Crittenden | Page 8

yo' unyform and sich, I say, if you jest come out to de fahm--yes, mon, dat he will sho."
The boy laughed and Bob reiterated:
"Oh, I'se gwine--I'se gwine wid you--" Then he stopped short. The turbaned figure of Aunt Keziah loomed from behind the woodpile.
"What dat I heah 'bout you gwine to de wah, nigger, what dat I heah?"
Bob laughed--but it was a laugh of propitiation.
"Law, mammy. I was jes projeckin' wid Young Cap'n."
"Fool nigger, doan know what wah is--doan lemme heah you talk no more 'bout gwine to de wah ur I gwine to w'ar you out wid a hickory--dat's whut I'll do--now you min'." She turned on Basil then; but Basil had retreated, and his laugh rang from the darkening yard. She cried after him:
"An' doan lemme heah you puttin' dis fool nigger up to gittin' hisself killed by dem Cubians neither; no suh!" She was deadly serious now. "I done spanked you heap o' times, an' 'tain't so long ago, an' you ain' too big yit; no, suh." The old woman's wrath was rising higher, and Bob darted into the barn before she could turn back again to him, and a moment later darted his head, like a woodpecker, out again to see if she were gone, and grinned silently after her as she rolled angrily toward the house, scolding both Bob and Basil to herself loudly.
A song rose from the cowpens just then. Full, clear, and quivering, it seemed suddenly to still everything else into silence. In a flash, Bob's grin settled into a look of sullen dejection, and, with his ear cocked and drinking in the song, and with his eye on the corner of the barn, he waited. From the cowpens was coming a sturdy negro girl with a bucket of foaming milk in each hand and a third balanced on her head, singing with all the strength of her lungs. In a moment she passed the corner.
"Molly--say, Molly."
The song stopped short.
"Say, honey, wait a minute--jes a minute, won't ye?" The milkmaid kept straight ahead, and Bob's honeyed words soured suddenly.
"Go on, gal, think yo'self mighty fine, don't ye? Nem' min'!"
Molly's nostrils swelled to their full width, and, at the top of her voice, she began again.
"Go on, nigger, but you jes wait."
Molly sang on:
"Take up yo' cross, oh, sinner-man."
Before he knew it, Bob gave the response with great unction:
"Yes, Lawd."
Then he stopped short.
"I reckon I got to break dat gal's head some day. Yessuh; she knows whut my cross is," and then he started slowly after her, shaking his head and, as his wont was, talking to himself.
He was still talking to himself when Basil came out to the stiles after supper to get into his buggy.
"Young Cap'n, dat gal Molly mighty nigh pesterin' de life out o' me. I done tol' her I'se gwine to de wah."
"What did she say?"
"De fool nigger--she jes laughed--she jes laughed."
The boy, too, laughed, as he gathered the reins and the mare sprang forward.
"We'll see--we'll see."
And Bob with a triumphant snort turned toward Molly's cabin.
The locust-trees were quiet now and the barn was still except for the occasional stamp of a horse in his stall or the squeak of a pig that was pushed out of his warm place by a stronger brother. The night noises were strong and clear--the cricket in the grass, the croaking frogs from the pool, the whir of a night-hawk's wings along the edge of the yard, the persistent wail of a whip-poor-will sitting lengthwise of a willow limb over the meadow-branch, the occasional sleepy caw of crows from their roost in the woods beyond, the bark of a house-dog at a neighbour's home across the fields, and, further still, the fine high yell of a fox-hunter and the faint answering yelp of a hound.
And inside, in the mother's room, the curtain was rising on a tragedy that was tearing open the wounds of that other war--the tragedy upon which a bloody curtain had fallen more than thirty years before. The mother listened quietly, as had her mother before her, while the son spoke quietly, for time and again he had gone over the ground to himself, ending ever with the same unalterable resolve.
There had been a Crittenden in every war of the nation--down to the two Crittendens who slept side by side in the old graveyard below the garden.
And the Crittenden--of whom he had spoken that morning--the gallant Crittenden who led his Kentuckians to death in Cuba, in 1851, was his father's elder brother. And again he repeated the dying old Confederate's deathless words with which he had thrilled the Legion that morning--words heard by her own ears as well as his. What else was left him to do--when he knew what those three brothers, if they were alive, would have him