The Tobacco Tiller Part 22

CHAPTER XIII

MR. DOGGETT'S ACQUISITION

"I am now in fortune's power, He that is down can fall no lower."

"Fifty cents! I'm offered a half a dollar! Who'll make it three quarters?" The eyes of the sheriff twinkled, despite his efforts toward solemnity. It was the third Monday morning in August: he stood in front of the Court-house door, facing a "court-day" crowd and conducted the sale of Napper Dunaway, a gentleman afflicted with what the Court had diagnosed to be a case of chronic leisure.

Under the vagrancy law of the State, the remedy for this disease is the enforced sale of the patient's services for a given time,--the purchaser binding himself to furnish food, lodging, and medical attention to his bondman during the term of his compelled servitude.

The crowd pressed up for a nearer view of the young man, who, with a soft white thumb caught in the b.u.t.ton-hole of a pale blue negligee shirt, worn in shirt-waist style, with a crimson silk tie, a tan belt, and a pair of blue serge pantaloons, stood in nonchalant contemplation of the church steeple across the street.

"Who'll give me three quarters of a dollar?" repeated the sheriff.

"I will: yes, sir, I'll make the bid seventy-five cents!" drawled a new-comer, slightly out of breath from his hurry to reach the scene of the sale.

Every eye turned toward the advancer of the bid,--a long man, with a wild red beard. For a few minutes, the bidding between Mr. Ephriam Doggett and a derisive compet.i.tor advanced by cents, and half-cents, but one dollar marked the end of the bids, and Mr. Doggett became, for the s.p.a.ce of ten months, Dunaway's legal owner.

In the summers past, worms had been bad in the Kentucky tobacco fields, but this year, they came in numbers like the a.s.syrian army: by the middle of August, at the time of the leaving off of the spraying with Paris green, Mr. Doggett was, according to the words of his mouth, "in a tight place."

"Hands" were at a premium: his sons, Marshall and j.a.ppy, had a crop of their own several miles off; Mr. Brock had slyly induced two of Mr.

Doggett's "promised" men to stop with him: Mr. Doggett's aids--Dock, Joey, Gran'dad, the brothers, Bunch and Knox Trisler, and his cousins, Roscoe and Ob Doggett, numbered but seven, when there should have been ten, for the worming and the suckering.

Something had to be done, and on court day, with his seven left behind to do battle against the green army, Mr. Doggett went to town in search of a "hand." He heard on the street of the vagrancy sale, and seized the opportunity offered him to secure a free hireling. Time was precious to Mr. Doggett, and fifteen minutes after his one dollar bill went into the pocket of the County's representative, the new acquisition was seated beside him behind the abbreviated tail of Big Money.

"We'll go right on out," he said cheerfully to his purchase: "although,"

he added thoughtfully, "I wuz on the p'int o' fergittin' hit--you'll want to git your clothes. I'll jest drive by, and you can git 'em."

At the door of the yellow cottage on a rear street, Dunaway pointed out as the residence of his father-in-law, Mr. Doggett drew rein. This building, for five months from the day of his marriage, had been Dunaway's home, until his father-in-law, a one-armed pensioner, grew tired of waiting for him to add a day to the six days of manual labor he did during the term of his married life, and inst.i.tuted vagrancy proceedings. The hospitality of the Kentuckian is great and lasting, but even gold will wear thin in time.

"I reckon," delicately hinted Mr. Doggett, "considerin' you hain't exactly in faver with your folks, _I'd_ better go in the house fer the clothes."

"You needn't say _clothes_ here," the peppery little man who answered Mr. Doggett's knock informed him, when he had stated his business. "I'll allow you to have them garments he's got coverin' his worthless hide, but the others, they'll have to go to pay a little on what he's eat off of me since Nan got took in last March! I feel sorry for you, man," he concluded, dryly, "ef you are goin' to undertake to keep him fed. I might have been able to put up with what he et at the table, but the between-meal business of runnin' into victuals and eatin' was more than my pension would stand up against!"

A suspicion that his hand was not going to be the gratuitous addition to his laboring force he had supposed crossed Mr. Doggett's mind, and somewhat ruefully he turned Big Money's head again in the direction of the dry goods houses, and climbed out before the store of Jacob Himmelstein.

"I been a layin' off to drap in to see you, Mr. Himmelstein, yes, sir, I have," Mr. Doggett mollified his Israelitish friend, whose first words of greeting were gentle reproaches: "but I jest hain't possible had time 'tel today, and I come in to see ef you couldn't sorter holp me out.

Can't you gimme some barg'ins?"

"Can I gif _you_ bargains, mine frient?" Mr. Himmelstein's upraised hands spoke worlds of reproach: "I t'ought your memory vas goot!"

"Thar's a kind o' fellers that won't buy nothin' onless might' night'

ever'body says they's gittin' a barg'in," pursued Mr. Doggett, "but I hain't one o' them kind. I wish I wuz."

"Ah, mine frient, you have been to buying elsewhere dan under de sign of J. Himmelstein!" mourned that gentleman.

