The Bishop of Cottontown Part 12

General Travis laughed, and that season one of his horses won the Tennessee Valley Futurity, worth thirty-thousand dollars--and the splendid estate was again free from debt.

There was not a negro on the place who did not love the overseer, not one who did not carry that love to the extent of doing his best to please him. He had never been known to punish one, and yet the work done by the Travis hands was proverbial.

Among his duties as overseer, the entire charge of the Westmore stable of thoroughbreds fell to his care. This was as much from love as choice, for never was a man born with more innate love of all dumb creatures than the preacher-overseer.

"I've allers contended that a man could love G.o.d an' raise horses, too,"

he would say; and it was ludicrous to see him when he went off to the races, filling the tent trunk with religious tracts, which, after the races, he would distribute to all who would read them. And when night came he would regularly hold prayers in his tent--prayer-meetings in which his auditors were touts, stable-boys and gamblers. And woe to the stable-boy who uttered an oath in his presence or dared to strike or maltreat any of his horses!

He preached constantly against gambling on the races. "That's the Devil's end of it," he would say--"The Almighty lets us raise good horses as a benefit to mankind, an' the best one wins the purse. It was the Devil's idea that turned 'em into gambling machines."

No one ever doubted the honesty of his races. When the Travis horses ran, the racing world knew they ran for blood.

Physically, he had been an athlete--a giant, and unconscious of his strength. Incidentally, he had taken to wrestling when a boy, and as a man his fame as a wrestler was coincident with the Tennessee Valley. It was a manly sport which gave him great pleasure, just as would the physical development of one of his race horses. Had he lived in the early days of Greece, he would have won in the Olympian wrestling match.

There was in Hillard Watts a trait which is one of the most p.r.o.nounced of his type of folks,--a st.u.r.dy, honest humor. Humor, but of the Cromwell type--and withal, a kind that went with praying and fighting. Possessed, naturally, of a strong mind of great good sense, he had learned to read and write by studying the Bible--the only book he had ever read through and through and which he seemed to know by heart. He was earnest and honest in all things, but in his earnestness and strong fight for right living there was the twinkle of humor. Life, with him, was a serious fight, but ever through the smoke of its battle there gleamed the bright sun of a kindly humor.

The overseer's home was a double log hut on the side of the mountain.

His plantation, he called it,--for having been General Travis's overseer, he could not imagine any farm being less than a plantation.

It consisted of forty acres of flinty land on the mountain side--"too po' to sprout cow-peas," as his old wife would always add--"but hits pow'ful for blackberries, an' if we can just live till blackberry time comes we can take keer ourselves."

Mrs. Watts had not a lazy bone in her body. Her religion was work: "Hit's nature's remedy," she would add--"wuck and five draps o'

turpentine if you're feelin' po'ly."

She despised her husband's ways and thought little of his religion.

Her tongue was frightful--her temper worse. Her mission on earth--aside from work--work--work--was to see that too much peace and good will did not abide long in the same place.

Elder b.u.t.ts, the Hard-Sh.e.l.l preacher, used to say: "She can go to the full of the moon mighty nigh every month 'thout raisin' a row, if hard pressed for time an' she thinks everybody else around her is miser'ble. But if things look too peaceful and happy, she'll raise sand in the last quarter or bust. The Bishop's a good man, but if he ever gits to heaven, the bigges' diamon' in his crown'll be because he's lived with that old 'oman an' ain't committed murder. I don't believe in law suits, but if he ain't got a damage case agin the preacher that married him, then I'm wrong."

But no one ever heard the old man use harsher language in speaking of her than to remark that she was "a female Jineral--that's what Tabitha is."

Perhaps she was, and but for her the Bishop and his household had starved long ago.

"Furagin' is her strong point"--he would always add--"she'd made Albert Sydney Johnston a great chief of commissary."

And there was not an herb of any value that Mrs. Watts did not know all about. Any fair day she might be seen on the mountain side plucking edibles. Ginseng was her money crop, and every spring she would daily go into the mountain forests and come back with enough of its roots to help them out in the winter's pinch.

"Now, if anybody'll study Nature," she would say, "they'll see she never cal'c'lated to fetch us here 'ithout makin' 'lowance fur to feed us. The fus' thing that comes up is dandelions--an' I don't want to stick my tooth in anything that's better than dandelion greens biled with hog-jowl. I like a biled dinner any way. Sas'fras tea comes mighty handy with dandelions in the spring, an' them two'll carry us through April. Then comes wild lettice an' tansy-tea--that's fur May. Blackberries is good fur June an' the jam'll take us through winter if Bull Run and Appomattox ain' too healthy. In the summer we can live on garden truck, an' in the fall there is wild reddishes an'

water-cresses an' spatterdock, an' nuts an' pertatoes come in mighty handy fur winter wuck. Why, I was born wuckin'--when I was a gal I cooked, washed and done house-work for a family of ten, an' then had time to spin ten hanks o' yarn a day."

