The Bishop of Cottontown Part 37

And that night and many others did the outlaw watch over the lonely cabin on the mountain side. And she, the outcast woman, slept within, unconscious that she was being protected by the man who had loved her all his life.

CHAPTER XIII

THE THEFT OF A CHILDHOOD

The Watts children were up the next morning by four o'clock.

Mrs. Watts ate, always, by candle-light. The sun, she thought, would be dishonored, were he to find her home in disorder, her breakfast uncooked, her day's work not ready for her, with his first beams.

For Mrs. Watts did not consider that arising at four, and cooking and sweeping and tidying up the cabin, and quarreling with the Bishop as "a petty old bundle of botheration"--and storming around at the children--all by sun-up--this was not work at all.

It was merely an appetizer.

The children were aroused by her this morning with more severity than usual. Half frightened they rolled stupidly out of their beds--Appomattox, Atlanta, and Shiloh from one, and the boys from another. Then they began to put on their clothes in the same listless, dogged, mechanical way they had learned to do everything--learned it while working all day between the whirl of the spindle and the buzz of the bobbin.

The sun had not yet risen, and a cold gray mist crept up from the valley, closing high up and around the wood-girdled brow of the mountain as billows around a rock in the sea. The faint, far-off crowing of c.o.c.ks added to the weirdness; for their shrill voices alone broke through the silence which came down with the mist. Around the brow of Sand Mountain the vapor made a faint halo--touched as it was by the splendid flush of the East.

It was all grand and beautiful enough without, but within was the poverty of work, and the two--poverty and work--had already had their effect on the children, except, perhaps, Shiloh. She had not yet been in the mill long enough to be automatonized.

Looking out of the window she saw the star setting behind the mountain, and she thought it slept, by day, in a cavern she knew of there.

"Wouldn't it be fine, Mattox," she cried, "if we didn't have to work at the mill to-day an' cu'd run up on the mountain an' pick up that star? I seed one fall onct an' I picked it up."

For a moment the little face was thoughtful--wistful--then she added:

"I wonder how it would feel to spen' the day in the woods onct.

Archie B. says it's just fine and flowers grow everywhere. Oh, jes'

to be 'quainted with one Jeree--like Archie B. is--an' have him come to yo' winder every mornin' an' say, '_Wake up, Pet! Wake up, Pet!

Wake up, Pet!_' An' then hear a little 'un over in another tree say, '_So-s-l-ee-py--So-s-l-ee-py!_'"

Her chatter ceased again. Then: "Mattox, did you ever see a rabbit? I seen one onct, a settin' up in a fence corner an' a spittin' on his han's to wash his face."

She laughed at the thought of it. But the other children, who had dressed, sat listlessly in their seats, looking at her with irresponsive eyes, set deep back into tired, lifeless, weazened faces.

"I'd ruther a rabbit 'ud wash his face than mine," drawled Bull Run.

Mrs. Watts came in and jerked the chair from under him and he sat down sprawling. Then he lazily arose and deliberately spat, between his teeth, into the fireplace.

There was not enough of him alive to feel that he had been imposed upon.

For breakfast they had big soda biscuits and fried bacon floating in its own grease. There was enough of it left for the midday lunch.

This was put into a tin pail with a tight fitting top. The pail, when opened, smelt of the death and remains of every other soda biscuit that had ever been laid away within this tightly closed mausoleum of tin.

They had scarcely eaten before the shrill scream of the mill-whistle called them to their work.

Shiloh, at the sound, stuck her small fingers into her ears and shuddered.

Then the others struck out across the yard, and Shiloh followed.

To this child of seven, who had already worked six months in the factory, the scream of the whistle was the call of a frightful monster, whose black smoke-stack of a snout, with its blacker breath coming out, and the flaming eyes of the engine glaring through the smoke, completed the picture of a wild beast watching her. Within, the whirr and tremble of shuttle and machinery were the purr and pulsation of its heart.

She was a nervous, sensitive child, who imagined far more than she saw; and the very uncanniness of the dark misty morning, the silence, broken only by the tremble and roar of the mill, the gaunt shadows of the overtopping mountain, filled her with childish fears.

