Vanguards of the Plains | Page 7

drove another slave
toward any coast. In Virginia her first purchaser had sold her quickly to
a Georgia planter whose heirs sent her on to Mississippi. Thence she

soon found her way to the Louisiana rice-fields. Nobody came to take
her back to any place she had quitted. "Safety first," is not a recent
practice. She had enormous strength and capacity for endurance, she
learned rapidly, kept her own counsel, obeyed no command unless she
chose to do so, and feared nothing in the Lord's universe. The people of
her own race had little in common with her. They never understood her
and so they feared her. And being as it were outcast by them, she came
to know more of the ways and customs, and even the thoughts, of the
white people better than of her own. Being quick to imitate, she spoke
in the correcter language of those whom she knew best, rather than the
soft, ungrammatical dialect of the plantation slave or the grunt and
mumble of the isolated African. Realizing that service was to be her lot,
she elected to render that service where and to whom she herself might
choose.
One day she had walked into New Orleans and boarded a Mississippi
steamer bound for St. Louis. It took three men to eject her bodily from
the deck into a deep and dangerous portion of the stream. She swam
ashore, and when the steamer made its next stop she walked aboard
again. The three men being under the care of a physician, and the
remainder of the crew burdened with other tasks, she was not again
disturbed. Some time later she appeared at the landing below Fort
Leavenworth, and strode up the slope to the deserted square where
Esmond Clarenden stood before his little store alone in the deepening
twilight.
I have heard that she had had a way of appearing suddenly, like a beast
of prey, in the dusk of the evening, and that few men cared to meet her
at that time alone.
My uncle was a snug-built man, sixty-two inches high, with small,
shapely hands and feet. Towering above him stood this great, strange
creature, barefooted, ragged, half tiger, half sphinx.
"I'm hungry. I'll eat or I kill. I'm nobody's slave!"
The soft voice was full of menace, the glare of famine and fury was in
the burning eyes, and the supple cruelty of the wild beast was in the
clenched hands.
Esmond Clarenden looked up at her with interest. Then pointing toward
our house he said, calmly:
"Neither are you anybody's master. Go over there to the kitchen and get

your supper. If you can cook good meals, I'll pay you well. If you can't,
you'll leave here."
Possibly it was the first time in her strange and varied career that she
had taken a command kindly, and obeyed because she must. And so the
savage African princess, the terror of the terrible slave-ship, the
untamed plantation scourge, with a record for deeds that belong to
another age and social code, became the great, silent, faithful, fearless
servant of the plains; with us, but never of us, in all the years that
followed. But she fitted the condition of her day, and in her place she
stood, where the beloved black mammy of a gentler mold would have
fallen.
She announced that her name was Daniel Boone, which Uncle Esmond
considered well enough for one of such a westward-roving nature. But
Jondo declared that the "Daniel" belonged to her because, like unto the
Bible Daniel, no lion, nor whole den of lions, would ever dine at her
expense. To us she became Aunty Boone. With us she was always
gentle--docile, rather; and one day we came to know her real measure,
and--we never forgot her.
I bounced out of bed at her call this morning, and bounced my
breakfast into a healthy, good-natured stomach. The sunny April of
yesterday had whirled into a chilly rain, whipped along by a raw wind.
The skies were black and all the spring verdure was turned to a sickish
gray-green.
"Weather always fit the times," Aunty Boone commented as she heaped
my plate with the fat buckwheat cakes that only she could ever turn off
a griddle. "You packin' up for somepin' now. What you goin' to get is
fo'casted in this here nasty day."
"Why, we are going away!" I cried, suddenly recalling the day before.
"I wish, though, that Mat could go. Wouldn't you like to go, too, Aunty?
Only, Bev says there's deserts, where there's just rocks and sand and
everything, and no water sometimes. You and Mat couldn't stand that
'cause you are women-folks."
I stiffened with importance and clutched my knife and fork hard.
"Couldn't!" Aunty Boone gave a scornful grunt. "Women-folks