith had grown so used to these talks and to those of a less kindly
tone that he had stopped arguing the matter at all, and, indeed, there
seemed little he could say beyond the fact, that it was a matter of
conscience with him. His wife's father had berated him soundly, and her
sisters plainly stated that, in their opinion, "poor Brother Grif was
insane." They pitied their sister Katherine from the bottom of their
hearts, and thanked God devoutly that their respective husbands were
not similarly afflicted. And, as may be readily understood, it was all a
sore trial for Katherine.

At last, when the manumission papers came, Katherine sent LeRoy, her
second son, to tell the negroes to come to the "big house."

Roy ran, laughing and calling, to the negro quarters. "Oh, John, Pete,
Sallie, Uncle Milt everybody I Father says for _all_ of you--every
single one--to come to the big house right after supper! Every single
one! He's got something for you. Something he is going to make you a
present of! I can't tell you what--only every one will have it--and you
must come right away after supper!"

"G'way fum heah, chile! What he gwine t' gib _me?_ New yaller dress?"
inquired Lippy Jane, whereupon there arose a great outcry from the rest,
mingled with laughter and gibes.

"I know wat he gwine t' gib Lippy Jane! He gwine t' gib'er a swing t'
hang onter dat lip, yah! yah! yah!" remarked Pete, and dodged the blow
that his victim leveled at him. "New dress! Lawsy, chile, I reckon he
be mo' likely ter gib you a lickin' along 'er dat platter you done bus'
widout tellin' Mis' Kate!" put in Sallie, whose secure place in the
affections of the mistress rendered her a severe critic of manners and
morals in the "quarters." "Come heah, Mos' Roy, honey, an' tell ole Une'
Milt wat'e gwine t' git. Wat dat is wat Mos' Grif gwine t' gib me? Some
mo' 'er dat dar town terbacker? Laws a massy, honey, dat dar las' plug
what he fotch me nebber las' no time ertal."

But Roy was tickling the ear of old Phillis with a feather he had picked
up from the grass, and the old woman was nodding and slapping at the
side of her head and humoring the boy in the delusion that she thought
her tormentor was a fly. Roy's delight was unbounded.

"G'way fum heah, fly! Shoo! G'way fum heah! I lay dat I mash you flat'
fo' a nudder minnit! Sho-o-o!"

Roy and the twins were convulsed with suppressed mirth, and Aunt Phillis
slapped the side of her head with a resounding whack which was not only
a menace to the life and limb of the aforenamed insect, but also,
bid fair to demolish her ear as well. One of the twins undertook to
supplement the proceeding on the other ear with a blade of "fox tail,"
but found himself sprawling in front of the cabin door. "You trillin'
little nigger! Don' you try none'er yoah foolin' wid me! I lay I break
yoah fool neck! I lay I do," exclaimed the old woman in wrath. Then in a
sportively insistent tone, as she banged at the other side of her head,
"Fore de good Lawd on high! twixt dat imperent little nigger an' dis
heah fly, I lay I'm plum wore out. Sho-o-o, fly!"

Suddenly she swung her fat body about on the puncheon stool and gave a
tremendous snort and snapped her teeth at the young master. "Lawsey me,
honey, was dat yoh all dis long cum short? Was dat yo' teasin' yoah po'
ole Aunt Phillis wid dat fedder? I lay I gwine ter ketch yo' yit, an'
swaller yo' down whole! I lay I is!"

The threat to swallow him down whole always gave Roy the keenest
delight. He ran for the big house, laughing and waving the feather at
Phillis.

Great was the speculation in the quartets as to what Mos' Grif had for
every one.

"Hit's des' lade Chris'mus!"

"I des wisht I knowed wat I gwine t' git."

"Lawsey me, but I wisht hit was arter supper now!"

In the twilight they came swaying up through the grass--a long irregular
line of them. Jerry had his banjo. Mammy, Sallie's old mother, carrieed
in her arms the white baby. Little Margaret was her sole care and charge
and no more devoted lovers existed.

"'Et me wide piggy back, mammy," plead the child.

"Heah, Jerry, put dis heah chile on my back! Be mons'ous keerful dar
now! Don' yoh let dat chile fall! Dar yoh is, honey! Dar yoh is! Hoi'
tight, now! Hug yoah ole mammy tight! D-a-t-s de way.

     "'Go down, Moses, away down in Egypt's lan'.
     Go tell ole Pharoah, t' let my people go.'"

Mammy began to trot and hum the tune for the child. The swaying rhythm
caught like a sudden fire in a field of ripened grain. Every voice, old
and young, fell into harmony, and Jerry's banjo beat its tuneful way
like the ripple of a stream through it all.

Mrs. Davenport stood by the window watching them as they came nearer
and nearer. Her face was sad and troubled. She looked up into the clear
twilight and saw one star peer out. She did not know why, but in some
mysterious way it seemed to comfort her. She smiled through dim eyes at
the child on mammy's back. Her husband still sat by the table sorting
over some legal-looking papers.

"Are those the manumission papers, father?" asked Beverly, taking one up
and turning it curiously.

"Yes."

Beverly glanced at his father. It seemed to him that the lines in his
face were very sad. The merry twinkle that always hid in the corners of
eyes and mouth were obliterated. Then was a settled look of anxiety.
He seemed older. Beverly was silent. He more nearly understood what his
father was doing than did even Katherine. Presently he said: "Hear them
sing!"

Mr. Davenport was staring straight before him into space. He turned to
listen.

"Happy, careless, thoughtless, unfortunate creatures," he said softly,
"and as free as you or I, this minute--as free as you or I--if only they
knew it;" then suddenly--"No, not that, either. They can never be _that_
so long as they may not stay here free, even if they want to. I suppose
I am breaking the law to tell them what I shall to-night, but I _can't_
take them away from their old home and friends and not tell them it is
for good and all--that they may not come back. For good and all--for
good and all," he repeated, abstractedly. After a long pause he said,
"Law or no law, I cannot do that. I must tell them they are free before
they go--and that they must say good-bye, never to come back."

"Seems pretty hard, doesn't it, father? But then--but--don't you think
God was pretty hard on them when He--when He made them black? Jerry is a
gentleman, if--if he was not black."

"Griffith," asked Katherine from the window, "how do you suppose they
will take it? I'm afraid----"

"Take it! take it! Why, little woman, how would you or I take freedom
if it were given to us?" The thought cheered him and he crossed the room
and tapped her cheek with the papers. His face beamed. "I'm prepared to
see the wildest outbreak of joy." He chuckled, and some of the old lines
of mirth came back to his face. "I'm glad Jerry brought his banjo. They
will be in a humor for some of the rollicking songs afterward. I think
they would do me good too. And you, you, little woman, you will need it
too. You have been brave--you have been my tower of great strength in
all this. If _you_ had contested it, I'm afraid my strength would have
given out, after all." He put his arm around her. "But God knows what
we can stand, Katherine, and he tempers the trial to our strength. Thank
God it is over--the wont of it," he said, and drew her to him.

Suddenly this silent, self-controlled woman threw both arms about his
neck and sobbed aloud. "God help us to bear it, Griffith. Sometimes I
think I cannot! It is hard! It is hard!"

He stroked her hair silently.

"Mos' Grif, does yoh want us to come in er t' stay on de big po'ch?"
It was Jerry's voice. "Good-ebnin', Mis' Kath'rine I I hope yoh is
monst'ous well dis ebenin'. Thanky, ma'am, yes'm, I'm middlin'."

Mis. Davenport drew herself farther into the shadow, but she heard the
little groan that escaped her husband. She understood. Her own voice was
as steady as if no storm had passed.

"Open these large windows on to the porch, Jerry, and your Mos' Grif
will talk to you from here. Just keep them all outside. I liked your
songs. When Mos' Grif is done with you all, sing some more--sing that
one he likes so well--the one about 'Fun in de Cabin.'" "To be sho',
Mis' Kath'rine, to be sho'. Dat I will. What dat Mos' Grif gwine ter gib
us? Milt he 'low dat hit's terbacker, an' Lippy Jane she 'low dat hit's
calicker, an' John he 'low dat--"

With the opening of the low windows a great wave of "howdys" arose and
a cloud of black faces clustered dose to the open spaces. The moon was
rising behind them and the lamp on the table within gave but a feeble
effort to rival the mellow light outside. The master was slow to begin,
but, at last, when the greetings were over he said, with an effort to
seem indifferent, "You all know that we are going away from here and
that you are going, too; but--" He found the task harder than he had
expected. His voice trembled and he was glad that Katherine put her hand
on his arm. He shifted his position and began again. "You have all heard
of freedom." He was looking at them, and the faces were so blandly,
blankly vacant of that which he was groping for--they were so evidently
expecting a gift of tobacco, or its like--that he omitted all he had
thought of to say of their new freedom and what it could mean for them,
and what it had meant for him to secure it for them, and at once held up
the folded papers. "These are legal papers. They are all registered at a
court-house. I have one for each one of you. These papers set you free!
They are manumission papers, and you are all to be free! free--"

The silence was unbroken except for a slight shuffling of feet, but the
dire disappointment was depicted on every face. That was too plain to
be mistaken. Only papers! No tobacco! No calico! Nothing to eat! The
silence grew uncomfortable. They were waiting for something for which
they could give out the "thanky, Mos' Grif, thanky, sir, I's mighty much
'bleeged t' you, I is dat!" in their own hearty and happy way.

Griffith found himself trying to explain what these papers really were.
He chanced to open Judy's first. He would make an object lesson of it.
She had been his nurse, and was too old and rheumatic to work except as
the spirit of occupation urged her to some trifling task. Griffith was
reading the paper and explaining as he went. The negroes looked from the
master to Judy and back again until he was done. She walked lamely to
his side when he had finished and was holding her freedom papers toward
her. She held out her hand for it. Then she tore it through twice and
tossed it out of the window. Her eyes flashed and she held herself
erect.

"What I want wid yoah ole mannermussent papers? What I want wid 'em,
hey?" She folded her arms. "_Me_ a free nigger! Me! Mos' Grif, yoh ain't
nebber gwine ter lib t' be ole enough t' make no free nigger out ob ole
Judy! What I fotch yoh up foh? Didn't I nus yoh fum de time yoh was a
teenchy little baby, an' wasn't ole Mis' and yoah paw sas'fied wid me?
What I done t' yoh now? What fo' is yoh gwine ter tun me loose dat a
way? Mannermussent papers!" she exclaimed, in a tone of contemptuous
wrath, "mannermussent papers! Yoh can't mannermussent yoah ole Aunt
Judy! Deys life lef in her yit!"

