The American Claimant | Page 8

other a long time ago, and given my note, so to speak--you don't get such things as a gift--and how am I going to go back on a debt like that? And you see, they're so poor, and old, and friendless, and--' But I was ashamed by that time, and shut him off, and somehow felt a new courage in me, and so I said, softly, 'We'll keep them--the Lord will provide.' He was glad, and started to blurt out one of those over-confident speeches of his, but checked himself in time, and said humbly, 'I will, anyway.' It was years and years and years ago. Well, you see those old wrecks are here yet."
"But don't they do your housework?"
"Laws! The idea. They would if they could, poor old things, and perhaps they think they do do some of it. But it's a superstition. Dan'l waits on the front door, and sometimes goes on an errand; and sometimes you'll see one or both of them letting on to dust around in here--but that's because there's something they want to hear about and mix their gabble into. And they're always around at meals, for the same reason. But the fact is, we have to keep a young negro girl just to take care of them, and a negro woman to do the housework and help take care of them."
"Well, they ought to be tolerably happy, I should think."
"It's no name for it. They quarrel together pretty much all the time-- most always about religion, because Dan'l's a Dunker Baptist and Jinny's a shouting Methodist, and Jinny believes in special Providences and Dan'l don't, because he thinks he's a kind of a free-thinker--and they play and sing plantation hymns together, and talk and chatter just eternally and forever, and are sincerely fond of each other and think the world of Mulberry, and he puts up patiently with all their spoiled ways and foolishness, and so--ah, well, they're happy enough if it comes to that. And I don't mind--I've got used to it. I can get used to anything, with Mulberry to help; and the fact is, I don't much care what happens, so long as he's spared to me."
"Well, here's to him, and hoping he'll make another strike soon."
"And rake in the lame, the halt and the blind, and turn the house into a hospital again? It's what he would do. I've seen aplenty of that and more. No, Washington, I want his strikes to be mighty moderate ones the rest of the way down the vale."
"Well, then, big strike or little strike, or no strike at all, here's hoping he'll never lack for friends--and I don't reckon he ever will while there's people around who know enough to--"
"Him lack for friends!" and she tilted her head up with a frank pride-- "why, Washington, you can't name a man that's anybody that isn't fond of him. I'll tell you privately, that I've had Satan's own time to keep them from appointing him to some office or other. They knew he'd no business with an office, just as well as I did, but he's the hardest man to refuse anything to, a body ever saw. Mulberry Sellers with an office! laws goodness, you know what that would be like. Why, they'd come from the ends of the earth to see a circus like that. I'd just as lieves be married to Niagara Falls, and done with it." After a reflective pause she added--having wandered back, in the interval, to the remark that had been her text: "Friends?--oh, indeed, no man ever had more; and such friends: Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Johnston, Longstreet, Lee--many's the time they've sat in that chair you're sitting in--" Hawkins was out of it instantly, and contemplating it with a reverential surprise, and with the awed sense of having trodden shod upon holy ground--
"They!" he said.
"Oh, indeed, yes, a many and a many a time."
He continued to gaze at the chair fascinated, magnetized; and for once in his life that continental stretch of dry prairie which stood for his imagination was afire, and across it was marching a slanting flamefront that joined its wide horizons together and smothered the skies with smoke. He was experiencing what one or another drowsing, geographically ignorant alien experiences every day in the year when he turns a dull and indifferent eye out of the car window and it falls upon a certain station-sign which reads "Stratford-on-Avon!" Mrs. Sellers went gossiping comfortably along:
"Oh, they like to hear him talk, especially if their load is getting rather heavy on one shoulder and they want to shift it. He's all air, you know,--breeze, you may say--and he freshens them up; it's a trip to the country, they say. Many a time he's made General Grant laugh--and that's