Kitabı oku: «Ruth Fielding Down in Dixie; Great Times in the Land of Cotton», sayfa 6

CHAPTER XII – THE BOY AT THE WAREHOUSE

“Goodness me!” cried Helen to Nettie. “How do you get along with so many of these colored people under foot? I had thought it might be fun to have so many servants; but I don’t believe I could stand it.”

“Oh, I don’t think Aunt Rachel has too many,” Nettie said carelessly. “We don’t mind having them around. As long as their faces are smiling and we know they are happy, we don’t mind. You see, we Southerners actually like the negroes; you Northerners only say you do.”

“Hear! hear!” cried Ruth. “There is a difference.”

“Well,” pouted Helen, “I don’t know that I have any dislike for them. I – I guess maybe I’m not just used to them.”

“It takes several generations of familiarity, I reckon,” said Nettie, with some gravity, “to breed the feeling we Southerners have for the children of our old slaves. Slavery seems to have been a terrible institution to you Northern girls; but we feel that the vast majority of the negroes were better off in those days than they are now.

“Slavery after all is a condition of the mind,” Nettie said. “Those blacks who were intelligent in the old days perhaps should have had their freedom. But few slaves went with empty stomachs in the old days, or had to worry about shelter.

“It is different now. Whites as well as blacks throughout the South often go hungry. Aunt Rachel keeps many more people on the Merredith plantation than she really needs to work it, so that there shall be fewer starving families on the outskirts of the estate.”

“Your aunt is a dear, good woman,” Ruth said warmly. “I am sure whatever she does is right.”

The girls were sitting in comfortable rocking chairs on the broad veranda in the cool of the evening. A mocking-bird began to sing in a tree near by and the three friends broke off their conversation to listen to him.

“I’d have loved to see one of those grand companies of ladies and gentlemen who used to visit here,” said Helen, after a little. “Such a weekend party as that must have been worth while.”

“And you don’t like darkeys!” cried Nettie, laughing merrily. “Why, in those times the place was alive with them. This piece of gravel before the house was haunted by every darkey from the quarters. The gravel was worked like a regular silver-mine. No gentleman mounted his horse before the door here without scattering a handful of silver to the darkeys. Even now, the men working for Aunt Rachel, sometimes find tarnished old silver pieces as they rake over the gravel.”

“Dear me! let’s go silver-mining, Ruthie,” cried Helen. “I need to have my purse replenished already.”

“And if you found any money here you would give it to that bright little girl who waited on us so nicely upstairs,” laughed Ruth.

“Of course. That’s what I want it for,” confessed Helen.

“Your mind is perfectly adjusted to a system of slavery, my dear,” Nettie said to Helen Cameron. “Here is my father’s picture of what slavery meant to the South. He says he was walking along a street in New Orleans years ago and saw an old gentleman grubbing in the mud of a gutter with his cane. The old gentleman finally turned up a half dollar which had been dropped there; and after picking it up and polishing it on his handkerchief to make sure it was good money, he tossed it to the nearest negro idling on the street corner.

“That was slavery. It was the whites who were enslaved to the blacks, after all. Both were bound by the system; but it was the negro who got the best of it, for every half dollar that the white man earned he had to pay for food to keep his slaves. Now,” added Nettie, smiling, “the law even lets the bad white man cheat the ignorant black out of the wages he earns, and the poor black may starve.”

“Dear me!” cried Helen, “we’re getting as sociological as one of Miss Brokaw’s lectures. Let’s not. Keep your information to yourself, please, Miss Parsons. Positively I refuse to learn anything about social conditions in the South while I am in the Land of Cotton. I’ll get my information from text-books and at a distance. This is too beautiful a landscape to have it spoiled by statistics and examples, or any other such trash!”

By and by, as the darkness came swiftly (so swiftly that it surprised the visitors from the North) a bird flew heavily out of the lowlands and pitched upon a dead limb near the house. At once the plaintive cry of “whip-poor-will!” resounded through the night, and Ruth and Helen began to count the number of times in succession the bird uttered its somber note without a break.

Usually the count numbered from forty-three to forty-seven – never an even number; but Nettie said she had heard one demand “the castigation of poor William” more than seventy times before stopping.

