Complete Works of Howard Pyle

by Howard Pyle

  Old Hezekiah did not reply immediately. He sat for a while staring absently at the other as though not seeing him. Then suddenly he aroused himself almost as with a start. “Hey?” he said, “How? Oh, ay! what you say appeareth all very true, Master Burton. But — will you let me see them papers?”

  “To be sure I will,” said the other; “and if you can explain the business satisfactorily, Master Tipton, and if you can satisfy Sir Henry Ballister that his nephew is safe and sound, and shall be duly fetched back again with no ill having befallen him, why, I, for one, will be as glad as glad can be.”

  “That’s right, that’s right,” said the old man, almost briskly. He adjusted his spectacles as he spoke, and then opened the first paper of the packet and began slowly and deliberately reading it. Then he took up the second and gave it a like close and deliberate scrutiny, and so on through the packet.

  “Well, Master Hezekiah,” said the attorney, when the other had finished the perusal of the packet, “now you’ve read these papers, what do you think of ’em, and what do you intend to do about this business? I will report to Sir Henry Ballister just what you choose for me to say.”

  The old man did not reply immediately. He had taken up his spectacles again, and was rubbing them and rubbing them with his red bandana handkerchief. “Those papers, Master Burton,” said he, at last, “bear mightily hard upon me. They make it appear like I kidnapped Jacky myself. Here be you spending all your time a-hunting up evidence to make it look like as though I had dealt foul with my own flesh and blood — and you a neighbor of mine, and I one who hath put many and many a good guinea’s worth of work into your way.”

  “That last is true enough, Master Tipton,” said the little lawyer; “and, as I said before, I, for one, have no wish to do aught to harm you. Just you think, Master Tipton, — that was why I sent for you to come and see me; else I would have sent these papers straight to Sir Henry Ballister instead of showing them, first of all, to you.”

  “I be much beholden to you, neighbor,” said the old man. “But these papers look mightily ill for me. Suppose anything should happen to you, and those papers should fall into strange hands; how would it be with me then? Ha’ ye thought of that?”

  “Ay, ay,” said the little lawyer, “I have thought of it, and it is all arranged for, Master Tipton. If aught should happen to me, I have so arranged it that only a part of these papers go to Sir Henry Ballister. All that concerns you is cared for, so that no harm shall happen you.”

  “I be much beholden to you, neighbor,” said the old man again.

  “And now,” said the attorney, after another little pause of silence, “what have you to say, Master Tipton? What am I to write to Sir Henry Ballister?”

  Then the old America merchant arose: “Well, master,” said he, “all this be so sudden that, to be sure, I don’t know what to say. Give me time to think over it, and then I will talk to you in full some other day. Let me see; this be Wednesday. On Friday next I’ll meet you here, and tell you all that I have to say. Can you give me so long as that?”

  “To be sure I can,” said the lawyer. “Take your own time, and ‘twill suit me.”

  “Very well, then, on Friday next,” said the old man.

  It was the next day that the little lawyer returned home by night from the King’s Arms Coffee-House, where he used to spend an occasional bachelor’s evening gossiping with his cronies over his toddy, or talking politics.

  It was maybe ten o’clock when he left the coffee-house. There was a chill drizzling rain falling, and the little lawyer shuddered as he stepped out into the darkness, gathering his wrap-rascal more closely about him and turning up the collar about his ears. The night, coming as he did into it from the lights of the warm coffee-house, appeared as dark as pitch. The little lawyer took the middle of the street just lit by the occasional dim light of a corner lamp. There were few folks stirring, and only now and then the sound of a voice or a distant footstep. The far-away baying of a dog sounded from out the more distant hollow of the wet night. The little attorney was recapitulating in his mind the points of an argument he had had with the writer Willowood during the evening. He had had the better of the question, and he felt a warm glow of pleasure as he went stumbling through the night, as he thought, point by point, of the advantage he had had in the discussion. There was some one walking behind him, and it came into his mind to think how easy it would be for some one to knock him upon the head without his neighbors being any the wiser. Then he began again thinking of how he had answered Master Willowood.

  The thought of a possible attack upon himself came into his mind again as he reached the mouth of the dark court upon which fronted his own house, and he paused for a moment before he turned into the black and silent street. In the stillness he could hear the rain pattering and dripping everywhere, and there was a light shining dimly from an upper window of a house further down the court.

  The attorney thought he heard soft footsteps near him, and he was in the act of turning to satisfy himself that he was mistaken, when in the instant there came a crash as though the heavens had burst asunder. There was a flashing flame of livid fire and a myriad sparkling points of light. The thought had time to shoot through his brain, “What has happened to me?” — the thought and a hundred possibilities of answer, — before the sparks had vanished, and the roaring in his ears had hummed away into the silence of unconsciousness.

  It all passed in a moment; there was no struggle and no outcry. Excepting for a quivering twitch, the attorney Burton was lying as though dead, a dark and indistinguishably motionless heap upon the ground, and two men were bending over him, looking down at him.

