An Arkansas Planter Part 21

"Not at all. Got no relish for victuals. Don't eat enough to keep a chicken alive. Can't stand it much longer."

"Want to bet on it?" Gid cried.

"What's that?"

"I say I'm sorry to hear it."

"Glad to know that somebody sympathizes with me. Well, drop in some time and we'll take a chaw of tobacco and spit the fire out."

Nothing could have been more expressive of a welcome to Wash's house. To invite a man to sit until the fire was extinguished with the overflow of the quid was with him the topknot of courtesy.

"All right," Gid shouted back; and then to himself he said: "If I was sure that a drink of that old whisky would thrill him to death I'd steal it for him, but I'd have to be sure; I'd take no chances."

A horse came galloping up behind him. Dusk was falling and the old man did not at once recognize Mayo, the labor organizer of the negroes. But he knew the voice when the fellow spoke: "What's the weather about to do?"

"About to quit, I reckon," Gid answered.

"Quit what?"

"Quit whatever it's doing."

"Pretty smart as you go along, ain't you?"

"Yes, and when I stop, too."

"Strains you to answer a civil question, I see."

The old man turned in his saddle and jogged along facing the fellow, and some distance was covered before either of them spoke. "Are you trying to raise a row with me?" Gid asked. "I want to know for if you are I can save you a good deal of time and trouble."

"Sort of a time-saver," said Mayo.

"Yes, when I'm not a recruiter for eternity."

"I don't believe I follow you."

"Wish you would, or ride on ahead. Now look here," he added, "I just about know you when I see you, and as I don't make friends half as fast as I do enemies--in other words, as I am able to grasp a man's bad points quicker than I can catch his good ones--I would advise you not to experiment with me. You haven't come back here for the benefit of the community, and if we were not the most easy-going people in the world, we'd hang you and then speculate leisurely as to what might have been your aim in coming here."

Mayo grunted. He was a tall, big, stoop-shouldered fellow. He rode with his knees drawn up. He had a sort of "ducking" head, and his chin was long and pointed. He grunted and replied: "I guess this is a free country or at least it ought to be."

"Yes," Gid rejoined, still facing him, "but it won't be altogether free for such as you until the penitentiaries are abolished."

"Oh, I understand you, Mr. Batts. You are trying to work up a chance to kill me."

"Good guess; and you are trying to help me along."

"But I want to tell you that if you were to kill me you wouldn't live to tell the tale. I don't want any trouble with you. I'm not here to have trouble unless it's shoved on me. I am going to do one thing, however, trouble or no trouble; I am going to demand that the colored people shall have their rights."

"And at the same time I suppose you are going to demand that the white man shall not have his."

"No, won't demand that he shan't have his rights, but that he shan't have his way."

"Not have his way with his own affairs? Good. And now let me tell you something. Want to hear it?"

"I'm not aching to hear it."

"Well, I'll give it to you anyway. It's this: The first thing you know a committee of gentlemen will call on you and offer you the opportunity to make a few remarks, and after you have made them you will thereafter decline all invitations to speak. At the end of a rope the most talkative man finds a thousand years of silence. Long time for a man to hush, eh? Well, our roads split here."

"How do you know?"

"Because I turn to the right."

"But may be my business calls me over that way."

"Don't know about that, but I'm going to turn into this lane and I don't want you to come with me. Do you hear?"

Mayo did not answer. Gid turned into a road leading to the right, and looking back he saw that Mayo was riding straight ahead. "At any rate he ain't afraid to say what he thinks," the old man mused. "Got more nerve than I thought he had, and although it may make him more dangerous, yet it ent.i.tles him to more respect."

His horse's hoof struck into a patch of leaves, heaped beneath a cottonwood, and from the rustling his ears, warmed by the old liquor, caught the first bars of a tune he had known in his youth; and lifting high his voice he sang it over and over again. He pa.s.sed a negro cabin whence often had proceeded at night the penetrating cry of a fiddle, and it was night now but no fiddle sent forth its whine. A dog shoved open the door, and by the fire light within the old man saw a negro sitting with a gun across his lap, and beside him stood two boys, looking with rapture upon their father's weapon. Throughout the neighborhood had spread a report that the negroes were meeting at night to drill, and this glance through a door gave life to what had been a shadow.

He rode on, and his horse's hoof struck into another patch of leaves, but no tune arose from the rustle. The old man was thinking. In a field of furrowed clouds the moon was struggling, and down the sandy road fell light and darkness in alternating patches. Far away he saw a figure stepping from light into darkness and back again into light. Into the deep shadow of a vine-entangled tree he turned his horse, and here he waited until he heard footsteps crunching in the sand, until he saw a man in the light that lay for a moment in the road, and then he cried:

"h.e.l.lo, there, Jim Taylor!"

"Is that you, Uncle Gideon?"

"Yes, Gideon's band of one. Come over here a moment."

"I will as soon as I can find you. What are you doing hiding out in the dark? The grand jury ain't in session."

"No, I gad, but something else is," he replied.

Jim came forward and put his hand on the horn of the old man's saddle, which as an expert he did in spite of the shying of the horse; and then he asked: "Well, what is it, Uncle Gideon?"

"You've heard the rumor that the negroes are drilling at night."

"Yes, what of it?"

"It's a fact, that's what there is of it. Just now I rode quite a ways with Mayo and he was inclined to be pretty sa.s.sy; and right back there I looked into Gabe Little's cabin and saw him with a gun across his lap."

"Well, what of that? Haven't the negroes had guns ever since the war, and hasn't a man got the right to sit with his gun across his lap? Uncle Gideon, I'm afraid you've been putting too much new wine into an old bottle."

"Soft, Jimmie; it was old liquor, sixty years at least. But I gad, it strikes me that you are pretty glib to-night. You must have heard something."

"No, not since Mrs. Cranceford got the letter, but that was enough to last me a good while."

"Didn't hear about my bereavement, did you?"

"What, you bereaved, Uncle Gideon? How did it happen?"