The whippoorwill flew to other “pitches” near the house, and once actually lit upon the roof to utter his love-call; but never, Nettie told the other girls, would the bird alight upon a live branch.

Just before his cry began they could hear him “cluck! cluck! cluck!” just like an old hen – or, as Ruth suggested – “like a rheumatic old clock getting ready to strike.”

“He’s clearing his voice,” declared Helen. “Now! off he goes. Isn’t he funny?”

“I wonder what the little whippoorwillies are like?” asked Ruth.

“I don’t know. I never saw the young. But I’ve seen a nest,” said Nettie. “The whippoorwill makes it right out in the open, on the top of an old stump, or on a boulder. There the female lays the eggs and shelters them and the young from the storms with her own body.”

“My, I’d like to see one!” exclaimed Helen.

But there were more interesting things than the nest of the whippoorwill to see about the Merredith plantation. And the sightseeing began the next morning, before the sun had been long up.

Immediately after breakfast, while it was still cool, the horses appeared on the gravel before the great door, each held by a grinning negro lad from the stables. No Southern plantation would be properly equipped without a plentiful supply of good riding stock, and Mrs. Parsons had bred some rather famous horses during the time she had governed her ancestral estate.

Ruth and Helen had learned to ride well when they visited Silver Ranch some years before; so they were not afraid to mount the spirited animals that danced and curveted upon the gravel. Mr. Lomaine, the superintendent of the estate, and whom the visitors had met the evening before, came pacing along from the stables upon a great, black horse, ready to accompany the three girls upon a tour of inspection.

Mr. Lomaine was a very pleasant gentleman and was dressed in black, wearing a broad-brimmed black hat, riding puttees, and gauntlets. The whip he carried was silver-mounted. He had entire charge of the work on the plantation; but the old negro, Patrick Henry, Mammy Dilsey’s husband, had personal care of the house, its belongings, and the other negroes’ welfare.

“Come on, girls,” cried Nettie, showing more vigor than she usually displayed as she was helped into her saddle by one of the attendants. “I’m just aching for a ride.”

They rode, however, with side-saddle, and neither Ruth nor Helen felt as sure of themselves mounted in this way as they had in the West on the cow-ponies belonging to Mr. Bill Hicks.

The morning, however, was delightful. The dogs and little negroes cheered the cavalcade as they passed in sight of the cabins. Had Mr. Lomaine not ordered them back, a dozen or more of both pickaninnies and canines would have followed “de quality” around the plantation.

They rode down from the corn lands to the cotton fields. Negroes and mules were at work everywhere. “I do say!” gasped Helen. “I didn’t know there were so many mules in the whole world. Funny things! with their shaved tails and long ears.”

“And hind feet with the itch!” exclaimed Ruth. “I don’t want to get near the dangerous end of one of those creatures.”

The cavalcade followed the roads through the fields of cotton and down to the river bank. Here stood the long cotton warehouse and the gin-house and press, where the cotton is prepared, baled, and stored for the market. The Merredith cotton was shipped direct from the plantation’s own dock, and the buyers came here at the selling time to inspect and judge the quality of the output.

The warehouse boss, a long, lean, yellow man with a chin whisker that wabbled in a funny way every time he spoke, came out on the platform to speak with Mr. Lomaine. There were some hands inside trundling baled cotton from one end of the dark warehouse to the other.

“Hullo!” exclaimed Mr. Lomaine, within the girls’ hearing, and after a minute or two of desultory conversation with the boss. “Hullo! who’s that white boy you got there, Jimson?”

“That boy?” returned the man, with a broad grin. “That’s a little, starvin’ Yank that come along. I had to feed him; so I thought I’d bettah put him to work. And he kin work – sho’ kin!”

Ruth’s eye would never have been attracted by the slim figure wheeling the big cotton bale had she not overheard this speech. A boy from the North? And he had curly hair.

It was a very dilapidated figure, indeed, that Ruth watched trundle the bale down the shadowy length of the warehouse. When his load was deposited he wheeled the hand-truck back for another bale. His face was red and he was perspiring. Ruth thought the work must be very arduous for his slight figure.

And then she forgot all about anything but the identity of the boy. It was Henry Smith – “Curly” as he was known about Lumberton, New York. She glanced quickly at her chum. Helen saw the boy, too, and had recognized him as quickly as had Ruth herself.

