University of Virginia Library

9. CHAPTER IX.
THE COMING OF THE CIRCUIT RIDER.

COLONEL Wheeler was the standard-bearer of the
flag of independence in the Hissawachee bottom.
He had been a Captain in the Revolution; but
Revolutionary titles showed a marked tendency to
grow during the quarter of a century that followed
the close of the war. An ex-officer's neighbors carried
him forward with his advancing age; a sort of
ideal promotion by brevet gauged the appreciation of
military titles as the Revolution passed into history
and heroes became scarcer. And emigration always
advanced a man several degrees — new neighbors, in
their uncertainty about his rank, being prone to give
him the benefit of all doubts, and exalt as far as possible
the lustre which the new-comer conferred upon
the settlement. Thus Captain Wheeler in Maryland
was Major Wheeler in Western Pennsylvania, and a
full-blown Colonel by the time he had made his second
move, into the settlement on Hissawachee Creek.
And yet I may be wrong. Perhaps it was not the
transplanting that did it. Even had he remained on
the “Eastern Shore,” he might have passed through a
process of canonization as he advanced in life that
would have brought him to a colonelcy: other men
did. For what is a Colonel but a Captain gone to
seed?

“Gone to seed” may be considered a slang expression;
and, as a conscientious writer, far be it from me
to use slang. And I take great credit to myself for
avoiding it just now, since nothing could more perfectly
describe Wheeler. His hair was grizzling, his
shoulders had a chronic shrug, his under lip protruded
in an expression of perpetual resistance, and his prominent
chin and brow seemed to have been jammed together;
the space between was too small. He had an
air of defense; his nature was always in a “guard-against-cavalry”
attitude. He had entered into the
spirit of colonial resistance from childhood; he was
born in antagonism to kings and all that are in authority;
it was a family tradition that he had been
flogged in boyhood for shooting pop-gun wads into
the face of a portrait of the reigning monarch.

When he settled in the Hissawachee bottom, he of
course looked about for the power that was to be resisted,
and was not long in finding it in his neighbor,
Captain Lumsden. He was the one opponent whom
Lumsden could not annoy into submission or departure.
To Wheeler this fight against Lumsden was the
one delightful element of life in the Bottoms. He had
now the comfortable prospect of spending his declining
years in a fertile valley where there was a powerful
foe, whose encroachments on the rights and privileges
of his neighbors would afford him an inexhaustible
theme for denunciation, and a delightful incitement
to the exercise of his powers of resistance. And
thus for years he had eaten his dinners with better
relish because of his contest with Lumsden. Mordecai

could not have had half so much pleasure in staring
stiffly at the wicked Haman as Isaiah Wheeler found
in meeting Captain Lumsden on the road without so
much as a nod of recognition. And Haman's feelings
were not more deeply wounded than Lumsden's.

Colonel Wheeler was not very happily married;
for at home he could find no encroachments to resist.
The perfect temper of his wife disarmed even his opposition.
He had begun his married life by fighting
his wife's Methodism; but when he came to the Hissawachee
and found Methodism unpopular, he took up
arms in its defense.

Such was the man whom Kike had selected as
guardian — a man who, with all his disagreeableness,
was possessed of honesty, a virtue not inconsistent
with oppugnancy. But Kike's chief motive in choosing
him was that he knew that the choice would be a
stab to his uncle's pride. Moreover, Wheeler was the
only man who would care to brave Lumsden's anger
by taking the trust.

Wheeler lived in a log house on the hillside, and
to this house, on the day after the return of Morton
and Kike, there rode a stranger. He was a broad-shouldered,
stalwart, swarthy man, of thirty-five, with a
serious but aggressive countenance, a broad-brim white
hat, a coat made of country jeans, cut straight-breasted
and buttoned to the chin, rawhide boots, and “linsey”
leggings tied about his legs below the knees. He
rode a stout horse, and carried an ample pair of saddle-bags.

Reining his horse in front of the colonel's double

[ILLUSTRATION]

COLONEL WHEELER'S DOORYARD.

[Description: 554EAF. Page 089. In-line engraving of a man with an upraised stick threatening several dogs; a man on a horse looks on in the background.] cabin, he shouted, after the Western fashion, “Hello!
Hello the house!”

At this a quartette of dogs set up a vociferous
barking, ranging in key all the way from the contemptible
treble of an ill-natured “fice” to the deep
baying of a huge bull-dog.

“Hello the house!” cried the stranger.

