Among the Pines Part 29

The native proposed we should separate--one go up, another down the stream, and the third, with the dog, follow the road; to which he thought Moye had finally returned. Those who should explore the run would easily detect the horse's tracks where he had left it, and then taking a straight course to the road, all might meet some five miles further on, at a place indicated.

I gave my adhesion to Sandy's plan, but the Colonel overruled it on the ground of the waste of time that would be incurred in thus recovering the overseer's trail.

"Why not," he said, "strike at once for the end of his route? Why follow the slow steps he took in order to throw us off the track? He has not come back to this road. Ten miles below there is another one leading also to the railway. He has taken that. We might as well send Sandy and the dog back and go on by ourselves."

"But if bound for the Station, why should he wade through the creek here, ten miles out of his way? Why not go straight on by the road?" I asked.

"Because he knew the dog would track him, and he hoped by taking to the run to make me think he had crossed the country instead of striking for the railroad."

I felt sure the Colonel was wrong, but knowing him to be tenacious of his own opinions, I made no further objection.

Directing Sandy to call on Madam P---- and acquaint her with our progress, he then dismissed the negro-hunter, and once more led the way up the road.

The next twenty miles, like our previous route, lay through an unbroken forest. As we left the watercourses, we saw only the gloomy pines, which there--the region being remote from the means of transportation--were seldom tapped, and presented few of the openings that invite the weary traveller to the dwelling of the hospitable planter.

After a time the sky, which had been bright and cloudless all the morning, grew overcast, and gave out tokens of a coming storm. A black cloud gathered in the west, and random flashes darted from it far off in the distance; then gradually it neared us; low mutterings sounded in the air, and the tops of the tall pines a few miles away, were lit up now and then with a fitful blaze, all the brighter for the deeper gloom that succeeded. Then a terrific flash and peal broke directly over us, and a great tree, struck by a red-hot bolt, fell with a deafening crash, half way across our path. Peal after peal followed, and then the rain--not filtered into drops as it falls from our colder sky, but in broad, blinding sheets--poured full and heavy on our shelterless heads.

"Ah! there it comes!" shouted the Colonel. "G.o.d have mercy upon us!"

As he spoke, a cras.h.i.+ng, crackling, thundering roar rose above the storm, filling the air, and shaking the solid earth till it trembled beneath our horses' feet, as if upheaved by a volcano. Nearer and nearer the sound came, till it seemed that all the legions of darkness were unloosed in the forest, and were mowing down the great pines as the mower mows the gra.s.s with his scythe. Then an awful, sweeping crash thundered directly at our backs, and turning round, as if to face a foe, my horse, who had borne the roar and the blinding flash till then unmoved, paralyzed with dread, and panting for breath, sunk to the ground; while close at my side the Colonel, standing erect in his stirrups, his head uncovered to the pouring sky, cried out:

"THANK G.o.d, WE ARE SAVED!"

There--not three hundred yards in our rear, had pa.s.sed the TORNADO--uprooting trees, prostrating dwellings, and sending many a soul to its last account, but sparing _us_ for another day! For thirty miles through the forest it had mowed a swath of two hundred feet, and then moved on to stir the ocean to its briny depths.

With a full heart, I remounted, and turning my horse, pressed on in the rain. We said not a word till a friendly opening pointed the way to a planter's dwelling. Then calling to me to follow, the Colonel dashed up the by-path which led to the mansion, and in five minutes we were warming our chilled limbs before the cheerful fire that roared and crackled on its broad hearth-stone.

CHAPTER XII.

THE YANKEE-SCHOOL-MISTRESS.

The house was a large, old-fas.h.i.+oned frame building, square as a packing-box, and surrounded, as all country dwellings at the South are, by a broad, open piazza. Our summons was answered by its owner, a well-to-do, substantial, middle-aged planter, wearing the ordinary homespun of the district, but evidently of a station in life much above the common "corn-crackers" I had seen at the country meeting-house. The Colonel was an acquaintance, and greeting us with great cordiality, our host led the way directly to the sitting-room. There we found a bright, blazing fire, and a pair of bright sparkling eyes, the latter belonging to a blithesome young woman of about twenty, with a cheery face, and a half-rustic, half-cultivated air, whom our new friend introduced to us as his wife.