  CHAPTER XV

  LIFE AT THE ROOST

  JACK’S AFTER RECOLLECTIONS of this earlier part of his life in America while he lived at the Roost always remained with him as singularly fragmentary memories of things passed. The various events that then happened to him never, in those recollections, had a feeling of keen and vivid reality as a part of his own life. It was almost as though they might have somehow happened outside of the real things of his life. Nearly every one who has reached manhood and who looks back thence to the earlier periods of his adolescence, feels such strangeness of unfamiliarity in certain fragmentary parts of his younger life.

  Maybe Jack felt this lack of reality in the events of that time because that just then he was passing from boyhood into manhood; perhaps the memory of those times seemed strange to him and lacking of vitality because of the many changes of scene and circumstance that then happened to him, and because he did not have time to become intimately acquainted with any especial arrangement of his surroundings before it was changed for some other surroundings of a different sort.

  For Jack’s master was very often away from home, and generally he would take Jack with him, and so it was that during this period there were successive memories of queer rambling Virginia towns — level streets of earth fronted by gray wooden buildings with narrow windows and wide brick chimneys, in the midst of which lesser buildings there towered here and there maybe a more pretentious mansion of brick, set back in a tangled garden, approached by a steep flight of stone steps. The towns were nearly all of this nature: — Yorktown, Jamestown, Williamsburg and the lesser courthouse towns, more or less inland, up the river; and they always remained in Jack’s memory as so many pictured scenes rather than as various settings of his actual life.

  At other times Mr. Parker would maybe take Jack with him on his periodical visits to the plantation houses of his friends; nearly all wide, rambling, barn-like structures, where wild company sometimes gathered, and where, during the time of his master’s visits, Jack would live in the company of the white servants and negroes who lounged about, ready to run at any moment at the owner’s call. Jack made many acquaintances among these people, but no friends.

  This life was so varied and so entirely different from anything that he had known before that he never got to feel as though it were perfectly a par
t of himself. Even the Roost, with its bare, rambling rooms and hallways, never entirely lost this feeling of unfamiliarity.

  Nearly always there was more or less company at the old house — the same sort of wild, roistering company that gathered at the other plantation houses; men who came riding fine high-bred horses, who fought cocks, who gambled, drinking deeply and swearing with loud voices, and with an accent that was not at all like the English speech that Jack had known at home.

  One of his earlier experiences of this new life of his in the strange new world into which he had come was of such a company that one day came riding up to the gray old wooden mansion with a vast clattering of horses’ hoofs, a shouting of voices and laughter, and a cloud of dust. The party was accompanied by a following group of negro servants, one of whom carried a fighting-cock on a saddle before him. Jack and Little Coffee and another negro boy ran out to hold the horses, and Dennis and two negroes came over from the stable to help. Mr. Parker came out and stood on the upper step in the doorway, looking on as the visitors dismounted. The scene was always very vivid in Jack’s memory.

  The most prominent of the visiting party was young Mr. Harry Oliver. He had been drinking, and his smooth cheeks were dyed a soft, deep red. He dismounted with some difficulty, and then with uncertain steps went over to his negro servant, who still sat on his horse, holding the cock before him on the horn of the saddle. “Give the bird to me, Sambo,” said the young man in a loud, unsteady voice.

  “He strike you, mea-asta, you no take care,” said the negro warningly.

  “Better let me take him, Mr. Oliver,” cried out Dennis.

  The young man paid no heed to either warning, but took the bird from the negro. It struggled, and one of the spurs caught in the lace of Mr. Oliver’s cuff, tearing a great rent in it. Everybody laughed but Mr. Parker, who stood looking calmly on at the scene. “Ouch! Look what he’s done to me,” cried out Mr. Oliver. “Here, Dennis, you take him.” And again the others laughed loudly at the young man’s mishap.

  Dennis took the bird, seizing its narrow cruel head deftly, and holding it so that it might not strike him.

  “Hath Mr. Castleman been here yet?” asked one of the visitors of Dennis.

  “No, your honor,” said Dennis.

  “Aha!” shouted Harry Oliver, “what do you think of that, Tom? I tell you he’ll not come. His black cock’s no match for Red Harry. I’ll bet you five pounds he doesn’t come at all. I knew he was only talking for talk’s sake last night when he said that he would match his bird against Harry.”

  The others, ready to be amused at anything the tipsy young fellow said, again laughed loudly.

  “If you want to bet your money, I’ll cover your five pounds that the gentleman is here in the hour,” said one of the party, who was a stranger to Jack.

  “Let him alone, Phillips,” said Mr. Parker, coming down the steps. “The boy is not cool enough to bet his money now. Won’t you come in, gentlemen?”

  “Yes, I am cool enough, too,” cried out Oliver. “I’ll bet my money as I choose; and you shall mind your own business, Parker, and I’ll mind mine.”

  Then they all went into the house and to the dining-room, where the rum and the sugar stood always ready on the sideboard.

  Jack, as was said, was still new to all this life. “What are they going to do?” he asked of Dennis as he led the horse he held over toward the stable.