It was done so suddenly. The reception of freedom was so utterly
unexpected--so opposed to what he had fondly hoped--that Griffith stood
amazed. Katherine motioned to mammy, who still stood with the white baby
in her arms. "Give me the baby, mammy. I will--"

"Mis' Kate," said the old woman, turning, as she pushed her way through
the room, "Mis' Kate, do Mos' Grif mean dat yo' alls is gwine ter
_leabe_ us? Do he mean dat we _alls_ is got ter be free niggers, wid no
fambly an' no big house an' no baby t' nus?"

She changed the child's position, and the little soft, white cheek lay
contentedly against the black one.

"'Cause, if _dat's_ wat Mos' Grif mean, dis heah chile ob yoahs an' ole
mammy, deys gwine t' stay togedder. Dis heah mammy don't eben _tetch_ no
ole mannermossent papers! Tar hit up yo'se'f, Mis' Kate, kase dis heah
nigger ain't eben gwine t' tetch hit. She's des gwine ter put dis baby
ter bed lak she alius done. Goodnight, Mis' Kate! Good-night, Mos'
Grif!"

She was half-way up the stairs, when she turned.

"Mis' Kate, sumpin' er a-nudder done gone wrong wid Mos' Grifs haid.
Sho' as yoh bawn, honey, dat's a fack! I wisht yoh send fo' yoh paw. I
does dat!" and she waddled up the stairs, with the sleeping child held
dose to her faithful heart.

The reception of the freedom papers by the others varied with
temperament and age. Two or three of the younger ones reached in over
the heads of those in front of them when their names were called, and,
holding the papers in their hands, "cut a pigeon-wing" in the moonlight.
One or two looked at theirs in stupid, silent wonder. Jerry and his
wife gazed at the twins, and, in a half-dazed, half-shamefaced way,
took theirs. Jerry took all four to Katherine. "Keep dem fo' me, please,
ma'am, Mis' Kathrine, kase I ain't got no good place fer ter hide'em.
Mebby dem dare chillun gwine ter want'em one er dese here days."

Not one grasped the full meaning of it all. It was evident that one
and all expected to live along as before--to follow the fortunes of the
family.

"Thanky, Mos' Grif, much 'bleeged," said old Milt, as he took his, "but
I'd a heap site a-rud-der had some mo' ob dat town terbacker--I would
dat, honey."

"Give it up for to-night, Griffith," said his wife, gently, as he still
stood helplessly trying to explain again and again. "You look so white,
and I am very tired. Give it up for tonight. It will be easier after
they have talked it over together, perhaps--by daylight."

She pushed him gently into a chair and motioned to Jerry to take them
all away. The faithful fellow remembered, when outside, that she had
asked him to sing, but the merry song she had named had no echo in the
hearts about him. All understood that they had failed to respond to
something that the master had expected. The strings of his banjo rang
out in a few minor chords, and as they moved toward the quarters an old
forgotten melody floated back--

     O, de shadders am a deepenin' on de mountains,
     O, de shadders am a deep'nin' on de stream,
     An' I think I hear an echo f urn de valley,
     An echo ob de days ob which I dream!

     Ole happy days! Ole happy days!
     Befo' I knew dat sorrow could be bawn,
     When I played wid mos'er's chillun in de medder,
     When my wuk was done a-hoein' ob de cawn!

     Dose happy, happy days! Dose happy, happy days!
     Dey'll come again no mo', no-o-o m-o-r-e, no more!

     Ole mos'er is a-sleepin' 'neath de willow!
     An' de apple blossoms' failin' on de lawn,
     Where he used to sit an' doze beneath its shadder,
     In de days when I was hoein' ob de cawn!

     Ole happy, etc.

     Dey'll come no mo' dis side de rlbber Jordan,
     O, dey'll come no mo' dis side de golden shoah!
     Foh de Chilian's growed so big dat deys forgot me,
     Kase I'se ole an' cannot wok foh dem no mo'!

     Ole happy, etc.




CHAPTER VIII.--OUT OF BONDAGE.


_"Look down. Say nothin'. Few words comprehends the whole."_


The long, lank mountaineer stood leaning on his gun and looking
listlessly at the collection of bundles, bags, children, dogs, guns,
banjos, and other belongings of the Davenport negroes, as they waited
about the wagons, now nearly ready to start for "Washington and the
free States"--that Mecca of the colored race. It is true that Lengthy
Patterson disapproved of the entire proceeding, notwithstanding his
profound respect for, and blind admiration of Parson Davenport, as he
always called Griffith; but he had tramped many miles to witness the
departure, which had been heralded far and wide. Lengthy's companion,
known to his familiars as "Whis" Biggs, slowly stroked the voluminous
hirsute adornment to which he was indebted for his name, "Whiskers"
being the original of the abbreviation which was now his sole
designation--Whis stroked his beard and abstractedly kicked a stray dog,
which ran, howling, under the nearest wagon.

"Hit do appear t' me that the Pahrson air a leetle teched in the haid."

There was a long pause. The negroes looked, as they always did, at these
mountaineers in contempt.

Lengthy dove into a capacious pocket and produced a large home-twisted
hand of tobacco and passed it in silence to his companion, who gnawed
off a considerable section and in silence returned it to the owner.

"Let's set," he remarked, and doubled himself down on a log. Lengthy
took the seat beside him, and gathered his ever-present gun between his
long legs and gazed into space. Mr. Biggs stroked his beard and remained
plunged in deep thought. That is to say, he was evidently under the
impression that he was thinking, albeit skeptics had been known to
point to the dearth of results in his conversation, and to intimate that
nature had designed in him not so much a thinker as an able-bodied tack
upon which to suspend a luxuriant growth of beard. He was known far and
wide as "Whis" Biggs; and, if there was within or without his anatomy
anything more important, or half so much in evidence as was his
tremendous achievement in facial adornment (if such an appendage may be
called an adornment by those not belonging to a reverted type), no one
had ever discovered the foot. What there was of him, of value, appeared
to have run to hair. The rest of him was occupied in proudly displaying
the fact. He stroked his beard and looked wise, or he stroked his
beard and laughed, or he stroked his beard and assumed a solemn air, as
occasion, in his judgment, appeared to require; but the occasion always
required him to stroke his beard, no matter what else might happen to
man or to beast.

But at last the wagons pulled out. Amidst shouts and "Whoas!" and
"Gees!" and "G'langs!" Amidst tears and laughter and admonitions
from those who went, and those who were left behind, the strange and
unaccustomed procession took its course toward the setting sun. The
family drove, in the old Davenport barouche, far enough behind to avoid
the dust of the wagons. The long journey was begun for master and for
freedmen. Each was launched on an unknown sea. Each was filled with
apprehension and with hope. Old friends and relatives had gathered to
witness the departure, some to blame, some to deprecate, and all to
deplore the final leave-taking. Comments on the vanishing procession
were varied and numerous. The two mountaineers listened in silence,
the one stroking his beard, the other holding his gun. Some thought
the preacher undoubtedly insane, some thought him merely a dangerous
fanatic, some said he was only a plain, unvarnished fool; some insisted
that since he had gone counter to public opinion and the law of the
state, he was a criminal; while a semi-silent few sighed and wished for
the courage and the ability to follow a like course. The first hours
of the journey were uneventful. There was a gloom on all hearts, which
insured silence. Each felt that he was looking for the last time upon
the valley of their love. Jerry drove the family carriage. As they
paused to lower the check-reins at the mill stream, Katherine bent
suddenly forward and shaded her eyes with her hands. "Griffith!
Griffith! there goes Pete back oyer the fields I I'm sure it is Pete.
No other negro has that walk--that lope. See! He looked back! He is
running! I know it is Pete!"

Mr. Davenport sprang from the carriage and shouted to the fleeing man.
He placed his hands to the sides of his face and shouted again and
again.

"Shell I run foh' 'im, Mos' Grif?" asked Jerry passing the lines to his
mistress. "I lay I kin ketch 'im, 'n I'll fetch' im back, too, fo' he gits
to de cross-roads!"

He grasped the carriage whip and prepared to start. The shouts had
served to redouble Pete's.

"He was your negro, Katherine, shall I let him go?" Griffith said in a
tired voice.

"Yes, yes, oh, Griffith, let him stay in Virginia if he wants to. We
can't have him with us--why, why not let him stay here?"

Griffith sighed. His wife knew quite well why; but she was nervous and
overwrought and feared resistance should Pete be brought to bay--might
he not fight for his freedom to remain where he might _not_ be free!

The wagons had all stopped. One of the twins, with ashen face, came
running back to report Pete's escape. "Mos' Grif, Oh, Lordy, Mos' Grif!
Pete he's run off! Pete------"

It was plain to be seen that the negroes were restless and expectant.
The tone and atmosphere of uncertainty among them, the tearful eyes of
some, and the sullen scowl of others quickly decided Mr. Davenport. It
was no time for indecision. Prompt action alone would prevent a panic
and a stampede. Katherine spoke a few hasty words to him as he leaned on
the carriage-door. He sprang in. "Go on!" he shouted. "Go on! We can't
all stop now. We must cross the ferry tonight!" Then as a precaution he
said to the twin: "Catch up and tell Judy that 'Squire Nelson will get
Pete if he tries to stay here."

'Squire Nelson, the terrible!' Squire Nelson! who had called before him
a runaway boy and calmly shot him through the leg as an example to his
fellows, and then sent him to the quarters to repent his rash act--and
incidentally to act as a warning! 'Squire Nelson! Did the manumission
papers give those who stayed behind to 'Squire Nelson? The negroes looked
into each other's faces in silent fear, and drove rapidly on.

An hour later, as they were looking at the glorious sunset, and Griffith
was struggling to be his old cheery self, Katherine said sadly: "We are
as much exiled as they, Griffith. We could never come back." She choked
up and then, steadying her voice, "If you think it is God's will we must
submit; but--but everything makes it so hard--so cruelly hard. I am so
afraid. I--no one ever--every one loved you before, and now--now--did
you see the faces, Griffith, when we left? Did you see 'Squire Nelson's
face?" She shuddered.

"Oh, is _that_ all?" he exclaimed lightly. "Is that it, Katherine? Well,
don't worry over that, dear. We won't be here to see it, and--of course
he wouldn't like it. Of course it will make trouble among his negroes
for awhile and I am sorry for that. I don't wonder he feels--I--"

"But, Griffith," she said nervously, "we are not out of the State yet,
and--and, Griffith," she lowered her voice to make sure that Jerry would
not hear, "can't the law do something dreadful to you for leaving Pete
here, free? What can----"

"Jerry, I wish you'd drive up a little. Get to the ferry before it is
too dark to cross, can't you?" said Griffith, and then, "Don't worry
about that, Katherine, Pete won't dare show himself for a day or two,
and besides-" He paused. The silence ran into minutes. Then he reached
over and took her hand and with closed eyes he hummed as they rode, or
broke off to point silently to some picturesque spot or to whistle to a
robin. There was a nervous tension on them all.

