University of Virginia Library

III.

On this particular morning, the fourth anniversary of the fatal advent of Apollo Gump into his store at Winchester, as the Colonel sat smoking in his chair, a covered wagon came toiling slowly up from the south. The horses were thin and fagged, and it was all that they could do to drag the creaking wagon. The harness was old and patched with rope. Over the hames and along the back strap hung pieces of sunflower brush to serve as fly nets. The wagon stopped at the well and two little boys clambered out and came trotting up the path toward the store. As they came the Colonel heard them chattering together in a broad Southern dialect; and the sound of his own tongue was sweet to his ears.

"What is it, boys?" he asked, coming to the door.

"Say, boss, kin we git some watah at yo' well?"

"Of course you can, boys. Git all you want."

"Thank yo', sir ;" and the lads trotted back to the wagon.

The Colonel took up his stick and

followed them. He had not seen such good natured, tow-headed little chaps for a long while; and he was fond of children. A little girl, dressed in that particularly ugly shade of red in which farming people seem to delight, clambered out of the wagon and went up to the well with a tin cup, picking her way carefully with her bare feet to avoid the sand burrs. A fretful voice called from the wagon.

"Law me, boys, haint you most got that watah yit?"

A wan woman's face appeared at the front of the wagon, and she sat down and coughed heavily, holding her hand over her chest as if it hurt her. The little girl filled the tin cup and ran toward the wagon.

"Howdy do, sir?" said the woman, turning to the Colonel as soon as she had finished drinking.

"Right smart, ma am, thank 'ee."

"Mercy, air yo' from the South? Virginy? Laws! I am from Mizzoura myself an' I wisht I was back there. I 'low we'd be well enough off if we could git back to Pap."

She looked wistfully off toward the southwest and put her hand to her side again. There was something in the look of her big, hollow eyes that touched the Colonel. He told her she had better stay there a few days and rest the horses,—she did not look well enough to go on.

"No, thank yo', sir, we must git on. I'll be better in the mornin', maybe. I was feelin' right smart yisterday. It's my lungs, the slow consumption. I think I'll last till I git back to Pap. There has been a good deal of the consumption in our family, an' they most all last." She talked nervously on, breathing heavily between her words. "Haint there a town Eldorader somewheres about here?"

The Colonel flushed painfully. "Yes, this is El Dorado."

"Law me, purty lookin' town!" said the woman, laughing dismally. "Superb's better'n this." She pronounced Superb as though it had but one syllable. "They got a blacksmith shop an' a hardware store there, anyways. I am from nigh Superb, yo' see. We moved there ten years ago, when the country was lookin' mighty green and purty. It's all done burnt up long ago. It's that dry we couldn't raise any garden stuff there these three years. Everything's gone now, exceptin' these horses Pap give me when I was married. No, my man haint with me; he died jist afore we come away. A bull gored him through an' through, an' he crawled outsiden the bob-wire fence and died. It was mighty hard. He didn't want to die there; he craved to die in Mizzoura. We shot the bull and brought t'other cattle with us; but they all died on the way."

She closed her eyes and leaned back against the side of the wagon. Suddenly she roused herself and said:

"Law me, boys, this must be the sto' that man told us on. Yo' see our meat and stuff give out most a week ago, an' we been a livin' on pancakes ever since. We was all gittin' sick, fur we turned agin' 'em, when we met a feller on horseback down the valley, a mighty nice lookin' feller, an' he give us five dollars an' told us we'd find a store someers up here an' could git some groceries."

"It must have been one of them loan company fellows," said the Colonel meditatively. "They still come sneakin' about once in a while, though I don't know what they're after. They haven't left us much but the dirt, an' I reckon that wouldn't do 'em much good if they could carry it off."

"That I can't tell yo'. I never seen him befo',—but he was a mighty kind sort of a feller. He give us the money, and he give me some brandy."

The Colonel helped her out of the wagon, and they went up to the store, while the boys watered the horses. Their purchases were soon made; but the Colonel refused to take their money.

"No, ma'am, I can't do that. You'll need your money before you get to Missouri. It's all in the family, between blood kin like. We're both from the South; and I reckon it would have been enough better for us if we'd never left it."

"Thank yo' mighty kindly, sir. Yo' sholey can't be doin' much business heah; better git in an' go with us. Good day to yo', an' thank you kindly, sir."

The Colonel stood wistfully watching the wagon until it rolled slowly out of sight, and then went back to his store, and with a sigh sat down,—sat down to wait until water came from the rock and verdure from the desert, a sort of Sphinx of the Solomon who sat waiting for the end of time. This was a day when his mind dwelt even more than usual upon his misfortunes, and homesickness was heavy upon him, and he yearned for his own people and the faces of his kindred; for the long Virginia twilights in which he and Major Denney used to sit under the great trees in the courthouse yard, living the siege of Richmond over again; for the old comrades who took a drink with him at the Taylor House bar; for the little children who rolled their hoops before his door every morning, and went nutting with him in the fall; for the Great North Mountains, where the frosts would soon be kindling the maples and hickories into flame; for the soft purple of the Blue Ridge lying off to the eastward; and for that sound which every Virginian hears forever and forever in his dreams, that rhythmic song of deathless devotion, deep and solemn as the cadence of epic verse, which the Potomac and Shenandoah sing to the Virginia shore as they meet at Harper's Ferry. To every exile from the Valley of Virginia that sound is as the voice of his mother, bidding him keep his honor clean, and forever calling him to come home. The Colonel had stopped his horse there on the moonlight night in '62 when he rode away to the wars, and listened long to that sound; and looking up at the towering grandeur of Maryland heights above him, he had lifted his hand and sworn the oath that every young Virginian swore and that every young Virginian kept. For if the blood shed for those noble rivers could have been poured into their flood, they would have run crimson to the sea; and it is of that that they sing alway as they meet, chanting the story over and over in the moonlight and the sunlight, through time and change unable to forget all that wasted glory of youth, all that heroic love. Before now, when the old man had heard them calling to him in the lonely winter nights, he had bowed his head in his hands and wept in an almost physical passion of homesickness.

Toward evening the clouds banked up in the western sky, and with the night a violent storm set in, one of those drenching rains that always come too late in that country, after a barren summer has waned into a fruitless autumn. For some reason he felt indisposed to go to bed. He sat watching the lightning from the window and listening to the swollen Solomon, that tore between its muddy banks with a sullen roar, as though it resented this intrusion upon its accustomed calm and indolence. Once he thought he saw a light flash from one of the bluffs across the river, but on going to the door all was dark. At last he regretfully put out his lamp and went to bed.