"I regret not having had the pleasure of meeting Mrs. S---- before, but am very happy to meet her now," said the Colonel, with all the well-bred, gentlemanly ease that distinguished him.

"The pleasure is mutual, Colonel J----," replied the lady, "but thirty miles in this wild country, should not have made a neighbor so distant as you have been."

"Business, madam, is at fault, as your husband knows. I have much to do; and besides, all my connections are in the other direction--with Charleston."

"It's a fact, Sally, the Colonel is the d---- busy man in these parts.

Not content with a big plantation and three hundred n.i.g.g.e.rs, he looks after all South Carolina, and the rest of creation to boot," said our host.

"Tom will have his joke, Madam, but he's not far from the truth."

Seeing we were dripping wet, the lady offered us a change of clothing, and retiring to a chamber, we each appropriated a suit belonging to our host, giving our own to a servant, to be dried.

Arrayed in our fresh apparel, we soon rejoined our friends in the sitting-room. The new garments fitted the Colonel tolerably well, but, though none too long, they were a world too wide for me, and as my wet hair hung in smooth flat folds down my cheeks, and my limp s.h.i.+rt-collar fell over my linsey coat, I looked for all the world like a cross between a theatrical Aminodab Sleek and Sir John Falstaff, with the stuffing omitted. When our hostess caught sight of me in this new garb, she rubbed her hands together in great glee, and, springing to her feet, gave vent to a perfect storm of laughter--jerking out between the explosions:

"Why--you--you--look jest like--a scare-crow."

There was no mistaking that hearty, hoydenish manner; and seizing both of her hands in mine, I shouted: "I've found you out--you're a "country-woman" of mine--a clear-blooded Yankee!"

"What! _you_ a Yankee!" she exclaimed, still laughing, "and here with this horrid 'secesherner,' as they call him."

"True as preachin', Ma'am," I replied, adopting the drawl--"all the way from Down East, and Union, tu, stiff as buckram."

"Du tell!" she exclaimed, swinging my hands together as she held them in hers. "If I warn't hitched to this 'ere feller, I'd give ye a smack right on the spot. I'm _so_ glad to see ye."

"Do it, Sally--never mind _me_," cried her husband, joining heartily in the merriment.

Seizing the collar of my coat with both hands, she drew my face down till my lips almost touched hers (I was preparing to blush, and the Colonel shouted, "Come, come, I shall tell his wife"): but then turning quickly on her heel, she threw herself into a chair, exclaiming, "_I_ wouldn't mind, but the _old man would be jealous_." Addressing the Colonel, she added, "_You_ needn't be troubled, sir, no Yankee girl will kiss _you_ till you change your politics."

"Give me that inducement, and I'll change them on the spot," said the Colonel.

"No, no, Dave, 'twouldn't do," replied the planter; "the conversion wouldn't be genuwine--besides such things arn't proper, except 'mong blood-relations--and all the Yankees, you know are first-cousins."

The conversation then subsided into a more placid mood, but lost none of its genial, good humor. Refreshments were soon set before us, and while partaking of them I gathered from our hostess that she was a Vermont country-girl, who, some three years before, had been induced by liberal pay to come South as a teacher. A sister accompanied her, and about a year after their arrival, she married a neighboring planter. Wis.h.i.+ng to be near her sister, our hostess had also married and settled down for life in that wild region. "I like the country very well," she added; "it's a great sight easier living here than in Vermont; but I do hate these lazy, s.h.i.+ftless, good-for-nothing n.i.g.g.e.rs; they are _so_ slow, and _so_ careless, and _so_ dirty, that I sometimes think they will worry the very life out of me. I do believe I'm the hardest mistress in all the district."