"Mos' Grif, hit gwine ter be too late to cross dat ferry to-night. Ain't
we better stop at dat big house over dar?"

Mr. Davenport opened his eyes. He had been humming--without time and
with long pauses between the words--one of his favorite hymns. He looked
out into the twilight, "That's Ferris's old mill and the Ferris house,
isn't it, Katherine? Yes, Jerry, call to the boys to stop. We will have
to stay over. It is too late to cross now. That ferry isn't very safe
even in daylight."

The following morning, just before sunrise, there was a rap at the door,
and a servant came to say that Mr. Davenport was wanted. Katherine was
white with fear. She sprang from bed and went to the window. There, in
front of the house, stood Lengthy Patterson, gun in hand, and beside
him, sullen, crestfallen, and with one foot held in his hands, stood
Pete. Griffith threw open the window, and Lengthy waited for no prelude.
He nodded as if such calls were of daily occurrence, and then jerked
his head toward Pete. "Saw him runnin'. Told him t' stop. He clim'
out faster. Knowed you wanted him." He pointed to Pete's foot. It
was bleeding. There was a bullet hole through the instep. "Few words
comprehends the whole," added the mountaineer and relaxed his features
into what he intended for a humorous expression. Griffith turned sick
and faint. 'Squire Nelson's lesson had been well learned even by this
mountaineer.

Pete was a dangerous negro to be without control, that was true. As a
free negro left him without ties, it was only a question of time when he
would commit some desperate deed, and yet what was to be done? Lengthy
appeared to grasp the preacher's thought. He slowly seated himself on
the front step and motioned Pete to sit on the grass.

"Don't fret. Take yer time. I'm a goin' t' the ferry. Few words
comprehends th' whole," he remarked to Griffith, and examined the look
of his gun, with critical deliberation. When the wagons were ready to
start Jerry whispered to his master that two of the other young negroes
had run off during the night, and yet Mr. Davenport pushed on. It
was not until late the next afternoon when the dome of the Capitol at
Washington burst upon their sight that Griffith and Katherine breathed
free. The splendid vision in the distance put new life and interest in
the negroes. Their restlessness settled into a childlike and emotional
merrymaking, and snatches of song, and banter, and laughter told that
danger of revolt or of stampede was over. Judy, alone, sulked in the
wagons, and Mammy vented her discontent on the younger ones by word and
blow, if they ventured too near her or her white charge. At last the
Long Bridge alone stood between them and a liberty that could not be
gainsaid--and another liberty for the master which had been so dearly
and hazardously bought.

The Long Bridge was spanned and the strange party drove down
Pennsylvania Avenue to the office of the attorney who had arranged
for their reception. The Long Bridge was past and safety was theirs!
Griffith glanced back and then turned to look. "Katherine," he said,
smiling sadly, "we have crossed the dead line. We are all safe!" He
sighed with the smile still on his lips.

"It is terrible not to feel safe! Terrible! Terrible!" she said in an
undertone, "not to feel safe from pursuit, from behind, and from unknown
and unaccustomed dangers near at hand--terrible!"

So accustomed had Griffith been to caring for and housing these negroes,
who, now that they were in the midst of wonders of which they never had
dreamed, clung to him with an abiding faith that whatever should betide
he would be there to meet it for them--so accustomed had he been to
caring for them that it had never occurred to Griffith not do so, even
now when they were no longer his.

"Are the cabins ready?" he asked the attorney's clerk, and sent all but
Mammy to the huts which had been provided on the outskirts.

"Go along with this gentleman, children," he said. "Mammy will stay with
us, and after Jerry takes us to the hotel he will come and tell you what
else to do. Good-bye! Goodbye! Keep together until Jerry comes."

All was uncertainty; but it was understood by all that several of the
negroes were to go with the family and the rest to remain here. Griffith
had decided to take to his new home Jerry and his wife, Ellen, and the
twins; Mammy and Judy, and, if possible, Sally and John. It was here,
and now, that he learned the inhospitality of the free states to the
freed negroes.

"I intend to take several of them with, me and----"

"Can't do it," broke in the attorney, "Indiana's a free state."

"Well, I can take'em along and _hire_ 'em, I reckon."

"Reckon you can't--not in Indiana."

"What!"

"I said you couldn't take'em along and hire em.

"I'd like to know the reason for that. I--"

"Law. Law's against it."

Griffith drew his hand across his face as if he had lost his power to
think.

"You can't take _any_ of'em to Indiana, I tell you," said the attorney
insistently, and Griffith seemed dazed. Then he began again: "Can't take
them!" he exclaimed, in utter dismay.

"That's what I said twice--can't take them--none of them."

"But I shall pay them wages! Surely I can take my own choice of servants
into my own household if they are free and I pay them wages I Surely--"

"Surely you _cannot_, I tell you," said the attorney, and added dryly,
"not unless you are particularly anxious to run up against the law
pretty hard." He reached up and took down a leather-bound volume. He
turned the leaves slowly, and Griffith and Katherine looked at each
other in dismay. "There it is in black and white. Not a mere law,
either--sometimes you can evade a law, if you are willing to risk it;
but from the way you both feel about leaving those two free niggers
in Virginia, I guess you won't be very good subjects for that sort of
thing--thirteenth article of the constitution of the State itself." He
drew a pencil mark along one side of the paragraph as Griffith read.
"Oh! you'll find these free states have got mighty little use for
niggers. Came here from one of'em myself. Free or not free, they don't
want 'em. You see," he said, slowly drawing a line down the other side
of the page, "they prohibit you from giving employment to one! Don't
propose to have free nigger competition with their white labor. Can't
blame 'em." He shrugged his shoulders.

Griffith began to protest. "But I have read--I thought--"

"Of course you thought--and you've read a lot of spread-eagle stuff, I
don't doubt. Talk is one of the cheapest commodities in this world; but
when it comes to acts--" he chuckled cynically, "s'pose you had an idea
that the border States were just holding out their arms to catch and
shield and nurture and feed with a gold spoon every nigger you Southern
men were fools enough to set free; but the cold fact is they won't even
let you bring them over and pay 'em to work for you! That is one of the
charming little differences between theory and practice. They've got the
theory and you've had the practice of looking after the niggers! Your
end is a damned sight more difficult than theirs, as you'll discover, if
you haven't already. Excuse me, I forgot you were a preacher. You don't
look much like one." Griffith smiled and bowed. Katherine had gone
to the front window, where Mammy and the baby were enjoying the
unaccustomed sights of the street. Griffith and the lawyer moved toward
them.

"No, sir, your niggers have all got to stay right here in Washington and
starve or steal. You can't take'em to Indiana, that's mighty certain.
Why, when that Constitution was passed only a year or two ago, there
wern't but 21,000 voters in the whole blessed State that didn't vote to
punish a white man for even giving employment to a free nigger. Public
sentiment as well as law is _all_ against you. You can't take those
niggers to Indiana--that's certain!"

"Dar now! Dar now! wat I done tole you?" exclaimed Mammy. "What I done
tole Mos' Grif 'bout all dis foolishness? Mis' Kate, you ain't gwine ter
'low dat is you? Me an' Judy free niggers! _Town_ free niggers wid
no fambly!" The tone indicated that no lower depth of degradation and
misfortune than this could be thrust upon any human being.

"I's gwine ter keep dis heah baby, den. Who gwine ter take cahr ob her
widout me?" The child was patting the black face and pulling the black
ear in a gleeful effort to call forth the usual snort and threat to
"swaller her whole."

"Bless yoah hawt, honey, yoh ain't gwine t' hab no odder nus, is yo'?
Nus! Nus! White trash t' nus my baby! Yoh des gwine ter hab yoh ole
mammy, dat's wat!"

The attorney took Mr. Davenport and Katherine to an inner office. It was
two hours later when they came out. Both were pale and half dazed, but
arrangements had been made, papers had been drawn, by which the nine
oldest negroes were, in future, to appear at this office once every
three months and draw the sum of twenty-four dollars each, so long as
they might live. The younger ones must hereafter shift, as best they
could, for themselves. The die was cast. The bridges were burned behind
them. There was no return, and the negroes were indeed, "free, town
niggers," henceforth.

"God forgive me if I have done wrong," said Griffith, as he left the
office. "If I have done wrong in deserting these poor black children,
for children they will always be, though pensioned as too old to work!
Poor Mammy, Poor Judy! And Mart, and old Peyton!"

He shook his head and compressed his lips as he walked toward the door,
with a stoop in his shoulders that was not there when he had entered.
All the facts of this manumission were so wholly at variance with the
established theories.

Every thing had been so different from even what Griffith had expected
to meet. As they reached the door the attorney took the proffered hand
and laughed a little, satirically.

"Now I want you to tell me what good you expect all this to do? What was
the use? What is gained? It's clear to a man without a spy-glass what's
_lost_ all around; but it's going to puzzle a prophet to show where the
gain comes in, in a case like this. If you'll excuse the remark, sir, it
looks like a piece of romantic tom-foolery, to a man up a tree. A kind
of tom-foolery, that does harm all around--to black and to white, to
bond and to free. Of course if _all_ of 'em were free it would, no
doubt, be better. I'm inclined to think that way, myself. But just tell
me how many slave-owners--even if they wanted to do it--_could_ do
as you have? Simply impossible! Then, besides, where'd they go--the
niggers? Pension the whole infernal lot? Gad! but it's the dream of a
man who never will wake up to this world, as it is built. And what good
_have_ you done? Just stop long enough to tell me that;" he insisted,
still holding Griffith's hand. He was smiling down at his client who
stood on a lower step. There was in his face a tinge of contempt and of
pity for the lack of worldly wisdom.

"I'm not pretending to judge for you nor for other men, Mr. Wapley, but
for myself it was wrong to own them. That is all. That is simple, is
it not?" The lawyer thought it was, indeed, very, very simple; but to
a nature like Griffith's it was all the argument needed. His face was
clouded, for the lawyer did not seem satisfied. Griffith could not guess
why.

"My conscience troubled me. I am not advising other men to do as I have
done. Sometimes I feel almost inclined to advise them _not_ to follow
my example if they can feel satisfied not to--the cost is very
great--bitterly heavy has the cost been in a thousand ways that no one
can ever know but the man who tries it--and this little woman, here." He
took her hand and turned to help her into the carriage.

"Ah, Katherine, you have been very brave! The worst has fallen on you,
after all--for no sense of imperative duty urged you on. For _my_ sake
you have yielded! Her bravery, sir, has been double, and it is almost
more than I can bear to ask it--to accept it--of her! For my own sake!
It has been selfish, in a sense, selfish in me."

