"What if you had missed him! He would have been upon you before you could reload!" shuddered the wife, as we ran out to meet Cousin Frank.
"I did not mean to miss him. If I had, I should have clubbed my gun and brained him. No, dear love! it would not "have done as well had I fired at him over the palings." Snap was on the other side of the gate.
And"--with an arch flash he might have learned from her--"you and Namesake and I think the world and all of Snap, you know."
It was the only allusion he ever made in my hearing to the escapade that won him his wife.
We learned, within a few hours, that the dog had bitten several cows, five other dogs, and a valuable colt, before he reached Oakholme.
I was always very fond of Cousin Frank. Henceforward, he stepped into the vanguard of my heroes. I did not believe that Israel Putnam could have done anything more daring than what I had witnessed in the safe place in which he put us "before he sallied forth into the very jaws of death." That was the way I described it to myself.
Tramping through the lower pasture at his side that afternoon I tried to voice my admiration to him, but used less inflated language. I dearly enjoyed these long walks over the plantation in his company. He was an excellent farmer, and kept no overseer. I learned a great deal of forestry and botany from his talk. If he adapted himself, consciously, to my understanding, he did not let me perceive it. The recollection of his unfailing patience and his apparent satisfaction in the society of the child who worshipped him and his wife, has been a useful lesson to me in my intercourse with the young. I had told Cousin Molly Belle, a long time ago, that he "talked straight to children," with none of the involved meanings and would-be humorous turns of speech with which some grown-uppers diverted themselves and mystified us.
When he smiled at my well-mouthed, "Do you know, Cousin Frank, that your bravery may have saved at least four lives--Cousin Molly Belle"s, and baby"s, and Snap"s, and mine?"--I felt that he was not laughing at me inside, as the manner of some is.
"I don"t know about that, Namesake." n.o.body but himself and his wife was allowed to call me that. They were one, you know. "All of you would probably have got out of the way, except Snap. It _would_ have been a great pity to have him bitten. But here is a wee bit of a thing that could, and would, save a good many lives if people were as well acquainted with it as they ought to be. I am surprised that it is so little known in a part of the country where snakes abound as they do about here."
He stooped to gather, and gave to me, some succulent sprigs from a plant that grew in profusion along the branch running through the meadow.
"It is a cure for a snake-bite if bruised into a poultice and bound upon the place soon after one is bitten. My father showed it to me a great many years ago, when I was a little shaver, and told me how he had learned about it from an old Indian herb-doctor. He tried it several times for moccasin-and adder-and copperhead-bites among his servants, and it was a cure in every instance. It grows on both sides of this branch, and nowhere else that I know of on the plantation. My father was an admirable botanist."
"So are you," said I, stoutly.
"Oh, no. As the saying is, his chips were worth more than my logs."
No law of nature is more nearly invariable than that Events are twins, and often triplets. That very evening, after supper, Cousin Frank was on his way from the stables to the house, and saw what he mistook for a carriage whip lying in the walk. The moon was shining and he had no doubt as to what the thing was when he stooped to pick it up. Before he touched it, it made one swift writhe and dart and struck him on the wrist.
Cousin Molly Belle was laying Carter in the cradle, the last note of her lullaby upon her lips when her husband entered. He clutched his right wrist tightly with the left hand and was pale, but his voice was steady and gentle.
"Dear," he said, "don"t be frightened, but I have been bitten by a snake. A copperhead, I think. Get me some whiskey, please."
"The whiskey, Flora! Quick!" called the wife to her maid who stood by.
"Pour out a tumblerful and give it to him."
For herself, she fell upon her knees, seized her husband"s wrist and carried it to her mouth. This I saw, and heard the first words of his startled protest as the dear lips closed upon the wound. I was out of the room and clear of the house the next minute and speeding down the path and hill to the lower pasture.
The snake was at large, and might waylay me from any bush or tuft of gra.s.s. The moonbeams were ghostly and the stillness of the wide solitude was eerie. Being but a child,--and a girl-child,--I thought of these things, and of the likelihood of meeting runaway negroes, and mad dogs, and stray sane curs whose duty it was to attack nocturnal trespa.s.sers, and of a vicious bull never let out to roam the pasture except at night.
I was afraid of them all, intellectually. My heart was too full of a mightier dread to let bugbears turn me back. I ran right on until the branch, a silver ribbon on the dark bosom of the meadow, was before me.
Gra.s.ses and weeds were laden with dew, and the water whirled and whispered about the roots. I could have believed that the purling formed itself into words when I knelt down to fumble for the snake-bite cure. I would not let myself be scared. I kept saying over and over--"To save his life! to save his life!"
In the intensity of my excitement, language that I was afraid was blasphemous, yet could not exclude from my mind, pressed upon me:--
"_He saved others. Himself he cannot save!_"
He might be dying now. He had said that the poultice ought to be applied at once. Horrid stories of what had happened to people who were bitten by rattlesnakes and cobras tormented me, and would not be beaten off.
"A copperhead, I think he said. How could he know that it was not a cobra? Would he swell up, turn black, and expire in convulsions before I could reach him?" I said "expire in convulsions," out of a book.
Everyday Virginia vernacular fell short of the exigency.
