"Well," pouted Helen, "I don"t know that I have any dislike for them.
I-I guess maybe I"m not just used to them."
"It takes several generations of familiarity, I reckon," said Nettie, with some gravity, "to breed the feeling we Southerners have for the children of our old slaves. Slavery seems to have been a terrible inst.i.tution to you Northern girls; but we feel that the vast majority of the negroes were better off in those days than they are now.
"Slavery after all is a condition of the mind," Nettie said. "Those blacks who were intelligent in the old days perhaps should have had their freedom. But few slaves went with empty stomachs in the old days, or had to worry about shelter.
"It is different now. Whites as well as blacks throughout the South often go hungry. Aunt Rachel keeps many more people on the Merredith plantation than she really needs to work it, so that there shall be fewer starving families on the outskirts of the estate."
"Your aunt is a dear, good woman," Ruth said warmly. "I am sure whatever she does is right."
The girls were sitting in comfortable rocking chairs on the broad veranda in the cool of the evening. A mocking-bird began to sing in a tree near by and the three friends broke off their conversation to listen to him.
"I"d have loved to see one of those grand companies of ladies and gentlemen who used to visit here," said Helen, after a little. "Such a weekend party as that must have been worth while."
"And you don"t like darkeys!" cried Nettie, laughing merrily. "Why, in those times the place was alive with them. This piece of gravel before the house was haunted by every darkey from the quarters. The gravel was worked like a regular silver-mine. No gentleman mounted his horse before the door here without scattering a handful of silver to the darkeys.
Even now, the men working for Aunt Rachel, sometimes find tarnished old silver pieces as they rake over the gravel."
"Dear me! let"s go silver-mining, Ruthie," cried Helen. "I need to have my purse replenished already."
"And if you found any money here you would give it to that bright little girl who waited on us so nicely upstairs," laughed Ruth.
"Of course. That"s what I want it for," confessed Helen.
"Your mind is perfectly adjusted to a system of slavery, my dear,"
Nettie said to Helen Cameron. "Here is my father"s picture of what slavery meant to the South. He says he was walking along a street in New Orleans years ago and saw an old gentleman grubbing in the mud of a gutter with his cane. The old gentleman finally turned up a half dollar which had been dropped there; and after picking it up and polishing it on his handkerchief to make sure it was good money, he tossed it to the nearest negro idling on the street corner.
"_That_ was slavery. It was the whites who were enslaved to the blacks, after all. Both were bound by the system; but it was the negro who got the best of it, for every half dollar that the white man earned he had to pay for food to keep his slaves. Now," added Nettie, smiling, "the law even lets the bad white man cheat the ignorant black out of the wages he earns, and the poor black may starve."
"Dear me!" cried Helen, "we"re getting as sociological as one of Miss Brokaw"s lectures. Let"s not. Keep your information to yourself, please, Miss Parsons. Positively I refuse to learn anything about social conditions in the South while I am in the Land of Cotton. I"ll get my information from text-books and at a distance. This is too beautiful a landscape to have it spoiled by statistics and examples, or any other _such trash_!"
By and by, as the darkness came swiftly (so swiftly that it surprised the visitors from the North) a bird flew heavily out of the lowlands and pitched upon a dead limb near the house. At once the plaintive cry of "whip-poor-will!" resounded through the night, and Ruth and Helen began to count the number of times in succession the bird uttered its somber note without a break.
Usually the count numbered from forty-three to forty-seven-never an even number; but Nettie said she had heard one demand "the castigation of poor William" more than seventy times before stopping.
The whippoorwill flew to other "pitches" near the house, and once actually lit upon the roof to utter his love-call; but never, Nettie told the other girls, would the bird alight upon a live branch.
Just before his cry began they could hear him "cluck! cluck! cluck!"
just like an old hen-or, as Ruth suggested-"like a rheumatic old clock getting ready to strike."
"He"s clearing his voice," declared Helen. "Now! off he goes. Isn"t he funny?"
"I wonder what the little whippoorw.i.l.l.i.e.s are like?" asked Ruth.
"I don"t know. I never saw the young. But I"ve seen a nest," said Nettie. "The whippoorwill makes it right out in the open, on the top of an old stump, or on a boulder. There the female lays the eggs and shelters them and the young from the storms with her own body."