Katherine smiled through dim eyes and pressed her lips hard together.
She did not trust herself to speak. She bowed to the attorney and turned
toward Mammy and the baby as they stood by the carriage door.

"I'm a-goin' wid yoh alls to de hotel, ain't I, Mis' Kath'rine? Dar now,
honey, des put yoah foot dar an' in yoh goes! Jerry, can't yoh hol' dem
hosses still! Whoa, dar! Whoa! Mos' Beverly, he radder set in front wid
Jerry, an' I gwine ter set inside wid de baby, an' yo' alls."

The old woman bustled about and gave orders until they were, at last, at
the door of the Metropolitan, where, until other matters were arranged,
the family would remain.

Strange as it may seem, to save themselves from the final trial of
a heartbreaking farewell, from protests, from the sight of weeping
children and excited negroes, three days later Mr. Davenport and his
family left by an early train for the west before the negroes, aside
from Jerry, knew that they were gone. And in the place of the spectacle
of a runaway negro escaping from white owners, the early loungers beheld
a runaway white family escaping from the galling bondage of ownership!




CHAPTER IX.


_"One touch of nature."_--Shakespeare.


As time wore on the family had, in some sort, at least, adjusted itself
to the new order of things. The dialect of the strapping Irish-woman who
presided over the kitchen of the small but comfortable new home, and
the no less unaccustomed speech of the natives, themselves, were a never
failing source of amusement to the children and, indeed, to Griffith
himself. His old spirits seemed to return as he would repeat, with
his hearty laugh, the village gossip, couched in the village forms of
speech.

Each day as he opened his _Cincinnati Gazette_ he would laugh out some
bit of town news which he had overheard at the post-office or on his
way home. The varying forms of penuriousness exhibited in the dealings
between the fanners and the villagers impressed him as most amusing
of all. The haggling over a few cents, or the payment of money between
neighbors for fruit or milk or services of a nature which he had always
looked upon as ordinary neighborly courtesy, filled him with mirth. One
day, shortly after their arrival, Beverly had brought his mother a dozen
peaches from a neighbor's yard. The boy had supposed when asked if his
mother would not like them that they were intended as a present. He
thanked the owner heartily and said that he was sure his mother would
very greatly enjoy.

"After he gave them to me," the boy said, indignantly, "'Six cents wuth,
an' cheap at that!' says he, and held out his hand! Well, I could
have fainted! Selling twelve peaches to a neighbor! Why, a mountaineer
wouldn't do that! And then he had _asked_ me to take them! I had ten
cents in my pocket and I handed it to him and walked off. He yelled
something to me about change, but I never looked back."

His father enjoyed the joke, as he called it, immensely. He chuckled
over it again and again as he sat in the twilight.

One day late in that summer--the summer of '57--the children were
attracted by a great uproar and noise in the street. A group of school
children, some street loafers, and a few mature but curious, grown
citizens were gathered about an object in the middle of the street.
Hoots and shouts of derision went up. A half-witted girl circled slowly
about the outskirts of the crowd making aimless motions and passes with
her hands toward the object of interest. Voices clashed with voices
in an effort to gain coherent sound and sense. Was it a bear or a hand
organ? The children ran to see. Beverly followed more slowly. Beverly
seemed a young man now, so sedate and dignified was this oldest son.

"What is it?"

"Look out there! Look out there! It's going that way!"

"What? What you say? Who?"

"Who is Mosgrif? No man by that name don't live here."

"Nigger, nigger, pull a trigger, never grow an inch a bigger!"

"Get her some soap! Let's take her and give her a wash!"

"What? Who? Shut up your noise there, will you, Dave Benton. She's
askin' fer somebody--some feller she knows. Who?"

There was a pause in the progress of the procession as it reached Mr.
Davenport's side gate. Beverly was craning his neck to see over the
heads of the crowd. His two brothers took a surer method. They dodged
under arms and between legs and were making straight for the center of
the crowd where they had heard an accustomed voice.

"What I axes yo' alls is, whah's my Mos' Grif! Dey done tole me down
yander dat he lib down dis a-way. Whah's my Mos' Grif's house? I got ter
fine my Mos' Grif!"

"Aunt Judy! Aunt Judy!" shrieked the two younger boys, in mad delight.
"It's Aunt Judy! Oh, Beverly, come quick! She's hurt! She's been struck
with a rock! Come quick--quick!"

LeRoy had reached the old woman, who began to tremble and cry as soon
as she felt that friends were indeed near. She threw her arms about his
neck and half-sobbed with joy. Then she tried to pick up the younger boy
in her arms, as of old, but her strength gave way, and she fell on her
knees beside her bundle and stick. A laughing shout went up. Dave Benton
shied a small stone at her.

"How dare you! How dare you! you common loafers!" shrieked LeRoy, white
with rage. He struck out with both fists at those who were nearest. "How
dare you throw at Aunt Judy! How dare you, you low-down--!"

Words failed him, and he was choking with rage, but both fists were
finding a mark on the visage of the prostrate Dave. His fists and the
astonishment felt at the sight of white children caressing and calling
the old black creature "aunty" had served to clear a space about them.
Every one had fallen back. The halfwitted girl alone remained with the
center group, making aimless passes, with ill-regulated hands, at Aunt
Judy. So absorbing was this strange creature to the bewildered senses
that not even the struggling boys on the ground at her feet served to
divert her gaze from the old black face.

"His aunt's a nigger!"

"Kissed her, by gum!"

"They're the Virginia preacher's kids!"

"Never knew before that some of their kin was niggers!"

Dave Benton was now on top, and Howard was pulling at his leg in an
effort to help his brother. Suddenly Roy swirled on top and grasped the
helpless Dave by the throat.

"You let her alone, you dirty little--devil!" he ground out between his
teeth, "or I'll _kill_ you!"

His rage was so intense, his face was so set and livid, that it looked
as if he might execute the threat before the astonished and half-amused
bystanders realized the danger. Beverly sprang to the rescue. He had
hustled Judy through the side gate and into the house with Howard.

"LeRoy! LeRoy! stop--stop! Get up! let go! Get up this instant!" he
commanded, loosening the boy's grasp. "Look at that blood! Father will
be so ashamed of you!"

He pushed the boy ahead of him and the door closed behind them, leaving
a hooting mob outside and Dave Benton with a bleeding nose and a very
sore head.

"Got a nigger fer a ant, by gosh!" exclaimed one, as they turned slowly
away, leaving the weak-minded girl alone circling about the gate, making
inarticulate noises and movements of indirection at the house and its
curious and uncanny new occupant.

But LeRoy's blows and his taunts bore fruit in due season. A week later,
Dave Benton's father, who had nursed his wrath, caused service to be
made upon Mr. Davenport to show cause why he was not infringing the law
and the State constitution by keeping in his service a free negro. Mr.
Davenport explained to the court that he had not brought her into the
State and was in no way responsible for her having come. Indeed, Judy
would not or could not tell exactly how she had managed it herself. That
she had been helped forward by some one seemed evident. But Griffith's
plea would not suffice. She was here. He was avowedly the cause of her
coming. She was a free negro. He was giving her employment. That was
against the State constitution. Clearly, she must be sent away. Griffith
consulted with a lawyer. The lawyer gravely stated, in open court, that
the old negro was a guest, and not an employé, of the Davenport family.
The judge smiled. There was no law, no constitutional provision,
no statute to prevent a family from having negro guests in Indiana;
provided they would give bond for the good behavior during life, and
burial in case of death, of such guest!

"By gum! I reckon she _is_ kin to'em, shore'nuff!" remarked Dave's
father, _sotto voce_. "Wonder which one's sister she is--her'n or
his'n?"

"Do' know, but it's one er t'other; fer all three o' the boys call her
ant, 'n' the little gal, too. She rides on her back. Seen her out in the
yard t'other day."

"'Fore I'd let one o' _mine_ kiss a nigger 'n ride on her back!"

"Well, _I_ should smile!"

"Sh! What's that the jedge said?"

"Goin't' take it under 'dvisement, perviden' Davenport agrees t'
bind hisself--give bon'." And so it came about, as I told you in the
beginning, that this man, who was already a lawbreaker in his native
State, unblushingly became a law-evader in the State of his adoption;
for the papers were duly drawn up and finally signed and executed. Aunt
Judy was officially and legally declared not to be employed by, but
to be a visitor in, the family; "and, furthermore, it is declared and
agreed, that, in case of her becoming indigent, or in case of her death
while within the borders of the State, the aforenamed Rev. Griffith
Davenport binds himself, his heirs and assigns, to support while living,
or bury in case of the death of the aforenamed Judy Davenport (colored);
and, furthermore, agrees that she shall in no manner whatsoever become
a charge upon the State of Indiana. The expenses of this procedure to be
paid, also, by the said Rev. Griffith Davenport."

"I reckon my conscience is getting a little tough, Katherine," said her
husband, smiling, that night as he recited the matter to the family.
"I signed that paper with precious little compunction--and yet it _was_
evading the law, pure and simple--so far as the intent goes! Fancy Aunt
Judy looking upon herself as a guest of the family! Ha! ha! ha! ha!"
The idea so amused him that he laughed uproariously. Five minutes later
there floated out on to the porch, where Judy sat with the children
telling them wonderful tales of Washington, the notes of "Joy to the
world! The Lord has come!" "De _good_ Lawd, bless my soul!" exclaimed
the old woman, listening, "I ain't heerd nothin' so good as dat soun'
ter me, sense yo' alls runned away! Dat sholy do soun' like ole times!
Hit sholy do!"

Rosanna, the Irish cook, sniffed. She was hanging out of the kitchen
window listening to aunt Judy's tales of adventure. "She do talk
the quarest, schure, an' it's barely the rear av her remarks thet a
Christian can understhand;" mumbled Rosanna to herself.

"Well, but how about the twins, Aunt Judy? You said you'd tell us all
about the twins just as soon as supper was over. Now, hurry, or I'll
have to go to bed,".urged Howard.

The old woman shifted around in her chair to make sure the ears of
Rosanna were not too near and lowered her voice to a stage whisper.

"Honey, dem dar twins is des so spilt dat dey is gettin' tainty!"

"Bad, you mean?" asked Roy.

"Dat's wat I said, an' dat's wat I sticks to. Dey's so spilte dey's
tainty. Bad! Why bad ain't no name fo' hit. Dey is mouldy. De onliest
reason why dey ain't in the lock-up is kase dey ain't got ketched up wid
yit. Dey gwine ter git dar, sho' as yoh bawn. Dey is dat!"

"I don't believe it. I don't believe the twins are so bad. You are just
mad at 'em. They--" Roy was always a partisan.

"Look a heah, honey, yoh don't know what yoh's talkin' 'bout. Dem twins
is plum spilte, I tell yoh. Jerry, he's a teamin' an' he can't watch'em,
an' dey maw she's a wuckin' fo' one er dem Congressers, an' dem twins is
des plum run wile."

