The Bishop of Cottontown Part 25

But another severed link cut deepest of all. In the realization of her love for Thomas Travis, Alice Westmore's heart died within her.

In the years which followed, if suffering could make her a great singer, now indeed was she great.

PART FOURTH--THE LINT

CHAPTER I

COTTONTOWN

Slavery clings to cotton.

When the directors of a cotton mill, in a Ma.s.sachusetts village, decided, in the middle '70's, to move their cotton factory from New England to Alabama, they had two objects in view--cheaper labor and cheaper staple.

And they did no unwise thing, as the books of the company from that time on showed.

In the suburbs of a growing North Alabama town, lying in the Tennessee Valley and flanked on both sides by low, regularly rolling mountains, the factory had been built.

It was a healthful, peaceful spot, and not unpicturesque. North and south the mountains fell away in an undulating rhythmical sameness, with no abrupt gorges to break in and destroy the poetry of their scroll against the sky. The valley supplemented the effect of the mountains; for, from the peak of Sunset Rock, high up on the mountain, it looked not unlike the chopped up waves of a great river stiffened into land--especially in winter when the furrowed rows of the vast cotton fields lay out brown and symmetrically turned under the hazy sky.

The factory was a low, one-story structure of half burnt bricks.

Like a vulgar man, cheapness was written all over its face. One of its companions was a wooden store house near by, belonging to the company. The other companion was a squatty low-browed engine room, decorated with a smoke-stack which did business every day in the week except Sunday. A black, soggy exhaust-pipe stuck out of a hole in its side, like a nicotine-soaked pipe in an Irishman's mouth, and so natural and matter-of-fact was the entire structure that at evening, in the uncertain light, when the smoke was puffing out of its stack, and the dirty water running from its pipes, and the reflected fire from the engine's furnace blazed through the sunken eyes of the windows, begrizzled and begrimed, nothing was wanted but a little imagination to hear it cough and spit and give one final puff at its pipe and say: "Lu'd but o'ive wur-rek hard an' o'im toired to-day!"

Around it in the next few years had sprung up Cottontown.

The factory had been built on the edge of an old cottonfield which ran right up to the town's limit; and the field, unplowed for several years, had become sodded with the long stolens of rank Bermuda gra.s.s, holding in its perpetual billows of green the furrows which had been thrown up for cotton rows and tilled years before.

This made a beautiful pea-green carpet in summer and a comfortable straw-colored matting in winter; and it was the only bit of sentiment that clung to Cottontown.

All the rest of it was practical enough: Rows of scurvy three-roomed cottages, all exactly alike, even to the gardens in the rear, laid off in equal breadth and running with the same unkept raggedness up the flinty side of the mountain.

There was not enough originality among the worked-to-death inhabitants of Cottontown to plant their gardens differently; for all of them had the same weedy turnip-patch on one side, straggling tomatoes on another, and half-dried mullein-stalks sentineling the corners. For years these cottages had not been painted, and now each wore the same tinge of sickly yellow paint. It was not difficult to imagine that they had had a long siege of malarial fever in which the village doctor had used abundant plasters of mustard, and the disease had finally run into "yaller ja'ndice," as they called it in Cottontown.

And thus Cottontown had stood for several years, a new problem in Southern life and industry, and a paying one for the Ma.s.sachusetts directors.

In the meanwhile another building had been put up--a little cheaply built chapel, of long-leaf yellow pine. It was known as the Bishop's church, and sat on the side of the mountain, half way up among the black-jacks, exposed to the blistering suns of summer and the winds of winter.

It had never been painted: "An' it don't need it," as the Bishop had said when the question of painting it had been raised by some of the members.

"No, it don't need it, for the hot sun has drawed all the rosin out on its surface, an' pine rosin's as good a paint as any church needs.

Jes' let G.o.d be, an' He'll fix His things like He wants 'em any way.

He put the paint in the pine-tree when He made it. Now man is mighty smart,--he can make paint, but he can't make a pine tree."

It was Sunday morning, and as the Bishop drove along to church he was still thinking of Jack Bracken and Captain Tom, and the burial of little Jack. When he arose that morning Jack was up, clean-shaved and neatly dressed. As Mrs. Watts, the Bishop's wife, had become used, as she expressed it, to his "fetchin' any old thing, frum an old hoss to an old man home, wharever he finds 'em,"--she did not express any surprise at having a new addition to the family.

The outlaw looked nervous and sorrow-stricken. Several times, when some one came on him unexpectedly, the Bishop saw him feeling nervously for a Colt's revolver which had been put away. Now and then, too, he saw great tears trickling down the rough cheeks, when he thought no one was noticing him.