"My, I"d like to see one!" exclaimed Helen.
But there were more interesting things than the nest of the whippoorwill to see about the Merredith plantation. And the sightseeing began the next morning, before the sun had been long up.
Immediately after breakfast, while it was still cool, the horses appeared on the gravel before the great door, each held by a grinning negro lad from the stables. No Southern plantation would be properly equipped without a plentiful supply of good riding stock, and Mrs.
Parsons had bred some rather famous horses during the time she had governed her ancestral estate.
Ruth and Helen had learned to ride well when they visited Silver Ranch some years before; so they were not afraid to mount the spirited animals that danced and curveted upon the gravel. Mr. Lomaine, the superintendent of the estate, and whom the visitors had met the evening before, came pacing along from the stables upon a great, black horse, ready to accompany the three girls upon a tour of inspection.
Mr. Lomaine was a very pleasant gentleman and was dressed in black, wearing a broad-brimmed black hat, riding puttees, and gauntlets. The whip he carried was silver-mounted. He had entire charge of the work on the plantation; but the old negro, Patrick Henry, Mammy Dilsey"s husband, had personal care of the house, its belongings, and the other negroes" welfare.
"Come on, girls," cried Nettie, showing more vigor than she usually displayed as she was helped into her saddle by one of the attendants.
"I"m just aching for a ride."
They rode, however, with side-saddle, and neither Ruth nor Helen felt as sure of themselves mounted in this way as they had in the West on the cow-ponies belonging to Mr. Bill Hicks.
The morning, however, was delightful. The dogs and little negroes cheered the cavalcade as they pa.s.sed in sight of the cabins. Had Mr.
Lomaine not ordered them back, a dozen or more of both pickaninnies and canines would have followed "de quality" around the plantation.
They rode down from the corn lands to the cotton fields. Negroes and mules were at work everywhere. "I do say!" gasped Helen. "I didn"t know there were so many mules in the whole world. Funny things! with their shaved tails and long ears."
"And hind feet with the itch!" exclaimed Ruth. "I don"t want to get near the _dangerous_ end of one of those creatures."
The cavalcade followed the roads through the fields of cotton and down to the river bank. Here stood the long cotton warehouse and the gin-house and press, where the cotton is prepared, baled, and stored for the market. The Merredith cotton was shipped direct from the plantation"s own dock, and the buyers came here at the selling time to inspect and judge the quality of the output.
The warehouse boss, a long, lean, yellow man with a chin whisker that wabbled in a funny way every time he spoke, came out on the platform to speak with Mr. Lomaine. There were some hands inside trundling baled cotton from one end of the dark warehouse to the other.
"Hullo!" exclaimed Mr. Lomaine, within the girls" hearing, and after a minute or two of desultory conversation with the boss. "Hullo! who"s that white boy you got there, Jimson?"
"That boy?" returned the man, with a broad grin. "That"s a little, starvin" Yank that come along. I had to feed him; so I thought I"d bettah put him to work. And he kin work-sho" kin!"
Ruth"s eye would never have been attracted by the slim figure wheeling the big cotton bale had she not overheard this speech. A boy from the North? And he had curly hair.
It was a very dilapidated figure, indeed, that Ruth watched trundle the bale down the shadowy length of the warehouse. When his load was deposited he wheeled the hand-truck back for another bale. His face was red and he was perspiring. Ruth thought the work must be very arduous for his slight figure.
And then she forgot all about anything but the ident.i.ty of the boy. It was Henry Smith-"Curly" as he was known about Lumberton, New York. She glanced quickly at her chum. Helen saw the boy, too, and had recognized him as quickly as had Ruth herself.
CHAPTER XIII-RUTH IS TROUBLED
"What shall we do about it?" asked Helen.
"Do about what, dear?"
"You know very well, Ruthie Fielding! You saw him as well as I did,"
Helen declared.
They were riding slowly back to the Big House after their visit to the river side, and Helen reined her horse close in beside her chum"s mount.
"I know what you mean," admitted Ruth, placidly. "Do you think it is necessary for us to say anything-especially where others might hear?"