"Perhaps you expect too much of the morals of Washington," suggested
Beverly, winking at Roy to give the old woman full sway.

"Mo'ls! mo'ls! Why, lawsy, honey, yoh don' know what yoh talkin' 'bout
no mo' dan Mos' Roy do. Dey _ain't_ no mo'ls in Washin-ton--white _ner_
black. Mebby dem dar folks had some 'f o dey cum dar; but dey sholy did
leave de whole lot back in de place whah dey cum fum! Dey sholy did
dat. Mo'ls! In Washin'ton? Dey ain't none dar!" She shook her finger at
Beverly.

Roy saw his opportunity as she started for the door to shut off further
questions. "Oh! go away, Aunt Judy, you don't know what morals are," he
said, "that's all. In Washington they are government property and they
keep'em in tin cans. Of course you didn't _see_ any."

"Dey dun los' de opener t' dat can, too," she remarked, hobbling up
the steps. Many and blood-curdling had been her stories of life at
the capital. In her opinion, the seat of government had no redeeming
qualities. "Stay dar? Why, dis chile wouldn't stay dar fo' no 'mount o'
money, ner fer _nobody_. She's got too much self-'spect fer _dat_, de
good Lawd he do know. Stay dar? No, sah!"

"Well, the others are getting along all right, I'll bet you," piped up
Howard, as her foot struck the top step. She turned.

"I ain't gwine ter tell yoh no mo' to-night. I'se gwine ter bed; but
wat I knows is des dis: De way dey gets 'long, dey goes t' dat dar Mr.
Lawyer an' gits dat money Mos' Grif done lef. De fus' mont' dey sholy
dus lib high; de nex' mont' dey sorter scrabbles erlong, an' de las'
mont' dey sholy is hawd times. Dey ain't no use talking, dey sholy is
dat! Now I'm des' gwine in 'n take a good big jorum of pepsissiway for
my stummick, 'n git erlong ter my bed, fore do rasters'gin ter crow fer
mawnin'." And she disappeared in the darkness, shaking her head and
reiterating the refrain, as to the badness of those twins.

The story of Aunt Judy's travels, in so far as she vouchsafed to tell
them and not to resort to fiction or silence--her adventures by land and
water, by wagon and rail, in search of "Mos' Grif," spread far and wide.
The old woman could not set her foot outside of the door without a
following of boys and girls, and, as a faithful historian, it would
little avail me to omit, also, of men and of women, who hooted, stared
at and otherwise indicated that she was less than human and more than
curious. She was the pariah of the village, albeit LeRoy's fists had
done their perfect work in that she was no more stoned. But she was
content--so, at least, she asserted--and not even the longing for
Jeny and Ellen and those badly-spoiled twins (of whom she never tired
talking) served to convince her that there could be, on all this green
earth, any home for her except, alone, the one that sheltered "Mos' Grif
an' Mis' Kath'rine an' dat blessed baby," now grown too large to be a
baby longer except alone to this loving old soul, to whom, forever, she
was "my baby."




CHAPTER X.


_"To thine own self be true."_ Shakespeare.


There had been a bright side for Griffith in all this change, too. New
and warm friends had been made. He had watched with a feeling of joy
the enervating influence of slave ownership drop from Beverly's young
shoulders--and upon the other boys he felt that it had never cast its
blight with a power that would outlast early youth. It filled him with
pleasure to find his sons surrounded in the academy and college with the
mental atmosphere and influence of freedom, only. He encouraged them
to join the debating societies and Greek letter orders which admitted
discussion of such topics. Beverly was now in his Sophomore year and was
an ardent student of free-soil doctrines. He read and absorbed like a
fresh young sponge the political literature of the time. He was always
ready and eager to enter the debates of his class upon the ever pregnant
and always recurring slavery extension and compromise bills. The young
fellows had numerous hot arguments over the position of the different
statesmen of the time, and Stephen A. Douglas furnished Beverly with
many a hard hour's thinking. Mr. Davenport adhered to Douglas; but
Beverly inclined to persistently oppose his point of view. When, at
last, Douglas had taken the side of repeal in that famous measure--the
Missouri Compromise Bill, which had been at once the hope and the
despair of all the great northwest,--Beverly no longer hesitated. He and
his father took different sides, finally and forever, in their political
opinions. At commencement time, year after year, the governor of the
State was made the feature of the college exercises, and he had several
times been the guest of Mr. Davenport. This had served to draw to the
house many politicians whose talks had given both stimulus and material
to Beverly's already ardent political nature, which was so fast leading
him outside the bounds reached by his father. The scope and class of
his reading often troubled his mother sorely. One day she had gone to
Griffith in dismay. It was so seldom that she felt obliged to criticise
this eldest son of hers, upon whom she looked with a pride almost beyond
words to express, that Griffith was astonished.

"I wish, Griffith, that you would tell Beverly not to read this book.
It is the second time I have told him and he is determined. I burned the
first copy and he has bought another. He says he will buy fifty if I
burn them before he has read it all. He is that determined to read it. I
hated to tell you, but------"

Griffith held out his hand for the obnoxious book. Then he exclaimed in
surprise: "The 'Age of Reason'! Paine's book! Where did he happen to get
that?" He looked over the title page.

"I see, I see! 'Rights of Man'--he quoted from that in his last essay
at college. It was good, too--excellent. I've never read either one,
but--oh, tut, tut, mother, why not let him read it? I wouldn't wony over
it. Beverly is all right. He has got a better mind than you have--a far
better one than I have--why not let him use it? Let him read anything
he wants to. We can't judge for him. He'll be all right anyhow. You know
that. He and I differ in politics now. He is going the radical road and
I'm staying by the old line whigs; but--oh, tut, tut, Katherine! let's
not hamper the boy's mind with our notions to the extent of forcing them
on him. It won't do a bit of good if we try it either. That's not the
kind of a mind Beverly has got--and suppose it was, what right have we
to warp and limit its action?" He was turning over the leaves. "I've
never read this myself." Then looking up suddenly: "Have you?"

"No, of course not! But my father forbade our boys reading it. He said
it was a fearful book--infidel--" She broke off, but stammered something
about Beverly's salvation. Griffith drew her down on his knee.

"Madam Kath'rine," he said, quizzically, "if I had followed my father's
conscience instead of my own, I never would have"--he was going to say
seen her, but he recognized in time that that might hurt her--"I never
would have done a good many things that have seemed right to me--_the_
only right things for my soul. So long as Beverly is open and frank and
true to himself--and he has always been that--I mean to let him alone.
I am sure that I found a good deal better way for myself than my father
had marked out for me. Perhaps Beverly will. Suppose we trust him.
He has been such a good son--such a frank fellow; don't let us make a
pretender of him. Let him read what he does openly. You may be very sure
if it looks wrong to him he won't _want_ to be open with it. I don't
want to hurt Beverly as my father, dear soul, hurt me--intending it for
my own good, of course; but--but--can't you trust Beverly, Katherine? I
can. And maybe, after all, people have not understood this book. Leave
it here. I believe I'll read it myself." Katherine was astonished,
but the little talk rested and helped her. That night the book was on
Beverly's table again and nothing was said of it. Beverly had joined
his father's church when he was a little fellow, but since he entered
college he had seemed to take slight interest in it. He was always
present at family prayers, but said nothing about his religious views of
late. A year ago he had been reprimanded, in company with others, by the
local preacher for attending a social dance. That night he said to Roy:
"The first time a dancing teacher comes to this town I am going to take
lessons. Look at those Louisville boys in my class and in yours, too.
They are twice as easy in their manners as any of the rest of us. It is
their dancing that did it. They told me so."

"Mr. Brooks will turn you out of the church if you do," said Roy.

"Father wouldn't," replied Beverly, whistling--"and father is good
enough for me."

But, since there had been no opportunity to fulfill the threat, the
little matter of the social dance had blown over, and Beverly was still,
nominally, a member of the Methodist Church.

The days passed. The political crash was upon the country. Men met only
to talk of free-soil and slave extension, of union and disunion, of
repeal, and even, in some quarters, of abolition. Young men's blood
boiled. In Legislature and Congress feeling ran to blows. The air was
thick and heavy with threats of--no one knew what. Old friendships were
broken and new ones strained into real enmity. Brothers took different
sides. Fathers and sons became bitter. Neighbor looked with suspicion
upon neighbor. College fraternities lapsed into political clubs. It was
now Beverly's last year. His favorite professor died. Griffith noticed
that the boy was restless and abstracted. One day he came to his father.

"Father," he said, abruptly, "I don't feel as if I ought to waste any
more time at college. There is a tremendous upheaval just ahead of us.
Could you--would you just as soon I should?--I've got an offer with two
of the other fellows, and I--"

Mr. Davenport recognized in the boy's unusual hesitancy of speech an
unaccustomed quality of unrest and uncertainty. He looked over his
gold-bowed glasses.

"Why, what is it, son? Out with it," he said, smiling.

"Well, it's like this: You remember Shapleigh, of the class last year?
Well, you know his father owns that little free-soil paper out in
Missouri that I get every once in a while. It's democratic, you know,
but free-soil."

Griffith nodded. "Very good little paper, too. Don't fully agree with
those last editorials--too fiery--but a very decent little sheet."
Beverly was evidently pleased.

"Well, the old gentleman is tired of the fight, and Shap wrote me that
if Donaldson and I will each put in $1,500, his father will turn the
paper over to the three of us. Shap knows how to run the business end of
the concern. That's what he has done since he was graduated. Shap wants
me for political editor, mostly. He's a red-hot free-soiler, and he
knows I am. I sent him my last two speeches and he used 'em in the
paper. He says they took like wildfire; his constituents liked 'em
first-class. You know, I've always thought I'd like to be a newspaper
man. Think so more than ever now. Times are so hot, and there is such a
lot to be said. They need new blood to the front, and--"

Griffith was laughing gently and looking quizzically, with lips pursed
up, at this ambitious son of his; but the boy went on:

"The fact is, father, I've worried over it all this term. I hated to
ask you if you could let me have the money. It is such a splendid
chance--one of a lifetime, I think. I do wish you'd let me."

At last he had fallen into his boyish form of speech, and Griffith
laughed aloud.

"_Let_ you? _Let_ you be an editor of a fiery free-soil paper out in
Missouri, hey? The fellow that edits a paper out there just now can't
be made out of very meek stuff, Bev. It won't be a nest of roses for any
three young birds that try it, I reckon. D'yeh see that account in the
_Gazette_, yesterday, of the mob out there near Kansas City?"