CHAPTER XIII – RUTH IS TROUBLED

“What shall we do about it?” asked Helen.

“Do about what, dear?”

“You know very well, Ruthie Fielding! You saw him as well as I did,” Helen declared.

They were riding slowly back to the Big House after their visit to the river side, and Helen reined her horse close in beside her chum’s mount.

“I know what you mean,” admitted Ruth, placidly. “Do you think it is necessary for us to say anything – especially where others might hear?”

“But that’s Curly!” whispered Helen, fiercely.

“I am sure of it.”

“And did you see how he looked? Why, the boy is in rags. He even looks much worse than when we last saw him – when he saved me from that deer at Norfolk,” and Helen began to giggle at the recollection.

“Something has happened to poor Curly since then,” said Ruth, with a sigh. “I guess he has found out that it is not so much fun to run away as he thought.”

“The man said he was starving,” sighed Helen.

“He certainly must have been having a hard time,” Ruth returned. “I’ll write to his grandmother again. Her answer to my letter written at Old Point Comfort has not arrived yet; but I think she ought to know that we have found Curly again.”

“And tell her he is ragged and hungry. Maybe it will touch her heart,” begged Helen. “But we ought to do something for him, Ruth.”

“Maybe.”

“Of course we should. Why not?”

“It might scare him away if he knew that anybody here had recognized him. It is such a coincidence that he should come right here to this Merredith plantation,” Ruth said. “What do you suppose it means? Could he have known that we were coming here, and is he trying to find us?”

“Oh, Ruth! He’d know we would help him, wouldn’t he?”

“I didn’t think that Curly was the sort of boy to hunt up girl’s help in any case,” laughed Ruth.

“Don’t laugh! it seems so cruel. Hungry!” breathed Helen.

“The boy is learning something,” her chum said, with decision. “Now that he is really away from his grandmother, I hope this will teach him a lesson. I don’t want any harm to come to Curly Smith; but if he learns that his home is better than a loose life among strangers, it will be a good thing.”

“Why, Ruth!” gasped Helen. “You talk just as though the police were not looking for him.”

“Hush! we won’t tell everybody that,” advised Ruth. “Probably they will never discover him here, in any case. His crime is not so great in the eyes of the law.”

“I don’t believe he ever did it!” cried Helen.

“Neither do I. It seems to me,” Ruth said gravely, “that if he had helped those men commit the robbery, he would have gone away from Lumberton with them.”

“That is so!”

“And he shows that he has no criminal friends, or he would not come so far – and all alone. Nor would he have been so forlorn and hungry, if he was willing to steal.”

Ruth wrote her letter, as she promised; and she thought a good deal about the boy they had seen at the cotton warehouse. Suppose Curly Smith should take up his wanderings from this place? Suppose the warehouseman, Mr. Jimson, should discharge him? The man had spoken in rather an unfeeling way of the “little, hungry Yank,” and Ruth did not know how good at heart the lanky, chin-whiskered man was.

She determined to do something to make it reasonably sure that Curly would remain on the Merredith plantation until she could hear from his grandmother. Possibly the trouble in Lumberton might be settled. If the railroad had not lost much money – provided it was really proved that Curly had recklessly helped the thieves – the matter might be straightened out if Mrs. Sadoc Smith would refund a portion of the money lost.

And by this time Ruth believed the boy’s grandmother might be willing to do just that. It was very natural for her to announce in the first flush of her anger and shame, that she would have nothing more to do with her grandson, but Ruth was quite sure she loved him devotedly, and that her heart would soon be yearning for his graceless self.

Besides, when Mrs. Smith read the letter Ruth wrote, she would know that the wandering boy was in trouble and in poverty. As Helen begged her, Ruth had written these facts “strong.” She had made out Curly’s case to be as pitiful as possible, and she hoped for results from Lumberton.

Suppose, however, if a forgiving letter came from Mrs. Sadoc Smith, Curly could not then be found at the warehouse on the river side? Ruth thought of this during the heat of the day, when the family at the Big House rested. That siesta after luncheon seemed necessary here, in the warm, moist climate of the river-lands. Ruth awoke about three o’clock, with an idea for action in Curly Smith’s case. She slipped out of the room without disturbing Helen.