“Hello! hello!” answered back Isaiah Wheeler,
opening the door, and shouting to the dogs, “You,
Bull, come here! Git out, pup! Clear out, all of
you!” And he accompanied this command by threateningly
lifting a stick, at which two of the dogs scampered

away, and a third sneakingly retreated; but the
bull-dog turned with reluctance, and, without smoothing
his bristles at all, slowly marched back toward the
house, protesting with surly growls against this authoritative
interruption.

“Hello, stranger, howdy?” said Colonel Wheeler,
advancing with caution, but without much cordiality.
He would not commit himself to a welcome too rashly;
strangers needed inspection. “'Light, won't you?”
he said, presently; and the stranger proceeded to dismount,
while the Colonel ordered one of his sons who
came out at that moment to “put up the stranger's
horse, and give him some fodder and corn.” Then
turning to the new-comer, he scanned him a moment,
and said: “A preacher, I reckon, sir?”

“Yes, sir, I'm a Methodist preacher, and I heard
that you wife was a member of the Methodist Church,
and that you were very friendly; so I came round
this way to see if you wouldn't open your doors for
preaching. I have one or two vacant days on my
round, and thought maybe I might as well take Hissawachee
Bottom into the circuit, if I didn't find anything
to prevent.”

By this time the colonel and his guest had reached
the door, and the former only said, “Well, sir, let's go
in, and see what the old woman says. I don't agree
with you Methodists about everything, but I do think
that you are doing good, and so I don't allow anybody
to say anything against circuit riders without
taking it up.”

Mrs. Wheeler, a dignified woman, with a placidly

religious face — a countenance in which scruples are
balanced by evenness of temperament—was at the moment
engaged in dipping yarn into a blue dye that
stood in a great iron kettle by the fire. She made
haste to wash and dry her hands, that she might have
a “good, old-fashioned Methodist shake-hands” with
Brother Magruder, “the first Methodist preacher she
had seen since she left Pittsburg.”

Colonel Wheeler readily assented that Mr. Magruder
should preach in his house. Methodists had just
the same rights in a free country that other people
had. He “reckoned the Hissawachee settlement didn't
belong to one man, and he had fit aginst the King of
England in his time, and was jist as ready to fight
aginst the King of Hissawachee Bottom.” The Colonel
almost relaxed his stubborn lips into a smile when
he said this. Besides, he proceeded, his wife was a
Methodist; and she had a right to be, if she chose.
He was friendly to religion himself, though he wasn't a
professor. If his wife didn't want to wear rings or
artificials, it was money in his pocket, and nobody had
a right to object. Colonel Wheeler plumed himself
before the new preacher upon his general friendliness
toward religion, and really thought it might be set down
on the credit side of that account in which he imagined
some angelic book-keeper entered all his transactions.
He felt in his own mind “middlin' certain,”
as he would have told you, that “betwixt the prayin'
for he got from such a wife as his, and his own gineral
friendliness to the preachers and the Methodis'
meetings, he would be saved at the last, somehow or

nother.” It was not in the man to reflect that his
“gineral friendliness” for the preacher had its origin
in a gineral spitefulness toward Captain Lumsden.

Colonel Wheeler's son was dispatched through the
settlement to inform everybody that there would be
preaching in his house that evening. The news was
told at the Forks, where there was always a crowd of
loafers; and each individual loafer, in riding home
that afternoon, called a “Hello!” at every house he
passed; and when the salutation from within was answered,
remarked that he “thought liker'n not they
had'n heern tell of the preacher's comin' to Colonel
Wheeler's.” And then the eager listener, generally the
woman of the house, would cry out, “Laws-a-massy!
You don't say! A Methodis'? One of the shoutin'
kind, that knocks folks down when he preaches!
What will the Captin' do? They do say he does hate
the Methodis' worse nor copperhead snakes, now.
Some old quarrel, liker'n not. Well, I'm agoin', jist to
see how redikl'us them Methodis' does do!”

The news was sent to Brady's school, which had
“tuck up” for the winter, and from this centre also it
soon spread throughout the neighborhood. It reached
Lumsden's very early in the forenoon.

“Well!” said Lumsden, excitedly, but still with his
little crowing chuckle; “so Wheeler's took the Methodists
in! We'll have to see about that. A man that
brings such people to the settlement ought to be
lynched. But I'll match the Methodists. Where's
Patty? Patty! O, Patty! Bob, run and find Miss
Patty.”

And the little negro ran out, calling, “Miss Patty!
O! Miss Patty! Whah is ye?”

He looked into the smoke-house, and then ran
down toward the barn, shouting, “Miss Patty! O!
Miss Patty!”

Where was Patty?