  “Do?” said Dennis; “what d’ye think they’d do but fight a cock main?”

  About an hour after the arrival of the first party of guests, Mr. Castleman and four of his friends came in a body. Mr. Castleman’s negro also brought a cock, and almost immediately the birds were pitted against one another in the bare and carpetless hallway.

  Jack did not see the beginning of the fight. He was up-stairs helping Mrs. Pitcher make up some beds for the night. When he heard that they were fighting the cocks down in the hall, he hurried down-stairs, boy-like, to see what was going on. A burst of loud voices greeted his ears as he descended the stairway. A number of the negroes and some white servants were clustered on the steps, looking over the banister and down below. There was another loud burst of voices dominated by Mr. Oliver’s shrill boyish tones crying out, “Why, then! Why, then! That’s my hero! Give it to him again! Why, then! ’Tis Red Harry against them all! Where’s your fifty pounds now, Castleman?”

  Jack at the head of the stairs could look down upon the tragedy being enacted on the floor below. He stood for a second — two seconds — gazing fascinated. The black cock — a dreadful bloody, blinded thing — was swaying and toppling to death. The red cock towered above him, cruel, remorseless, striking, and striking again; then poising, then striking its helpless dying enemy again. Harry Oliver was squatted behind his bird, hoarse with exultation. The end was very near. Mr. Parker sat calm and serene, looking down at the fight. The others stood or squatted around in a circle, tense and breathless with excitement. All this Jack saw in the few dreadful seconds that he stood there, and the scene was forever fixed upon his memory. He awoke to find that his mouth was clammy with a dreadful excitement. Peggy Pitcher had followed him out on the landing. Suddenly she burst out laughing. “Look at Jack!” she cried. “‘T hath made him sick.”

  Jack saw many cock-fights after that one, but the circumstances of this time always remained the most keenly stamped upon his memory as one of the most vivid of those unreal realities of that transition period.

  Another memory of an altogether different sort was of one time when Mr. Parker was away from home, and when he himself went with Dennis, and Little Coffee, and two other negroes, down the river to the Roads, fishing. Mrs. Pitcher had advised him not to go. “His honor may come back,” said she; “and if he does and finds you away he’ll be as like as not to give you a flaying with his riding-whip.”

  “A fig for his honor!” said Jack. “I’m not afraid of his honor. And as for being away when he comes back, why, that I shall not. He’ll be sure not to be back from Annapolis for a week to come.”

  The memory that followed was of a long sail in the open boat of some forty miles or so in the hot sun and the swift, brisk wind; a memory of sitting perched on the up-tilted weather-rail listening to Dennis and the negroes chattering together in the strange jabbering English that was becoming so familiar to him now.

  It was pretty late in the afternoon when they approached the fishing-ground. Dennis leaned over the rail every now and then, and peered down into the water, as the hoy drifted along close-hauled to the wind. One of the negroes stood ready to drop the sail, and the other stood in the bow to throw over the stone that served as an anchor when Dennis should give the order. “Let go!” shouted Dennis suddenly, and the sail fell with a rattle of the block and tackle, and in a heap of canvas. At the same time the negro in the bow threw the stone overboard with a great loud splash.

  Jack and Little Coffee were the first to drop their lines into the water. Jack sat watching the negro boy; he hoped with all his might that he might catch the first fish, but it did not seem possible that he could catch a fish in that little open spot of the wide, wide stretch of water. Then all of a sudden there came a sharp, quivering pull at the hook, and he instantly began hauling in the wet and dripping line wildly, hand over hand. He thought for a moment that he had lost the fish; then there came a renewed tugging at his line, and in another second he had jerked the shining thing into the boat, where it lay flashing and splashing and flapping upon the boards of the bottom. “I caught the first fish, Little Coffee!” he shouted.

  “Look dar, now,” said Little Coffee, testily. “Fish just bite my hook, and you talk and scare ‘um away.”

  Jack jeered derisively, and Dennis burst out laughing, while Little Coffee glowered at Jack in glum sullenness.

  They fished all that afternoon, and it was toward evening when they hoisted up the anchor stone. Two of the negroes poled the hoy to the shore. Jack was the first to jump from the bow of the boat to the white, sandy beach, litter
ed with a tangle of water-grasses and driftwood, washed up by the waves. A steep bluff bank of sand overlooked the water, and Jack ran scrambling up the sliding, sandy steep, and stood looking around him. For some little distance the ground was open, and there was a low wooden shed, maybe fifty or sixty paces away; beyond it stood the outskirts of the virgin forest. He stood and gazed about him, realizing very keenly that this was the new world, and sensing a singular thrilling delight at the wildness and strangeness of everything.

  This, too, was a very vivid memory fragment of that strange and distantly impersonal period of his life.

  CHAPTER XVI

  JACK’S MASTER IN THE TOILS

  JACK HAD BEEN living nearly a month at the Roost before he saw anything of those money troubles that so beset and harassed his master. He was afterward to learn how fierce and truculent Mr. Parker could become at those times when he was more than usually tormented by his creditors.