"Yes, I did; and that's the very thing that decided me to ask you
to-day. Of course, you'd really own the stock. It would only be in my
name till I could pay you for it, and--"

"Beverly," said his father, gravely, "if you've made up your mind fully
to this thing, and are sure you know what you want and can do, I reckon
you don't need to worry over the money for the stock. But are you
_sure_ you want to leave college before you finish? Isn't it a little
premature?"

He did not hear his son's reply. It came suddenly to his mind that this
boy of his was almost exactly the age that he had been when he had tried
to argue his own case with the old Major. It rushed into his thoughts
how hard it had been to approach the topic nearest his heart, and how
cruelly it had all ended. He realized, as he often did these days,
how boyish and immature he must have seemed to his father, and yet how
tragically old he had felt to himself. He wondered if Beverly felt that
way now. He began to realize that the boy was still talking, arguing and
planning, although he had not heard.

"Bev," he said, gently, using the abbreviation instinctively to make
the boy feel the tenderness of his intent--"Bev, I don't intend to argue
this thing with you at all."

Beverly had misunderstood his father's long silence and abstraction. The
remark confirmed his misconception. He arose, disappointed, and started
for the door. Griffith reached out, caught him by the sleeve, and pulled
him into a chair beside his own.

"I want to tell you something, Bev. When I was about your age--maybe a
little younger--

"I made a request of my father that it had cost me a sore trial to make
up my mind to ask. He--well, he didn't take it kindly, and--and--and I
left home in a huff; not exactly a huff, either; but, to tell the truth,
we succeeded in hurting each other sorely. And there wasn't the least
need of it. It took us both a long time to get over the hurt of it.
I sometimes doubt if we ever did get really all over it. I tell you,
Beverly, boy, it was a sad, sad blunder all around. It darkened and
dampened my spirits for many a day, and I don't doubt it did his."

Griffith was playing idly with a paper-knife on the table beside him,
and there came a pause and a far-off look in his eyes.

"Oh, father, don't fancy I feel that way--I--don't--I wouldn't
think----" began Beverly, eagerly, with a suspicious quaver in his
voice. To hide it, he arose suddenly.

"Sit down, son," said Griffith, smiling at the boy and taking the hand
that rested on the table. It was cold. He dropped the paper-knife and
laid his other hand over his son's. "Beverly, you didn't understand me,
I reckon"--he threw one arm about the boy's shoulders--"I reckon you
didn't understand me. I meant to say this: I still think my father was
wrong. Now, if I can help it, I don't want the time to ever come, that
when you recall your first independent effort with me, you will think
that of me. I've always intended to try to remember, when that time
came, to put myself in your place, and recall my own early struggles--be
nineteen again myself. We will all hate to have you go so far away. That
will be the hardest part for mother and for all of us; but if you have,
thought it all over seriously----"

"I have, indeed, father--for months and months. It----"

"Why, all there is to do is for me to look into the matter and get
that stock for you, and see how we can make the change as easy as
possible--as----"

The boy was on his feet. He was struggling to hide his emotion.
Griffith, still holding his hand, arose. He drew the boy toward him.
Suddenly Beverly understood his father's wish. He threw both arms about
his neck and kissed him as he had not done since he was a little fellow.
Mr. Davenport held the boy close to his breast. Beverly was the taller
of the two, but the father's form had filled out into portly proportions
during these past years and Beverly's was very slight.

"There, there, there!" exclaimed Griffith, presently, blowing a blast
upon his handkerchief. "What are we two precious fools crying over?
Wasting time! Wasting time! Better go tell your mother all about it and
let her get about fixing you up to go. Editor Davenport!" he exclaimed,
holding the boy at arm's length. "Well, well, well! what next? Tut,
tut, tut, tut! I expect Roy will be wanting to set up a law-office--or a
boxing school--in a day or two." Roy's exploit with his fists in behalf
of Aunt Judy had always been a family joke. "But, look here, Beverly, I
want you to promise me you will be mighty careful to keep out of trouble
out there. It's a hot State just now. The times are scorching, and--God
only knows what's in store for the country. Keep out of trouble and
hasty words, son. Bless me, but I'm glad it's not Roy! He'd be in
trouble before he got his first stick set up. They call it a stick.
don't they? I'll have to coach up on journalistic language if I'm to
have an editor for a son. The proof of the editorials will be in the
reading thereof," he added, smiling at the play upon the old saying.
"But I stipulate right now that you send me every one you write marked
in red, so I won't have to wade through all the other stuff to find
yours. If they're as good as that last essay of yours at the Delta, I'll
be proud of you, my boy. Only--only don't be too radical! Young blood
boils too easy. Mine did. Go slow on this question, Bev. It's bigger
than you think it is. In one form or another it has burdened my whole
life, and I've never been able to solve it yet--for others, for others.
I solved it for myself--as Judy's presence here proves," he added,
laughing. Judy's presence and her triumph over the law was a family
jest, and Roy's fight on her behalf not wholly a memory of regret.

"He fit fur the ould naiger," remarked the envious Rosanna, from time
to time, "but it would be the rear of me loif, shure, before he'd do the
same, er even so much as jaw back, fer the loikes o' me!"




CHAPTER XI.


_"I'll stand as if a man were author of himself,

And knew no other kin."_

Shakespeare.


Since Beverly was a Virginian, and since it was well known that at least
one of the new owners of the paper was from Massachusetts, it was deemed
wise to have Beverly sign all of his editorials where they touched--as
they usually did--upon the ever-present, and ever-exciting topic of
slave extension. The young fellows were advised by the original owner
that the border people were in no mood to accept arguments opposed
to the opinions of a large proportion of the property owners, if they
supposed these arguments came from persons in any way hostile to their
interests--as all the New England people were supposed to be.

But, he reasoned, if these arguments came from the pen of one who had
known the institution of slavery at its best and had loved the old order
of things where it was an established institution and where its
roots were, as even Beverly believed, in normal earth and not to
be disturbed--if from his pen came the protest against its farther
extension--it was believed the natives would accept it in kindness
whether they agreed with him or not. Beverly still adhered to the old
order of things for the old states. He, like his father, had seen how
hard it was to be rid of even a small portion of its power and its
responsibility.

At the end of the second year of his new editorial work Beverly had
grown to feel himself quite at home with his duties. He had made both
friends and enemies. The little office had become the town's center of
debate and of political development. The clash of interests had come
nearer and nearer. The country was on the eve of an election excitement
such as had never before been known. Four parties were in the field. The
election of either of the two radical candidates meant civil war beyond
hope of evasion. Many still fondly hoped that peace was yet possible
if but the compromise candidates were elected. Mr. Davenport held
tenaciously to that view. Beverly came out openly against it. If it were
staved off by compromise, he insisted that it was only a matter of time
when the inevitable would come. He argued that it would be best to meet
and settle the issue once and for all.

"I shall cast my first presidential ballot for that Illinois lawyer who
flayed Douglas," he wrote to his father. "War is simply inevitable now,
and he is a fearless and clear-headed leader. When the extension party
sees that he means business, and has the whole North and West behind,
him the struggle will the sooner be over." But Griffith still hoped for
peace and a compromise, and declared his intention to vote for Bell
and Everett. "You are simply throwing your vote away," wrote Beverly,
insistently, "and after all you have done and suffered because of this
thing I am sorry to see you do it, father. I'd rather see you help other
people to keep out of the fire that scorched you than to silently allow
it to be lighted in the states that are now free--in the new territorial
country so soon to be states. But what business have I to advise you?
I'm in a position to see it better than you are, is my only excuse. I am
going to vote for Lincoln and work for him with all my strength. Things
are about as hot as they can be out here, I can tell you. I mail my last
editorial on the subject to-day. A good many people here don't half like
it, and I've had to buck up to some pretty ugly talk first and last;
but--we have to follow our consciences, don't we? That's mine,
whether they like it or not. Lots of love to mother and the boys and
Margaret--and to Judy, too. And af you plaise, me reshpects t' Rosanna,
shure!

"P. S.--I forgot to say I'll have to postpone that visit home for a
little while yet, until things settle down a bit. We have all we can
possibly manage at the office now. Shap runs the business end of things
very well, does the hiring and adv. work and all that. Donaldson takes
all the locals and reporting, and I've got pretty much the whole of the
editing to do. I sign only the political ones, but I do the other stuff
on that page and the literary part too. Of course both of them do some
of these things once in a while--and if they want to; but I am depended
on for it; so as times are, I've got to be here to meet all these new
questions. We talk 'em over and I write 'em up. It keeps me tied, but
I like it; I reckon I was born for the business. We are really making
great strides for youngsters. The subscriptions have very nearly doubled
in the two years. Did you read the issue of the 24th with my lurid
remarks on 'Breakers Ahead?' I believe every word of it. I don't believe
we are going to pull through without a touch of gunpowder. I don't
intend to fight myself, if I can help it--but I shall shoot with ink
just as long and as strong as I can. I believe my postscript is a good
deal longer than my letter; but sometimes our afterthoughts have more in
'em than the originals, so why not add 'em? I forgot, too, in my gassing
about myself, to say how glad I am that Roy is doing so well at college
now. I shall surely try to get home to his graduation in June next, for
I hope after Lincoln is once in the White House (and you see I assume he
is going to get there), that it won't take long to settle matters down.
I think by next June I can surely come home for a good visit. I doubt,
though, if we do have a place for Roy to take even then. All the places
we have to give are rather--well, they are not in his line and the pay
is small. The salary list looks pretty big to us on payday, but I
reckon it looks slim enough to each one of the men who gets his little
envelope. Now, I believe that is really all I overlooked replying to in
your last; only, once more, father, _do_ vote for Lincoln and _don't_
throw yourself away on that tinkling little Bell. His chances are
hopeless; and if they were not, then the country's chances would be.
Might as well just put little Margaret at the helm of a ship. No matter
how hard she'd pull, or how sweetly she'd smile or how hard she'd coax,
the ship would miss the firm grip needed to steer clear of the breakers.
There _are_ breakers ahead I Lincoln is our only hope for an undivided
country and the limitation, once and for all, of the extension of
slavery--_sure sure_. Again, love to all,

"Beverly.

"N. B.--I don't often read my letters over, but if I hadn't read this
one I shouldn't be so certain as I am now that if I were my own
father and should receive this cock-sure piece of advice from my eldest
hopeful, I'd--well, I'd tan him well, verbally. But since I have the
good luck to be the eldest of the _very_ best and most considerate
father in this wide world, I don't expect anything of the kind to happen
to me; but if it does, I'll swallow it like a little man--and take my
revenge (in a scorching editorial) on some other fellow's father who
votes for Bell.

"Meekly,

"B."

Mr. Davenport--as was his habit--read the letter aloud to the family,
but he smiled anxiously at Roy's merry comments.