My feet were drenched, my pantalettes and skirts were bedraggled up to the knees, my eyes were large and black in my colorless face, when I burst into the chamber, and threw the bunch of priceless herbs into Cousin Molly Belle"s lap. I was too spent for speech.
Cousin Frank"s coat and vest were off; his right shirt-sleeve was rolled up to the shoulder, and he was holding his hand and wrist in a deep bowl of warm water. The air reeked with the fumes of whiskey and hartshorn.
I concluded, when I came to think of it the next day, that the whiskey must have been doing antidotal work by getting into his head, for he laughed outright at sight of the specific I had brought. Then, tears--real tears and plenty of them--suffused his eyes and made his voice weak and husky. Or--was it the whiskey?
"You are a dear, brave, thoughtful Namesake!" he said, clearing his throat. "Darling!" to his wife who was eyeing the herbs wonderingly,--"She has been all the way to the lower meadow for those. I showed her the snake-bite cure to-day. Bruise them and put them on my wrist. Then Namesake must get off her wet clothes and go to bed. The danger is over."
I was thirty years old before I found out that what I had risked so much to procure was not the panacea he had showed me, but common jewel-weed, or wild touch-me-not, a species of the _Impatiens_ of botanists, harmless, but not curative.
And they had never let me guess what a blunder I had made!
[Ill.u.s.tration]
Chapter XIV
Miss Nancy"s Nerves
The Gateses were our distant relatives. Not nearer than fourth cousins-in-law, I fancy, but we counted them among our "kinfolks" in Virginia, calling Mrs. Gates "Cousin Nancy," and Captain Gates, "Cousin "Ratio." His proper name was Horatio, of course, and he belonged to the family that gave the Revolutionary hero, Horatio Gates, to his country.
I was slowly getting over the whooping-cough, having taken it, as I took most "catching" things that fell in my way,--with all my might. I began to whoop the last of April, and kept it up all summer, when every other child on the plantation was entirely well.
Captain Gates drove over to our house by the time the breakfast-table was cleared one sultry August day, bringing in his roomy double buggy a basket of Georgia peaches--brunettes with crimson cheeks--and the biggest watermelon I had ever seen, as a neighborly gift to my mother.
"Miss Nancy gave me no peace of my life till I got off with them," he said in his loud, breezy tones. "There"s none of her kin she sets more store by than by Cousin Ma"y Anna Burwell. And she"s as proud as a peac.o.c.k of our fruit. I tell her a judgment will come upon her for it.
As I take it, Old Marster sends the rain upon the unjust as well as upon the just, and if it"s our turn this year, somebody else"s turn will come next year, and yet we"ll be as good Christians then as we are now. It"s one of His ways that"s past finding out. Howdy"e, little lady!" putting out a brawny hand to pull me between his knees.
I was standing a yard or so away, but right in front of him, my hands behind me, my eyes and ears, and, I"m afraid, my mouth, open to his hearty talk. I had never heard G.o.d called "Old Marster" before, and if I had not been taught that children ought not to criticise what grown people say and do, I should have been quite sure that it was wrong. I did not want to think any harm of Cousin "Ratio, and determined that I would not, when he drew a great finger gently over my thin cheek, and looked down at me with kindly, pitying eyes.
"Tut! tut! tut! this is too bad! too bad! We must fill up this gulley somehow, Cousin Ma"y Anna. Other folks" victuals are the best physic I know for that sort of work. Miss Nancy would cry her eyes out if I was to go home with the story that little Molly Burwell had coughed her bones pretty near as bare as barrel-staves, and I didn"t try to cover them up again. A week in my peach-orchard and watermelon-patch, with quarts of cream and Miss Nancy"s breakfasts, dinners, and suppers--is what she wants. Get her bonnet, and stick a tooth-brush and a pocket-handkerchief into a bandbox, Chloe, for I"m going to take her home with me, right straight off."
My mother shook her head smilingly at the thought of the week"s visit.
"The child coughs so badly at night that I don"t like to have her away from me, Cousin "Ratio. But change of air, even for a day, would do her good. Her father and I will come for her about sundown."
Thus it happened, that, decked in a clean pink calico frock and white muslin ap.r.o.n, I was hoisted to my perch in the high gig beside Cousin "Ratio, and set off to spend a whole day at Cold Comfort.
The name was so out of keeping with Cousin "Ratio"s kind, red face and funny ways, and the warm, sweet-smelling day, that I couldn"t help asking him on the way "why he called his house such a _shivery_ name?"
The gig swayed and creaked under his laugh.
"That was just the reason my grandmother gave for naming it. You see, the house stands on the top of a hill, and all the winds from three counties get at it in winter. The house my grandfather put up was of wood, and none too tight in the joints, and the poor old lady, his wife--my step-grandmother she was--had rheumatism, and suffered a heap all the year "round. So, nothing would do but it must be "Cold Comfort,"
and Cold Comfort it has been ever since. We Gateses have a way of giving in to our wives in "most everything. Everything that"s reasonable, I mean. And we don"t pick out unreasonable girls for wives."
The fat, sleek horse was taking his own lazy pace in a mile of shady road, cut through the heart of a pine forest. The ground was brown and soft with pine needles, and the high gig swung and creaked a sort of drowsy tune. Cousin "Ratio tapped the wheel nearest him with his whip, and fell into talk with himself, rather than with the child under his elbow.