"Now, Jack," said the Bishop after breakfast, "you jes' get on John Paul Jones an' hunt for Cap'n Tom. I know you'll not leave no stone unturned to find him. Go by the cave and see if him an' Eph ain't gone back. I'm not af'eard--I know Eph will take care of him, but we want to fin' him. After meetin' if you haven't found him I'll join in the hunt myself--for we must find Cap'n Tom, Jack, befo' the sun goes down. I'd ruther see him than any livin' man. Cap'n Tom--Cap'n Tom--him that's been as dead all these years! Fetch him home when you find him--fetch him home to me. He shall never want while I live.

An', Jack, remember--don't forget yo'se'f and hold up anybody. I'll expec' you to jine the church nex' Sunday."

"I ain't been in a church for fifteen years," said the other.

"High time you are going, then. You've put yo' hands to the plough--turn not back an' G.o.d'll straighten out everything."

Jack was silent. "I'll go by the cave fus' an' jus' look where little Jack is sleepin'. Po' little feller, he must ha' been mighty lonesome last night."

It was ten o'clock and the Bishop was on his way to church. He was driving the old roan of the night before. A parody on a horse, to one who did not look closely, but to one who knows and who looks beyond the mere external form for that hidden something in both man and horse which bespeaks strength and reserve force, there was seen through the blindness and the ugliness and the sleepy, ambling, shuffling gait a clean-cut form, with deep chest and closely ribbed; with well drawn flanks, a fine, flat steel-turned bone, and a powerful muscle, above hock and forearms, that clung to the leg as the Bishop said, "like bees a'swarmin'."

At his little cottage gate stood Bud Billings, the best slubber in the cotton mill. Bud never talked to any one except the Bishop; and his wife, who was the worst Xanthippe in Cottontown, declared she had lived with him six months straight and never heard him come nearer speaking than a grunt. It was also a saying of Richard Travis, that Bud had been known to break all records for silence by drawing a year's wages at the mill, never missing a minute and never speaking a word.

Nor had he ever looked any one full in the eye in his life.

As the Bishop drove shamblingly along down the road, deeply preoccupied in his forthcoming sermon, there came from out of a hole, situated somewhere between the grizzled fringe of hair that marked Bud's whiskers and the grizzled fringe above that marked his eyebrows, a piping, apologetic voice that sounded like the first few rasps of an old rusty saw; but to the occupant of the buggy it meant, with a drawl:

"Howdy do, Bishop?"

A blind horse is quick to observe and take fright at anything uncanny. He is the natural ghost-finder of the highways, and that voice was too much for the old roan. To him it sounded like something that had been resurrected. It was a ghost-voice, arising after many years. He s.h.i.+ed, sprang forward, half wheeled and nearly upset the buggy, until brought up with a jerk by the powerful arms of his driver. The shaft-band had broken and the buggy had run upon the horse's rump, and the shafts stuck up almost at right angles over his back. The roan stood trembling with the half turned, inquisitive muzzle of the sightless horse--a paralysis of fear all over his face.

But when Bud came forward and touched his face and stroked it, the fear vanished, and the old roan bobbed his tail up and down and wiggled his head rea.s.suringly and apologetically.

"Wal, I declar, Bishop," grinned Bud, "kin yo' critter fetch a caper?"

The Bishop got leisurely out of his buggy, pulled down the shafts and tied up the girth before he spoke. Then he gave a puckering hitch to his underlip and deposited in the sand, with a puddling _plunk_, the half cup of tobacco juice that had closed up his mouth.

He stepped back and said very sternly:

"Whoa, Ben Butler!"

"Why, he'un's sleep a'ready," grinned Bud.

The Bishop glanced at the bowed head, c.o.c.ked hind foot and listless tail: "Sof'nin' of the brain, Bud," smiled the Bishop; "they say when old folks begin to take it they jus' go to sleep while settin' up talkin'. Now, a horse, Bud," he said, striking an att.i.tude for a discussion on his favorite topic, "a horse is like a man--he must have some meanness or he c'udn't live, an' some goodness or n.o.body else c'ud live. But git in, Bud, and let's go along to meetin'--'pears like it's gettin' late."

This was what Bud had been listening for. This was the treat of the week for him--to ride to meetin' with the Bishop. Bud, a slubber-slave--henpecked at home, brow-beaten and cowed at the mill, timid, scared, "an' powerful slow-mouthed," as his spouse termed it, wors.h.i.+pped the old Bishop and had no greater pleasure in life, after his hard week's work, than "to ride to meetin' with the old man an' jes'

hear him narrate."

The Bishop's great, sympathetic soul went out to the poor fellow, and though he had rather spend the next two miles of Ben Butler's slow journey to church in thinking over his sermon, he never failed, as he termed it, "to pick up charity even on the roadside," and it was pretty to see how the old man would turn loose his crude histrionic talent to amuse the slubber. He knew, too, that Bud was foolish about horses, and that Ben Butler was his model!

They got into the old buggy, and Ben Butler began to draw it slowly along the sandy road to the little church, two miles away up the mountain side.

CHAPTER II