The Deliverance | Page 4

hung suspended above the encrusted axle, peering
with blinking pale-gray eyes over a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles. In
his appearance there was the hint of a scholarly intention unfulfilled,
and his dress, despite its general carelessness, bespoke a different
standard of taste from that of the isolated dwellers in the surrounding
fields. A casual observer might have classified him as one of the
Virginian landowners impoverished by the war; in reality, he was a
successful lawyer in a neighbouring town, who, amid the overthrow of
the slaveholding gentry some twenty years before, had risen into a
provincial prominence.
His humour met with a slow response from the driver, who sat
playfully flicking at a horsefly on the flank of a tall, raw-boned sorrel.
"Wall, thar's been a sight of rain lately," he observed, with goodnatured
acquiescence, "but I don't reckon the mud's more'n waist deep, an' if
you do happen to git clean down, thar's Sol Peterkin along to pull you
out. Whar're you hidin', Sol? Why, bless my boots, if he ain't gone fast
asleep!"
At this a lean and high-featured matron, encased in the rigidity of her
Sunday bombazine, gave a prim poke with her umbrella in the ribs of a
sparrow-like little man, with a discoloured, scraggy beard, who nodded
in one corner of the long seat.
"I'd wake up if I was you," she remarked in the voice her sex assumes
when virtue lapses into severity.
Starting from his doze, the little man straightened his wiry, sunburned
neck and mechanically raised his hand to wipe away a thin stream of
tobacco juice which trickled from his half-open mouth.
"Hi!we ain't got here a'ready!" he exclaimed, as he spat energetically
into the mud. "I d'clar if it don't beat all--one minute we're thar an' the
next we're here. It's a movin' world we live in, ain't that so, mum?"
Then, as the severe matron still stared unbendingly before her, he
descended between the wheels, and stood nervously scraping his feet in
the long grass by the roadside.

"This here's Sol Peterkin, Mr. Carraway," said the driver, bowing his
introduction as he leaned forward to disentangle the reins from the
sorrel's tail, "an' I reckon he kin pint out Blake Hall to you as well as
another, seem' as he was under-overseer thar for eighteen years befo'
the war. Now you'd better climb in agin, folks; it's time we were off."
He gave an insinuating cluck to the horses, while several passengers,
who had alighted to gather blackberries from the ditch, scrambled
hurriedly into their places. With a single clanking wrench the stage
toiled on, plodding clumsily over the miry road.
As the spattering mud-drops fell round him, Carraway lifted his head
and sniffed the air like a pointer that has been just turned afield. For the
moment his professional errand escaped him as his chest expanded in
the light wind which blew over the radiant stillness of the Virginian
June. From the cloudless sky to its pure reflection in the rain-washed
roads there was barely a descending shade, and the tufts of dandelion
blooming against the rotting rail fence seemed but patches of the
clearer sunshine.
"Bless my soul, it's like a day out of Scripture!" he exclaimed in a tone
that was half-apologetic; then raising his walking-stick he leisurely
swept it into space. "There's hardly another crop, I reckon, between
here and the Hall?"
Sol Peterkin was busily cutting a fresh quid of tobacco from the plug he
carried in his pocket, and there was a brief pause before he answered.
Then, as he carefully wiped the blade of his knife on the leg of his blue
jean overalls, he looked up with a curious facial contortion.
"Oh, you'll find a corn field or two somewhar along," he replied, "but
it's a lanky, slipshod kind of crop at best, for tobaccy's king down here,
an' no mistake. We've a sayin' that the man that ain't partial to the weed
can't sleep sound even in the churchyard, an' thar's some as 'ill swar to
this day that Willie Moreen never rested in his grave because he didn't
chaw, an' the soil smelt jest like a plug. Oh, it's a great plant, I tell you,
suh. Look over thar at them fields; they've all been set out sence the
spell o' rain."
The road they followed crawled like a leisurely river between the
freshly ploughed ridges, where the earth was slowly settling around the
transplanted crop. In the distance, labourers were still at work, passing
in dull-blue blotches between the rows of bright-green leaves that hung

limply on their slender stalks.
"You've lived at the Hall, I hear," said Carraway, suddenly turning to
look at his companion over his lowered glasses.
"When it was the Hall, suh," replied Sol, with