"Beverly is in a bad place to be reckless with his English, just now.
That editorial on Breakers Ahead seemed to me to go a good deal too far.
I'm glad he says he will not fight if there should be a war--which God
forbid."

"I would, then!" remarked Roy. "I'd get up a company right here in
college. Lots of the boys declare they'd go."

Mr. Davenport looked at his son over his gold-bowed glasses. There was a
suspicious twinkle in his eyes and a twitching of the lips. There was
a long pause before he spoke. This son of his had always seemed to
Griffith younger than he was.

"How old are you, Roy?" he asked in a spirit of fun. "You'd make a
tremendous soldier, now, wouldn't you?--just out of short clothes?"

"I'm older than Bev. was when he left college. I'm twenty. Young men
make the best soldiers anyhow. I heard Governor Morton tell you that the
last time he was here, and besides----"

"Tut, tut, tut, boy, you attend to your lessons! Twenty! Is that so,
Katherine? Is Roy twenty?"

Griffith took his glasses in his hand and held them as if he were trying
to magnify the boy in order to see him, and with his other hand tweaked
his upper lip as if searching for a mustache. Roy accepted the joke and
stretched himself up to his tallest, and from his inch of advantage over
his father he put down a patronizing hand on Griffith's head and said,
"Bless you, my children, bless you." Griffith changed the direction of
his glasses and searched the ceiling with that gratified smile fathers
have when they realize that a son really exceeds them in anything.
Katherine was laughing at the byplay of the two. Suddenly Griffith
turned to his youngest son: "Howard, how old are you? I suppose you will
vote this time, and go to war and do no end of great and rash things."

"No, I'll stay at home and nurse the baby. That's the kind of a fellow I
am," flung back this petulant one, and the door banged behind him.

"Don't tease Ward," said Katherine. "His temper seems to grow faster
than he does just these last two years, and--"

"Highty-tighty! He'd better take a reef in it. If I'd behaved that way
with my father he would have prescribed a little hickory oil. How old
_is_ Howard? Fourteen? Growing too fast by half--but his temper does
seem to keep up with the rest of him, I must say. Go and hitch up the
century plant, Roy. I want to drive out to the farm. Want to go'long?
Don't. Well, do you, Kath'rine? No? Well, then I guess I'll have to take
Margaret. She won't go back on me like that. It'll do her good and she
can play with those two peewees of Miller's, while he and I look over
the stock and drive about the place a little. Fan's colt was lame the
last time I was out. I don't believe the strawberry patch is going to
do well this year, either. Did I tell you what a fine fat calf the
brindle's is? You'd laugh to see it. It winks at you exactly as if it
understood a joke."

The old phaeton--otherwise the "century plant"--dashed up to the door.
The combination was especially incongruous. Hitched to it was a great,
gray, fiery Arabian stallion. The one-time circuit rider had not lost
his love for a good horse, and his little stock farm on the outskirts of
the town was the joy of his life. He sadly missed the beautiful valley
of his youth, but at least these fields were his. No blue mountains
loomed up in the distance, but the beech and maple trees were luxuriant.
Mountain stream and narrow pass there were not, but a pebbly brook, in
which were minnows, ran through the strip of woods, and Griffith still
enjoyed the comradeship of bird and beast and fish. He had named the
stallion Selim, after the love of his youth, and no one dared drive him
but himself. He took up the lines and called back to Roy as Selim dashed
off, "I'll leave Selim and bring Fannie in, so your mother and you can
drive to-morrow. 'Bye, Howard! Be a good boy!" he called, as he caught a
glimpse of the boy at the corner of the house.

"So'll the devil be a good boy! Just wait till that war comes! They'll
see!" he growled, as the "century plant" disappeared. There floated
back on the air, "Joy to the world, te, te, turn, turn. Yea, yea, there,
Selim! Whoa! Yea! yea! Let earth receive her King! Te, te, turn." The
"century plant" and Selim disappeared around the corner, and the fife and
drum corps which had startled the horse, drowned all other sounds, and
for Howard, all other thoughts. He did not stop to reach the gate. He
vaulted over the fence and joined the procession and the refrain of the
school-boys who gave words to the music--"on a rail! And we'll ride old
Abe, and we'll ride old Abe, and we'll ride him to the White House on
a rail!" The boy dropped into the step and the rhythm with a will. He
forgot to be sullen.




CHAPTER XII.


_"The shears of destiny."_--Shakespeare.


War! war! war! The great election was over. The bitterness of faction
and of section had only intensified. The inevitable had at last come.
Mobs, riots, and confusion followed threats, and at last the shot that
struck Fort Sumter echoed in every village and hamlet in the country.
The beginning of the struggle with arms to adjust the differences
between two irreconcilable doctrines--two antagonistic social and
economic policies--had culminated. The adjustment must, indeed, now
come. "Seventy-five thousand troops for three months!" The President's
call rang out, and almost before the echo died away the quota was
full. The young, the adventurous, and the hot-headed, supplemented the
patriotic and sprang into line. To these it was to be a three months'
camping-out lark. Of course the South would back down at the show of
armed strength and firm resistance to disunion. The martial spirit,
the fighting instinct inherent in the race--that legacy from our brute
ancestry--was fanned into flame like fire in a summer wind. College
classes were depleted. Young lads hastened to force themselves into the
ranks. Drum and fife and bugle sounded in every street. LeRoy Davenport
was one of the first to enlist. The company of college boys elected him
their second lieutenant, and they left at once for Camp Morton to be
ready to march to the front at the first order for troops from the west.
He looked very fine and soldierly and handsome in his uniform, and with
the straps upon his shoulders. Beverly wrote that he should stick to
his editorial chair. He slept in the office, to be ready to receive and
write up every scrap of news the moment it came. He wrote a series of
fiery editorials, denouncing the "outrage on the flag at Fort Sumter."
An anonymous letter was pushed under his office-door warning him to
desist. He published the letter and appended to it a more vigorous
article than before. That night, as he lay on the bed in the little
back room of the office, he thought he detected a strange odor. He went
softly to the window and looked out. The moon was just rising on the
river. His little row-boat, in which his fishing and pleasure trips were
taken, bobbed idly up and down on the waves just under the corner of the
building. The strange odor grew stronger and more distinct in character.
He began to suspect that he understood it. He opened the door into the
front room and passed on to the compositors' room. He was sure now that
it was the smell of smoke and oil-soaked cloth. His first impulse was to
open the front door and shout fire, but he remembered Lovejoy's fate and
paused. He stepped to the front window and turned the old slats of the
heavy green blinds so that he could see out into the narrow street.
There were three forms crouching near the door. He thought he saw the
gleam of steel. Flames had begun to creep under the door and from the
compositors' room. Suddenly the flimsy pine partition burst into a sheet
of flame. He knew that to open the front door was to meet death at the
hands of desperadoes. He caught up the only implement of defense he
saw--a pair of great, sharp, clipping-shears, and started for the door.
He intended, at least, to mark his man so that others could deal with
him afterward. Suddenly he remembered that he could drop from the back
window into the river. If they had not taken his oars he could escape.
The room was as light as day now, and he knew that to hesitate was to be
lost. He dropped the curious weapon he had in his hand, and ran to the
back room. The only rope there was the support of the old-fashioned
bed. He hastily unwound it and fastened it to the bed-post nearest the
window. He wanted to make the drop as short as possible, lest the splash
of the water attract the men from the front of the house. He smiled when
he climbed into the boat and found the oars safely in its bottom. In an
instant he was pulling gently, softly, slowly out into the stream. He
could almost hear the beating of his own heart Then in the moonlight a
shot rang out on the clear air, and a sharp crack, as the ball struck
the side of the boat, told him that he was discovered. No need for
caution now! Need only for haste and strength! He pulled with all his
young vigor--with the stroke of an accustomed hand. The sky was livid
with the flames from his burning office--the dream and hope of his first
manhood was melting before his eyes. "God damn'em!" he said, between his
set teeth, as two more shots followed him, "they won't dare stay longer
now--and I'm out of range. God damn'em!" He let the oars fall by his
side. He could see numbers of men running about now, shouting, swearing,
vainly trying to check the flames. Some one yelled, "Shoot again, he's
in that skiff!" He heard and understood that the victim was being
made out the culprit. The would-be assassins were covering retreat. He
decided that it would not be safe to pull back to the Missouri side just
then. He would land on the Kansas shore. Morning found him near a small
village. He landed and made his way directly to the newspaper office.
It was one of his own exchanges, and a free-soil paper like his. He told
his story, and the editor made a lurid article out of it and called
for his townsmen to gather in a public meeting. He issued an extra, and
Beverly was the hero of the hour. Rough frontiersmen--some of whom had
seen his paper--looked at the slender stripling and volunteered to cross
the river and "clean out the town." They called on Beverly for a speech.
They were bent upon making him a leader. The war fever was in the
frontier blood. He began his speech in a passion of personal feeling,
but ended in an appeal for volunteers, "not to fight _my_ battle, not to
avenge my wrong, not to repair my loss, but to fight this great battle
for liberty and freedom in the great northwest! It seems we will have to
fight for the freedom of speech and press, as well as for free soil! I
will be frank: I had not intended to enlist in this war. I had hoped to
do more good by argument than I could hope to do by arms. I had hoped to
see the end of it at the end of the three months for which the President
called for troops; but I do not stand on that ground any longer.
Yesterday, as you all know, there was issued a new call for five hundred
thousand more men! I want, now, to be one of the first of those, and
I shall enlist for three years or for ten years or as long as this war
lasts; and I don't want to come out of it alive if I have got to come
out into a country where free speech is throttled and a free press
burned up! I shall enlist, I tell you, and since I had to fly to Kansas
for protection, I hope that Kansas will enroll me as _her_ son, and if
it may be, as her very first volunteer!"

The idea took the fancy of his listeners. "Raise a regiment!" "I'll go
with you!" "Three cheers for the editor!"

They were given with a will, and the enthusiasm for himself put a new
idea into his head.

"I am only twenty-three years old," he said laughing, "and not much
bigger than the right arm of some of you great, fine, muscular fellows;
but if you are willing to trust me, I would ask nothing better than to
take the lead of such a body of men. If enough of you will enlist here
and now, I'll go with you as private or as captain. I'll take the lead
and the responsibility, or I'll follow any better qualified man you may
name, and we'll go up to the capital and offer ourselves as the first
Kansas volunteers for this war!"

Almost before he had spoken the words cheer after cheer rent the air.
Men signified their willingness to enlist, and before night on the first
day he had spent on Kansas soil he found himself marching toward the
capital at the head of one hundred determined, rough, strong, fearless
frontiersmen to ask for a commission as their captain, and for arms and
ammunition for his men.

Mr. Davenport was surprised that day to receive this dispatch:

"Am elected Captain, Company A. First Kansas Vols. Will write.