Running downstairs she found that nobody had yet descended. Two of the liveried men rose yawning from the mahogany settees in the hall. A downstairs girl dozed with her head on her arms on the center table in one reception room.

“The castle of the Sleeping Beauty,” murmured Ruth, smiling, and without speaking to any of the house servants, she ran out.

She knew the way to the stables and there were signs of life there. Two or three of the grooms were currying horses in the yard, and idly talking and laughing. One of them threw down the currycomb and brush and ran immediately to Ruth as she appeared at the bars.

Ruth recognized him as the boy who had held her horse while she mounted that morning, and she suspected immediately that he had been instructed to be at her beck and call if she expressed any desire for a mount. She asked him if that was so.

“Yes, ma’am. Patrick Henry say fo’ me t’ ‘tend yo’ if yo’ rode.”

“Can I ride out any time?” asked the girl.

He grinned at her widely. “Sho’ kin, ma’am,” he said. “Dat little bay mare wid de scah on her hip, she at yo’ sarbice – an’ so’s Toby.”

“You are Toby?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am.”

“Then saddle the mare for me at once and – stay! can you go with me?”

“Positive got t’ go wid yo’, miss. Ab-so-lum-lute-ly,” declared the negro, gravely. “Dem’s ma ’structions f’om Patrick Henry.”

“All right, Toby. I want to go back to that cotton warehouse where we stopped this morning. I forgot something.”

“Ready in a pig’s wink, Miss Ruth,” declared the young negro, and ran off to saddle the bay mare and get, for himself, a wicked looking speckled mule.

The bay mare felt just as much refreshed by her siesta as Ruth did. She started when Ruth was in the saddle, seemingly with a determination to break her own record for speed. The girl of the Red Mill, her hat off, her hair flying, and her eyes and cheeks aglow, looked back to see what had become of Toby and the speckled mule.

But she need not have worried about them. Toby had no saddle, and only a rope bridle; but he clung to the mule like a limpet to a rock, with his great-toes between two ribs, “tick’lin’ ob ‘im up!” as he expressed it to the laughing Ruth, when at last she brought the mare to a halt in sight of the river.

“Dishyer mu-el,” declared Toby, “I s’pec could beat out dat mare on a long lane; but I got t’ hol’ Mistah Mu-el in, ’cause Patrick Henry done tol’ me hit ain’ polite t’ ride ahaid ob de quality.”

He dropped respectfully to the rear when they started again, only calling out to Ruth the turns to take as they rode on. In half an hour they were in sight of the cotton warehouse.

It was just then that the girl almost drew her bay mare to a full stop. It smote her suddenly that she had not made up her mind just how she should approach Curly Smith, the runaway.

CHAPTER XIV – RUTH FINDS A HELPER

The warehouse foreman, or “boss,” was sunning himself on the end platform, just where the lap, lap, lap of the river drowsed upon his ear on one side, and the buzzing of the bees drowsed on the other. He started from his nap at the clatter of hoofs and beheld one of those “little Miss Yanks,” as he privately called the visitors to Merredith, reining in her horse before him, with the grinning darkey a proper distance behind.

“Wal, I’ll be whip-sawed!” ejaculated Mr. Jimson, under his breath. Then aloud: “Mighty glad t’ see yo’, miss. It’s a pretty evenin’, ain’t it? What seems t’ be the trouble?”

“Oh, no trouble at all,” said the girl of the Red Mill, brightly. “I – I just thought I’d stop and speak to you.”

“That’s handsome of yo’,” agreed the man, but with a puzzled look.

“I wanted another ride,” went on Ruth, “and I got Toby to take me around this way. Because, you see, I’m curious.”

“Is that so, Miss Ruth?” returned the long and lanky man. “Seems t’ me we most of us are. What is yo’ curiosity aimin’ at right now?”

Ruth laughed, as she saw his gray eyes twinkling. But she put on a brave front and said: “I’d dearly love to see into your cotton storehouse. Can’t I come in? Are the men working there now?”

“Yes’m. And the boys,” said Mr. Jimson, drily.

Ruth had to flush at that. How the boss had guessed her errand she did not know; but she believed he suspected the reason for her visit. It was a moment or two before she could decide whether to confide in him or not.

Meanwhile, Toby held her stirrup and she leaped down and mounted the platform. The negro led the mare and the mule into the shade. Mr. Jimson still smiled lazily at her, and chewed a straw.