Mr. Doggett told of his purchase of the morning, and of his garment shortage, and received voluble a.s.surance of Mr. Himmelstein's ability and willingness to fit him out "sheap."

After a half-hour's haggling, the question of everyday clothing was settled in two pairs of azure cottonade "overhalls," three sky-colored hickory shirts, two outfits of underwear, a buckeye hat, and socks (three pairs for a nickel).

"Forty cents seems a reasonable price fer these here jeans breeches,"

Mr. Doggett mused, when he came to buy Dunaway's "Sunday" raiment: "but hain't they a leetle short in the leg? Hit seems to me they won't more'n hit him at the knees."

"Dey'll be all right for fine wedder," Himmelstein a.s.sured him, hastily wrapping up the doubtful pantaloons.

"A hat and shoes," Mr. Doggett reflected: "I hain't able to lay out but a doller er two more on him. I don't keer fer style fer him,--got anytheng a leetle onfashionable in the way o' head and foot coverin's?"

Mr. Himmelstein darted to a box in the extreme back part of his establishment, and after some moment's digging in its depths, brought out a flat derby of the style of twenty years past, and a pair of "needle pointers," number twelves.

"If your man can vear dese," he inveigled Mr. Doggett, "you can haf de great bargain for t'ree quarter of von dollar unt I t'row in de hat for von nickel unt two dimes more."

Mr. Doggett concluded to take the risk of their fitting, and had them wrapped up.

"Before we leave town," observed Dunaway, as Mr. Doggett took the reins, "I'd like to tell you I'm about out of chewing tobacco. 'Lady Isabel' is the brand I use."

"What's the matter with long green?" Mr. Doggett's tone was persuasive.

"I've got a world o' that hanging up at home."

Dunaway coughed apologetically. "My stomach is delicate," he declared airily, "and anything but the Lady Isabel seems to irritate it."

Mr. Doggett climbed to the pavement once more and three minutes later a package of the "Lady Isabel" was added to the company of bundles under the buggy's seat.

Mr. Dunaway, on the drive, proved to be a most agreeable talker, oily of tongue,--eloquently mendacious. He explained to Mr. Doggett the circ.u.mstances that had brought him to his present state. His family was one of wealth and high social position, he said, and he had never known a care until the failure and death of his father. Since that time, travelling with a party of surveyors in the Arkansas swamps, he had contracted malaria, had drifted to Kentucky, and had married. Because of his delicacy, his wife had persuaded her father to allow them to remain with him for a while and the vagrancy proceedings were taken without hint to him that the old gentleman was weary of his presence. He was astounded at this cruel treatment, and could hardly believe that his two trunks of clothing would be withheld from him.

Mr. Doggett listened respectfully, with expressions of interest and sympathy,--and drew his own conclusions.

Mr. Dunaway's garments were neat in appearance, his face was newly shaved, and the visible portions of his person were clean, but, mindful of the suspicions that would be sure to arise in Mrs. Doggett's mind as to the personal cleanliness of a gentleman convicted of vagrancy, unless she had actual convincing evidence of the recent application of water to his epidermis, Mr. Doggett stopped when they reached a covered bridge, spanning a stream that crossed the road.

"How'd you like to go in washin', Dunaway, bein's. .h.i.t's so hot?" he asked, as he hitched his horse to the roadside fence. "I b'leeve _I'll_ go in!"

Dunaway did not particularly relish the idea--it involved the expenditure of some energy--but he politely refrained from objection, and a few minutes later, he and his owner were disrobing behind a clump of elders that hid one of the banks of the Silver Run about fifty yards below the bridge.

Mr. Dunaway was in the deep water, first, enjoying the cool splashing, and swimming toward the bridge, before Mr. Doggett had divested himself of half his garments. This was Mr. Doggett's opportunity. Dunaway had laid his top shirt, his belt, tie, and shoes, apart from his other garments, which fact saved them to him, for when he started in the water, Mr. Doggett remembered other suspicions--unjust or otherwise--that might enter Mrs. Doggett's mind,--suspicions as to possible inhabitants of a vagrant's garments--and in his plunge, accidentally caught his foot in the heap of clothes, sending them into the deep water.

When Dunaway came back to the clump of elders for his clothes, Mr.

Doggett was using the cake of laundry soap he held in his hand, in vigorous applications.

"I thought I'd wash my years and neck good while I wuz at hit, Dunaway,"

he said: "the old lady's mighty perticular. S'pose'n you lay on a little too, hit takes the pike dust off so slick!"

When the two climbed out of the water, Dunaway gazed uncertainly at the spot where had lain his trousers and underwear.

"Where the--" he began. Mr. Doggett interrupted him. "Ef your breeches and thengs hain't gone, Dunaway! That must 'a' been them I stumbled over when I went in! My foot caught on somethin'--I wuz a lookin' at you swimmin' off so peart--and I thought hit wuz a bunch o' gra.s.s er somethin'!"