"Now there's the old man--he's too lazy to wuck--he's like all parsons, he'd rather preach aroun' all his life on a promise of heaven than to wuck on earth for cash!"

"How did I ever come to marry Hillard Watts? Wal, he wa'n't that triflin' when I married him. He didn't have so much religiun then.

But I've allers noticed a man's heredity for no-countness c.r.a.ps out after he's married. Lookin' back now I reckin' I married him jes' to res' myself. When I'm wuckin' an' git tired, I watches Hillard doin'

nothin' awhile an' it hopes me pow'ful."

"He gits so busy at it an' seems so contented an' happy."

Besides his wife there were five grandchildren in his family--children of the old man's son by his second wife. "Their father tuck after his stepmother," he would explain regretfully, "an'

wucked hisself to death in the cotton factory. The dust an' lint give him consumption. He was the only man I ever seed that tuck after his stepmother"--he added sadly.

An old soldier never gets over the war. It has left a nervous shock in his make-up--a memory in all his after life which takes precedence over all other things. The old man had the naming of the grandchildren, and he named them after the battles of the Civil war.

Bull Run and Seven Days were the boys. Atlanta, Appomattox and Shiloh were the girls. His apology for Shiloh was: "You see I thout I'd name the last one Appomattox. Then came a little one befo' her mammy died, so weak an' pitiful I named her Shiloh."

It was the boast of their grandmother--that these children--even little Shiloh--aged seven--worked from ten to twelve hours every day in the cotton factory, rising before day and working often into the night, with forty minutes at noon for lunch.

They had not had a holiday since Christmas, and on the last anniversary of that day they had worked until ten o'clock, making up for lost time. Their pay was twenty-five cents a day--except Shiloh, who received fifteen.

"But I'll soon be worth mo', pap," she would say as she crawled up into the old man's lap--her usual place when she had eaten her supper and wanted to rest. "An you know what I'm gwine do with my other nickel every day? I'm gwine give it to the po' people of Indy an'

China you preaches about."

And thus she would prattle--too young to know that, through the cupidity of white men, in this--the land of freedom and progress--she--this blue-eyed, white-skinned child of the Saxon race, was making the same wages as the Indian sepoy and the Chinese coolie.

It was Sat.u.r.day night and after the old man had put Shiloh to bed, he mounted his horse and rode across the mountain to Westmoreland.

"Oh," said the old lady--"he's gwine over to Miss Alice's to git his Sunday School less'n. An' I'd like to know what good Sunday school less'ns 'll do any body. If folks'd git in the habit of wuckin' mo'

an' prayin' less, the worl'ud be better off, an' they'd really have somethin' to be thankful fur when Sunday comes, 'stid of livin' frum han' to mouth an' trustin' in some unknown G.o.d to cram feed in you'

crops."

Hardened by poverty, work, and misfortune, she was the soul of pessimism.

CHAPTER VIII

WESTMORELAND

From The Gaffs to Westmoreland, the home of Alice Westmore, was barely two miles up the level white pike.

Jim sat in the buggy at The Gaffs holding the horses while Richard Travis, having eaten his supper, was lighting a cigar and drawing on his overcoat, preparatory to riding over to Westmoreland.

The trotters stood at the door tossing their heads and eager to be off. They were cherry bays and so much alike that even Jim sometimes got them mixed. They were clean-limbed and racy looking, with flanks well drawn up, but with a broad bunch of powerful muscles which rolled from hip to back, making a st.u.r.dy back for the splendid full tails which almost touched the ground. In front they stood up straight, deep-chested, with clean bony heads, large luminous eyes and long slender ears, tapering into a point as velvety and soft as the tendril-bud on the tip of a Virginia creeper.

They stood shifting the bits nervously. The night air was cool and they wanted to go.

Travis came out and sprang from the porch to the buggy seat with the quick, sure footing of an athlete. Jim sat on the offside and pa.s.sed him the lines just as he sang cheerily out:

"Heigh-ho--my honies--go!"

The two mares bounded away so quickly and keenly that the near mare struck her quarters and jumped up into the air, running. Her off mate settled to work, trotting as steadily as a bolting Caribou, but pulling viciously.

Travis twisted the near bit with a deft turn of his left wrist, and as the two mares settled to their strides there was but one stroke from their shoes, so evenly and in unison did they trot. Down the level road they flew, Travis sitting gracefully upright and holding the lines in that sure, yet careless way which comes to the expert driver with power in his arms.

"How many times must I tell you, Jim," he said at last rather gruffly--"never to bring them out, even for the road, without their boots? Didn't you see Lizette grab her quarters and fly up just now?"

Jim was duly penitent.