"Beverly."

They could not imagine at home why Beverley should be in a Kansas
company, but when the _Gazette_ came that night with an account of
the burning of the obscure newspaper-office out in Missouri, they
understood, and Katherine felt faint and sick when she realized that two
of her boys had gone to fight against her people. She knew that her own
brothers and nephews would all be on the other side, and that Griffith's
were there too. Griffith had gone with Roy's company to Camp Morton and
had sorrowfully consented to his enlistment; but if war there must be
and if his son must go, Griffith felt that he was on the right side. He
held back, himself, from the idea that fighting was necessary, even yet.
At the very worst, it would all be over very soon, he thought, and he
hoped and believed that a few demonstrations of determination on the
part of the Government would undoubtedly settle the matter without any
real or serious fighting. He was unalterably opposed to a division of
the Union, and he believed that the South would see its mistake on
that question and reconsider it. But as State after State seceded, his
perplexity deepened. He and Katherine had all these years kept up a
fond and constant correspondence with the old home friends and kinsmen,
several of whom, from time to time, had visited them. All these had felt
that Griffith had made a grievous mistake in following the course he had
taken, but until now no real bitterness had resulted. Now, all letters
ceased. They had heard, somehow, in the old home, that Griffith's sons
had enlisted in the Union army--to fight against them! That was more
than they could bear. Even before the line of communication was finally
closed against letters, theirs had ceased to come--and Katherine
understood. Many a night she sobbed herself to sleep.

"How terrible this all is, Griffith! How terrible! Why should they fight
over it? Why don't they let the slave states go, if they want to, and be
one government, and the others be free states and another government--as
Canada and we are, or as Mexico and we?"

Griffith had tried to explain the difficulties and the inevitable
clashing of interests that would be forever resulting--the constant and
eternal clashing. He pointed out that no country would allow itself to
be divided. He read to her long arguments in support of the maintenance
of the Union; but she said:

"Yes, I see it is desirable if all want it so; but if they do _not_,
why--why--I wouldn't fight to compel them to stay with me if they want
to go. You never do that way with your children, Griffith, you know you
don't. You never did try to conquer one of them and force him to think
your way. You always felt that way about freeing the slaves, too. You
said you did not judge for other people--only for yourself. And when you
saw how terribly hard it was to do it, and that most people could not
do as you did even if they wanted to--you always said that you did not
blame them in the least."

"I say so yet. I know all that; but governments are very different. Some
one has got to decide for others. If they didn't, everything would go
to smash in very short order. I suppose I am a good deal of a coward.
I can't bear to judge for other people. But I do believe in maintaining
this government at any and all cost--but I'd leave slavery alone in the
South. I wouldn't let it spread. That is Lincoln's policy now. He said
so in his message--his inaugural. If it will stay where it is, he says
he won't disturb it--and that suits me; but if it will not----"

"Well, it won't," put in Howard. "I heard Governor Morton say so in his
speech last night. He said that this fight had all along been really to
extend and not to retain slavery, and when that was lost then the South
proposed to smash the Union. That's exactly what he said; but, 'We'll
rally round the flag, boys, we'll rally once again,'" he sang, and
banged the door behind him.

That night Howard disappeared. He had ran away, sworn that he was
eighteen years old and enlisted under another name, as a gunner in a
battery! It was ten days before a trace of him was found. Then he was on
his way to the front whence news had come thick and fast of skirmishes,
battles and tremendous preparations for a terrible and bloody struggle.
Excitement was at fever heat. The streets were crowded with soldiers
fend echoed with martial music night and day. War, indeed, was upon
them, and fair July was here.




CHAPTER XIII.--THE OTHER SIDE OF WAR.


In Washington, on the twentieth of July, 1861, expectation ran high.
A decisive, and it was hoped a final blow was to be struck on the
following day. Large numbers of troops had passed through the city and
been massed thirty miles away. A great battle was imminent. Both armies
had recently won small victories. Both were jubilant. For the most part
the soldiers in these two opposing camps were raw recruits. They sang
and joked and played tricks on each other. To both, war was a mere
name yet, a painted glory, a sabred, gold-laced parade before admiring,
cheering crowds. The Confederates knew every step of the ground. To
their opponents it was an unknown land into which they had been marched;
rugged, broken country, the like of which the most of them had never
before seen. Raw and untried they were on both sides, but the lack of
knowledge of the topography--of the location of pass and defile, of ford
and of stream--gave to the Union troops (when they had deigned to think
of it at all) a certain feeling of insecurity and uneasiness. Still no
one doubted for a moment the outcome. The battle would be fought and
won, and glory would be carried home on every Union bayonet. Civilians
drove out to camp from the city, and from distant hilltops were prepared
to witness the battle. A martial display like this may not be seen
through field-glasses every day. Early in the day cannonading had
been heard. More citizens started for the scene of action. There were
intervals of comparative silence, and then again the boom of cannon and
the rattle of muskets told the distant audience that hostilities were
on--that neither side had finally yielded. Later a number of citizens
drove furiously across the Long Bridge with the news that the Northern
troops were retreating toward the city. Then word came that they had
rallied, but citizens deserted their posts of observation and rode
rapidly toward town. They reported the Southern troops as fighting
fiercely, but it was thought they were about to yield. They could
not hold out much longer against the murderous fire of the Union men.
Suddenly a flying horseman with livid face and white lips sped through
the streets. It was a messenger from the front! He was making straight
to the White House! The Northern troops were in full retreat! People
looked at each other in dismay. Surely they would rally! They would
not come to the city! They were only foiling back! They would form and
attack again! People told each other these things and turned pale. The
streets began to be filled with returning civilians. No one stopped.
Every one pushed on toward home or to the Capitol. Another foam-flecked
horse dashed in. The rider had on a uniform, dirty, begrimed and wet.

"The Northern troops have broken ranks! They are fleeing, horse and
foot, in one mass of disorganized panic-stricken humanity, pursued by a
murderous fire from a jubilant, victory-intoxicated enemy! The officers
could not rally them! It is a panic!" No need to question the facts.
Look at the distant hills. Watch the approaches. See the succession
of dispatch bearers fly past to the White House! "It is only a retreat!
They will rally!" called back one rider only to be contradicted by the
next. "It is not a retreat! It is a panic! They have broken ranks. Men
are flying madly. Guns, ammunition, everything that hinders speed have
been thrown away! Each man is flying to save himself! Washington is in
danger!"

The climax had indeed come. The dismay knew no bounds. What next?
Must the President escape? Where should he go? If he left, what could
Congress do? Must all fly? Where? Would the enemy invade Washington? Was
the Northern army really so disorganized, so demoralized? In the name
of God! what could it all mean? People all asked questions. There was no
one to answer them--no one but the stragglers who began to come in. Were
the brave fellows who had so gallantly and cheerfully marched out not
brave after all? Were they outnumbered? Were there no reinforcements?
What was the solution? They had not long to wait. A handful of
horsemen, shame-faced and hesitant, then worn out and hard-driven teams
began to appear at the far end of the Long Bridge. All Washington took
to its housetops. Anxious faces watched for some approaching line. None
came; but the Long Bridge was gorged with a struggling mass of horse,
foot and ordnance. There was no pretense of a line of march. Each man
fled by and for himself. Twilight saw the streets filled with men in
soiled and torn uniform; uniform which had but just marched out fresh
and resplendent. Sullen replies greeted questions.

"By God, we didn't know where we were! Officers didn't know any more'n
we did."

"Had us in a pocket!"

"Gad, we was _lost_--didn't know the way in _ner_ out! Try it yerself."

"Willin' t' fight--but not willin' t' go it blind like that."
Ambulances, limping footmen, infantry, cavalry, ordinance and supply
wagons crowded and jostled and swore and cursed each at the other. Each
struggled for place in advance. The Long Bridge, the Aqueduct Bridge,
the Chain Bridge, all were one mad scene of confusion. The terrified men
saw the dome of the Capitol and their aim was to reach it by the nearest
route. The thought of the unknown country had been to them a nightmare
from which escape was their only desire. All night the ghastly spectacle
was kept up. No one slept. No one knew what to expect on the morrow,
Would the city be bombarded from the heights beyond? Would it be shelled
and burned? Would these panic-stricken men rally? Could they be depended
upon, or was the fright now so in their blood that they would refuse
to form in line again and obey commands? Could they be relied upon?
Pennsylvania avenue was lined with tired, terrified, and wounded
men. Churches were turned into hospitals. Nobody slept. Surgeons were
everywhere. More wounded kept coming in. Surgeons from Baltimore, from
Philadelphia, and even from New York responded to telegrams. Special
trains rushed in. Washington was one mad whirl of fright and dismay!
Nest morning the whole country was electrified by the terrible news.

"Extra! 'stra! 'stro! Extra! all 'bout terrible defeat m-m-m-'ion troops!
'stra! 'stra! 'stro!"

In every town and hamlet in the country--on every table there was spread
the awful news on the morning of July 22. Men began to take on another
look. This, indeed, was serious! What was to be done? Reserve troops
were started without delay from camp and home. Excitement was at fever
heat. Would the fresh troops arrive in time? Could Washington holdout?
Must the President fly? Another kind of question bore hard upon many a
household. Who was killed? Who wounded? Who missing? People looked into
each other's eyes and feared to ask or to speak of this question nearest
their hearts.

Roy Davenport's regiment was ordered to the front. Henceforth camp life
would be no picnic. They could be boys no longer. Men were needed at the
front. Beverly's company had some time since joined the troops in the
Southwest and was in the field. The battery in which Howard acted
as gunner was with Sherman in the far South. For the first time the
seriousness of the situation was borne home to the whole North. To feel
that Washington was really in danger gave a new meaning to defeat. Why
had the Northern troops met such a fearful disaster? Before this they
had won in almost every contest, but this was worth all the rest to
the South so near was it to Washington--so near to Richmond. The two
capitals faced each other like gladiators, and the first serious blow
had fallen with crushing force upon the Union champions. If Washington
fell the Confederacy was sure of foreign recognition--of success.

Griffith had a long talk with Governor Morton when he went to see Roy's
regiment off. When he came home he was pale and anxious. There was a new
trouble on his heart. He did not tell Katherine that Morton had urged
him to volunteer his services to the Government as a guide through the
passes and defiles of his native State.

"Your knowledge of that country would be simply invaluable. It would
prevent any such disaster as this again. Panics like this ruin an army.
It will take months to recover from such a rout even if nothing worse
comes of it. The moral effect is simply fatal. You are a Union man and
you know every foot of that country. Our generals don't. They are afraid
to risk getting their men into a pocket and losing their whole command.
You can help. The main battle-ground is bound to be Virginia; we can
accomplish nothing of value until we know and feel secure on that
soil

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