Lewis Rand | Page 9

"If he does, I'll--I'll--"
Through the window came Gaudylock's voice from the porch of the Bird in Hand. "You Stay-at-homes--you don't know what's in the wilderness! There's good and there's bad, and there's much beside. It's like the sea--it's uncharted."
Lewis Rand closed the door of the room, and went out upon the shady porch, where he found the hunter and a lounging wide-eyed knot of listeners to tales of Kentucky and the Mississippi. The dinner-bell rang. Adam fell pointedly silent, and his audience melted away. The hunter rose and stretched himself. "There is prime venison for dinner, and a quince tart and good apple brandy. Ha! I was always glad I was born in Virginia. Here is Gideon swinging down the hill--Gideon and his negro!"
The tobacco-roller joined them, and with a wave of the hand indicated his purchase of the morning. This was a tall and strong negro, young, supple, and of a cheerful countenance. Rand was in high good-humour. "He's a runaway, Mocket says, but I'll cure him of that! He's strong as an ox and as limber as a snake." Taking the negro's hand in his, he bent the fingers back. "Look at that! easy as a willow! He'll strip tobacco! His name is Joab."
The namesake of a prince in Israel looked blithely upon his new family. "Yaas, marster," he said, with candour. "Dat is my name dat sho' is! Jes' Joab. An' I is strong as en ox,--don' know 'bout de snaik. Marster, is you gwine tek me 'way from Richmond?"
"Albemarle," said the tobacco-roller briefly. "To-morrow morning."
Joab studied the vine above the porch. "Kin I go tell my ole mammy good-bye? She's washin' yonder in de creek."
Rand nodded, and the negro swung off to where, upon the grassy common sloping to Shockoe Creek, dark washer-women were spreading clothes. The bell of the Bird in Hand rang again, and the white men went to dinner.
Following the venison, the tart, and apple brandy came the short, bright afternoon, passed by Lewis Rand upon the brig from the Indies with Tom Mocket and little Vinie and a wrinkled skipper who talked of cocoanuts and strange birds and red-handkerchiefed pirates, and spent by Gideon first in business with the elder Mocket, and then in conversation with Adam Gaudylock. Lewis, returning at supper-time to the Bird in Hand, found the hunter altered no whit from his habitual tawny lightness, but his father in a mood that he knew, sullen and silent. "Adam's been talking to him," thought the boy. "And it's just the same as when Mrs. Selden talks to him. Let me go--not he!"
In the morning, at six of the clock, the two Rands, the negro Joab, the horses, and the dogs took the homeward road to Albemarle. Adam Gaudylock was not returning with them; he had trader's business with the merchants in Main Street, hunter's business with certain cronies at the Indian Queen, able scout and man-of-information business in Governor Street, and business of his own upon the elm-shaded walk above the river. Over level autumn fields and up and down the wooded hills, father and son and the slave travelled briskly toward the west. As the twilight fell, they came up with three white wagons, Staunton bound, and convoyed by mountaineers. That night they camped with these men in an expanse of scrub and sassafras, but left them at dawn and went on toward Albemarle. A day of coloured woods, of infrequent clearings, and of streams to ford, ended in an evening of cool wind and rosy sky. They descended a hill, halted, and built their fire in a grassy space beside a river. Joab tethered the horses and made the fire, and fried the bacon and baked the hoecake. As he worked he sang:--
"David an' Cephas, an' ole brer Mingo, Saul an' Paul, an' de w'ite folk sinners-- Oh, my chillern, follow de Lawd!"
Supper was eaten in silence. When it was over, Gideon Rand sat with his back against a pine and smoked his pipe. His son went down to the river and stretched his length upon a mossed and lichened boulder. The deep water below the stone did not give him back himself as had done the streamlet five days before. This was a river, marred with eddies and with drifting wood, and red with the soil. The evening wind was blowing, and the sycamore above him cast its bronze leaves into the flood which sucked them under, or bore them with it on its way to the larger river and the ultimate sea. This stream had no babbling voice; its note was low and grave. Youth and mountain sources forgotten, it hearkened before the time to ocean voices. The boy, idle upon the lichened stone, listened too, to distant utterances, to the sirens singing beyond the shadowy