I learned from her that a majority of the teachers at the South are from the North, and princ.i.p.ally, too, from New England. Teaching is a very laborious employment there, far more so than with us, for the Southerners have no methods like ours, and the same teacher usually has to hear lessons in branches all the way from Greek and Latin to the simple A B C. The South has no system of public instruction; no common schools; no means of placing within the reach of the sons and daughters of the poor even the elements of knowledge. While the children of the wealthy are most carefully educated, it is the policy of the ruling cla.s.s to keep the great ma.s.s of the people in ignorance; and so long as this policy continues, so long will that section be as far behind the North as it now is, in all that const.i.tutes true prosperity and greatness.

The afternoon wore rapidly and pleasantly away in the genial society of our wayside-friends. Politics were discussed (our host was a Union man), the prospects of the turpentine crop talked over, the recent news canva.s.sed, the usual neighborly topics touched upon, and--I hesitate to confess it--a considerable quant.i.ty of corn whiskey disposed of, before the Colonel discovered, all at once, that it was six o'clock, and we were still seventeen miles from the railway station. Arraying ourselves again in our dried garments, we bade a hasty but regretful "good-bye" to our hospitable entertainers, and once more took to the road.

The storm had cleared away, but the ground was heavy with the recent rain, and our horses were sadly jaded with the ride of the morning. We gave them the reins, and, jogging on at their leisure, it was ten o'clock at night before they landed us at the little hamlet of W---- Station, in the state of North Carolina.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE RAILWAY STATION.

A large hotel, or station-house, and about a dozen log shanties made up the village. Two of these structures were negro-cabins; two were small groceries, in which the vilest alcoholic compounds were sold at a bit (ten cents) a gla.s.s; one was a lawyer's office, in which was the post-office, and a justice's court, where, once a month, the small offenders of the vicinity "settled up their accounts;" one was a tailoring and clothing establishment, where breeches were patched at a dime a st.i.tch, and payment taken in tar and turpentine; and the rest were private dwellings of one apartment, occupied by the grocers, the tailor, the switch-tenders, the postmaster, and the negro _attaches_ of the railroad. The church and the school-house--the first buildings to go up in a Northern village--I have omitted to enumerate, because--they were not there.

One of the natives told me that the lawyer was a "stuck-up critter;" "he don't live; he don't--he puts-up at th' hotel." And the hotel! Would Shakspeare, had he have known it, have written of taking one's _ease_ at his inn? It was a long, framed building, two stories high, with a piazza extending across the side and a front door crowded as closely into one corner as the width of the joist would permit. Under the piazza, ranged along the wall, was a low bench, occupied by about forty tin wash-basins and water-pails, and with coa.r.s.e, dirty crash towels suspended on rollers above it. By the side of each of these towels hung a comb and a brush, to which a lock of everybody's hair was clinging, forming in the total a stock sufficient to establish any barber in the wig business.

It was, as I have said, ten o'clock when we reached the Station.

Throwing the bridles of our horses over the hitching-posts at the door, we at once made our way to the bar-room. That apartment, which was in the rear of the building, and communicated with by a long, narrow pa.s.sage, was filled almost to suffocation, when we entered, by a cloud of tobacco smoke, the fumes of bad whiskey, and a crowd of drunken chivalry, through whom the Colonel with great difficulty elbowed his way to the counter, where "mine host" and two a.s.sistants were dispensing "liquid death," at the rate of ten cents a gla.s.s, and of ten gla.s.ses a minute.

"h.e.l.lo, Cunnel, how ar' ye," cried the red-faced liquor-vender, as he caught sight of my companion, and, relinquis.h.i.+ng his lucrative employment for a moment, took the Colonel's hand, "how ar' ye?"

"Quite well, thank you, Miles," said the Colonel, with a certain patronizing air, "have you seen my man, Moye?"

"Moye, no! What's up with him?"