The Battle Ground | Page 2

blew, fanning the even heads of the bearded grain and dropping suddenly against the sunny mountains in the distance. In the nearer pasture, where the long grass was strewn with wild flowers, red and white cattle were grazing beside a little stream, and the tinkle of the cow bells drifted faintly across the slanting sunrays. It was open country, with a peculiar quiet cleanliness about its long white roads and the genial blues and greens of its meadows.
"Ain't I glad, O Lord!" chanted the boy again.
The little girl stirred impatiently, her gaze fluttering from the landscape.
"Old Aunt Ailsey's conjured all the tails off Sambo's sheep," she remarked, with feminine wile. "I saw 'em hanging on her door."
"Oh, shucks! she can't conjure!" scoffed the boy. "She's nothing but a free nigger, anyway--and besides, she's plum crazy--"
"I saw 'em hanging on her door," steadfastly repeated the little girl. "The wind blew 'em right out, an' there they were."
"Well, they wan't Sambo's sheep tails," retorted the boy, conclusively, "'cause Sambo's sheep ain't got any tails."
Brought to bay, the little girl looked doubtfully up and down the turnpike. "Maybe she conjured 'em on first," she suggested at last.
"Oh, you're a regular baby, Betty," exclaimed the boy, in disgust. "You'll be saying next that she can make rattlesnake's teeth sprout out of the ground."
"She's got a mighty funny garden patch," admitted Betty, still credulous. Then she jumped up and ran along the road. "Here's Virginia!" she called sharply, "an' I beat her! I beat her fair!"
A second little girl came panting through the dust, followed by a small negro boy with a shining black face. "There's a wagon comin' roun' the curve," she cried excitedly, "an' it's filled with old Mr. Willis's servants. He's dead, and they're sold--Dolly's sold, too."
She was a fragile little creature, coloured like a flower, and her smooth brown hair hung in silken braids to her sash. The strings of her white pique bonnet lined with pink were daintily tied under her oval chin; there was no dust on her bare legs or short white socks.
As she spoke there came the sound of voices singing, and a moment later the wagon jogged heavily round a tuft of stunted cedars which jutted into the long curve of the highway. The wheels crunched a loose stone in the road, and the driver drawled a, patient "gee-up" to the horses, as he flicked at a horse-fly with the end of his long rawhide whip. There was about him an almost cosmic good nature; he regarded the landscape, the horses and the rocks in the road with imperturbable ease.
Behind him, in the body of the wagon, the negro women stood chanting the slave's farewell; and as they neared the children, he looked back and spoke persuasively. "I'd set down if I was you all," he said. "You'd feel better. Thar, now, set down and jolt softly."
But without turning the women kept up their tremulous chant, bending their turbaned heads to the imaginary faces upon the roadside. They had left their audience behind them on the great plantation, but they still sang to the empty road and courtesied to the cedars upon the way. Excitement gripped them like a frenzy--and a childish joy in a coming change blended with a mother's yearning over broken ties.
A bright mulatto led, standing at full height, and her rich notes rolled like an organ beneath the shrill plaint of her companions. She was large, deep-bosomed, and comely after her kind, and in her careless gestures there was something of the fine fervour of the artist. She sang boldly, her full body rocking from side to side, her bared arms outstretched, her long throat swelling like a bird's above the gaudy handkerchief upon her breast.
The others followed her, half artlessly, half in imitation, mingling with their words grunts of self-approval. A grin ran from face to face as if thrown by the grotesque flash of a lantern. Only a little black woman crouching in one corner bowed herself and wept.
The children had fallen back against the stone wall, where they hung staring.
"Good-by, Dolly!" they called cheerfully, and the woman answered with a long-drawn, hopeless whine:--
"Gawd A'moughty bless you twel we Meet agin."
Zeke broke from the group and ran a few steps beside the wagon, shaking the outstretched hands.
The driver nodded peaceably to him, and cut with a single stroke of his whip an intricate figure in the sand of the road. "Git up an' come along with us, sonny," he said cordially; but Zeke only grinned in reply, and the children laughed and waved their handkerchiefs from the wall. "Good-by, Dolly, and Mirandy, and Sukey Sue!" they shouted, while the women, bowing over the rolling wheels, tossed back a fragment of the song:--
"We hope ter meet you in heaven, whar we'll