Nature can do no more than she is permitted; and the terrible strain of twelve hours' work, every day except Sunday, for the past six months, where every faculty, from hand and foot to body, eye and brain, must be alert and alive to watch and piece the never-ceasing breaking of the threads, had already begun to undermine the half-formed framework of that little life.

As she approached the mill she clung to the hand of Appomattox, and shrinking, kept her sister between herself and the Big Thing which put the sweet morning air a-flutter around its lair. As she drew near the door she almost cried out in affright--her little heart grew tight, her lips were drawn.

"Oh, it can't hurt you, Shiloh," said her sister pulling her along.

"You'll be all right when you get inside."

There was a snarling clatter and crescendo tremble, ending in an all-drowning roar, as the big door was pushed open for a moment, and Shiloh, quaking, but brave, was pulled in, giving the tiny spark of her little life to add to the Big Thing's fire.

Within, she was rea.s.sured; for there was her familiar spinning frame, with its bobbins ready to be set to spinning and whirling; and the room was full of people, many as small as she.

The companionship, even of fear, is helpful.

Besides, the roar and clatter drowned everything else.

Shiloh was too small to see, to know; but had she looked to the right as she entered, she had seen a sight which would have caused a stone man to flush with pity. It was Byrd Boyle, one of the mill hands who ran a slubbing machine, and he held in his arms (because they were too young to walk so far) twins, a boy and a girl. And they looked like half made up dolls left out on the gra.s.s, weather-beaten by summer rains. They were too small to know where their places were in the room, and as their father sat them down, in their proper places, it took the two together to run one side of a spinner, and the tiny little workers could scarcely reach to their whirling bobbins.

To the credit of Richard Travis, this working of children under twelve years of age in the mills was done over his protest. Not so with Kingsley and his wife, who were experienced mill people from New England and knew the harm of it--morally, physically. Travis had even made strict regulations on the subject, only to be overruled by the combined disapproval of Kingsley and the directors and, strange to say, of the parents of the children themselves. His determination that only children of twelve years and over should work in the mill came to naught, more from the opposition of the parents themselves than that of Kingsley. These, to earn a little more for the family, did not hesitate to bring a child of eight to the mill and swear it was twelve. This and the ruling of the directors,--and worse than all, the lack of any state law on the subject,--had brought about the pitiful condition which prevailed then as now in Southern cotton mills.

There was no talking inside the mill. Only the Big Thing was permitted to talk. No singing--for songs come from the happy heart of labor, unshackled. No noise of childhood, though the children were there. They were flung into an arena for a long day's fight against a thing of steel and steam, and there was no time for anything save work, work, work--walk, walk, walk--watch, forever watch,--the interminable flying whirl of spindle and spool.

Early as it was, the children were late, and were soundly rebuffed by the foreman.

The scolding hurt only Shiloh--it made her tremble and cry. The others were hardened--insensible--and took it with about the same degree of indifference with which caged and starved mice look at the man who pours over their wire traps the hot water which scalds them to death.

The fight between steel, steam and child-flesh was on.

Shiloh, Appomattox and Atlanta were spinners.

Spinners are small girls who walk up and down an aisle before a spinning-frame and piece up the threads which are forever breaking.

There were over a hundred spindles on each side of the frame, each revolving with the rapidity of an incipient cyclone and snapping every now and then the delicate white thread that was spun out like spiders' web from the rollers and the cylinders, making a balloon-like gown of cotton thread, which settled continuously around the bobbin.

All day long and into the night, they must walk up and down, between these two rows of spinning-frames, amid the whirling spindles, piecing the broken threads which were forever breaking.

It did not require strength, but a certain skill, which, unfortunately, childhood possessed more than the adult. Not power, but dexterity, watchfulness, quickness and the ability to walk--as children walk--and watch--as age should watch.

No wonder that in a few months the child becomes, not the flesh and blood of its heredity, but the steel and wood of its environment.

Bull Run and Seven Days were doffers, and confined to the same set of frames. They followed their sisters, taking off the full bobbins and throwing them into a cart and thrusting an empty bobbin into its place. This requires an eye of lightning and a hand with the quickness of its stroke.

For it must be done between the pulsings of the Big Thing's heart--a flash, a snap, a snarl of broken thread--up in the left hand flies the bobbin from its disentanglement of thread and skein, and down over the buzzing point of steel spindles settles the empty bobbin, thrust over the spindle by the right.