Finally, when Ruth was just before the man, she smiled one of her friendly, confiding smiles and he capitulated.

“Miss Ruth,” he said, in his soft, Southern drawl, “Jes’ what is it yo’ want? I saw you an’ that other little Miss Yank – beggin’ yo’ pahdon – lookin’ at that rag’muffin I took in yisterday, an’ I s’pected that you knowed him.”

“Oh, Mr. Jimson! how sharp you are.”

“Pretty sharp,” admitted the boss, with a sly smile. “I’d like t’ know what he’s done.”

“He’s run away from home,” Ruth said quickly.

“Ya-as. They mos’ allus do. But what did he do ’fore he ran away, Miss Ruth?”

The man’s dry, crooked smile held assurance in it. Ruth realized that if she wanted his help – and she did – she must be more open with Mr. Jimson.

“I don’t believe that he has really done anything very bad,” Ruth said gravely. “It was what he was accused of and the punishment threatening him, which made Curly run away.”

“Curly?” repeated Jimson.

“Yes. That’s what we call him. His name is Henry Smith.”

“I’ll be whip-sawed!” exclaimed Jimson. “I like that boy. He give me his real name – he sho’ did. Curly Smith he said ’twas. An’ yit, that‘d be as good a disguise as he could ha’ thunk up, mebbe. Smith’s a mighty common name, ain’t it?”

“Curly always was a frank and truthful boy. But he was full of mischief.”

She knew that she had Mr. Jimson’s sympathy for the boy now, so she began to tell him all about Curly. The warehouse boss listened without interruption save for an occasional, “sho’, now!” or “you don’t say!” Her own and Helen’s adventures since they had left home to come South, seemed to amuse Mr. Jimson a great deal, too.

“I’ll be whip-sawed!” he exclaimed, at last. “You little Miss Yanks are the beatenes’ – I declar’! Never heard tell of sech gals as you are, travelin’ about alone – jest as perky as young pa’tridges! Sho’ now!”

“My chum and I have gone about a good deal alone. We don’t think it so very strange. ‘Most always my friend’s twin brother is with us.”

“Wal, that don’t make so much difference,” said Mr. Jimson. “Her twin brother? Is he older’n she is?” he added, quite innocently.

“Oh, no,” Ruth admitted, stifling a desire to laugh. “My chum and I feel quite confident of finding our way about all right.”

“Sho’ now! I got a gal at home that’s bigger’n older’n you and Miss Helen and her maw wouldn’t trust her t’ go t’ the Big House for a drawin’ of tea. She’d plumb git lost,” chuckled Mr. Jimson. “But now! about this boy. What d’ yo’ want t’ do about him?”

“Oh, Mr. Jimson!” Ruth cried. “I do so want to be sure that Curly stays here until I can hear from his grandmother. I have written to her and begged her to take him back – ”

“An’ git him grabbed by the police?” demanded Jimson.

“He ought to go back and fight it out,” Ruth declared firmly. “He ought not to knock about the world, and fall into bad associations as he may, and come to harm. I don’t believe he will be punished if he is not guilty.”

“It don’t a-tall matter whether a man’s innocent or guilty,” objected Mr. Jimson. “If the police is after him, he’s jest natcher’ly scared.”

“I suppose so,” Ruth admitted. “I would run away myself, I suppose. But I want Curly to go back to Mrs. Sadoc Smith.”

“Jest as you say, Miss Ruth. I’ll hold on to him,” the warehouse boss promised.

“I hope he doesn’t see us girls and get frightened, thinking that we’ll tell on him,” Ruth said.

“I’ll see to it that he doesn’t skedaddle,” Mr. Jimson assured her. “He’s sleepin’ at my shack nights. I’ll lock him in his room.”

Ruth laughed at that, and rather ruefully. “That’s what his grandmother did,” she observed. “But it didn’t do any good, you see. He got out of the window and went over the shed roof to the ground. And it was a twenty-foot drop, too.”

“Don’t yo’ fret,” said Mr. Jimson. “The windah of his room is barred. And he’d half t’ drop into the river. By the looks of things,” he added, cocking his eye at the treetops, “there’s goin’ to be plenty of water in this river pretty soon.”

Jimson was a prophet. That very night it began to rain.