An Alabama Courtship/Part 1

by F. J. Stimson

PART FIRST.

1.

I MUST first tell you how I came to be ever a commercial traveller. My father was a Higginbotham—one of the Higginbothams of Salem—but my mother, Marie Lawrence, was a far-off cousin of the wife of old Thomas Lawrence, the great tobacconist of New York. Horatio Higginbotham was both an author and an artist; but he neither wrote nor painted down to the popular taste; and as he was also a gentleman, and had lived like one, he left very little money. Not that he took it with him when he died, but he had spent it on the way. It costs considerable to get through this world, if you travel first-class and pay as you go. And, at least, my father left no debts.

He left my dear mother, however, and his assets were represented by me, an expensive Junior at Harvard. And as none of the family counting-rooms and cotton-mills seemed to open the door for me—so degenerate a scion of a money-making race as to have already an artist behind him—I was glad to enter the wide portal of Cousin Lawrence's tobacco manufactory.

Here, as in most successful trades, you were, all but the very heir-presumptive, put through a regular mill. First, a year or two in the factory, just to get used to the sneezing; and then you took to the road; and after a few years of this had thoroughly taught you the retail trade, you were promoted to be a gentleman and hob-nob with the planters in Cuba, and ride over their landed estates.

I got through the factory well enough; but the road, as you may fancy, was a trial in prospect. When my time came (being then, as you will see, something of a snob) I was careful to choose the wildest circuit, most remote from Boston and from Boston ways. The extreme West—Denver, Kansas City, Omaha—was out of the question; even the South—New Orleans, Charleston, Florida particularly—was unsafe. Indiana was barbarous enough, but went with Ohio and Michigan; and I finally chose what was called the Tennessee Circuit, which included all the country west of the Alleghanies, from the Ohio River to the Gulf States. Louisville belonged to my Cincinnati colleague, but the rest of Kentucky and Tennessee, from the Cumberland and Great Smoky Mountains to the hills of Alabama and the plains of Memphis, were mine.

And by no means uninteresting I found it. I travelled, you must know, in snuff; and the southern mountains, with the headwaters of the western rivers, Cumberland, Alabama, Tennessee, are the country of the snuff-taker in America.

The civilization, the picturesqueness of our country lies always between the mountains and the seaboard. Trace the Appalachian summits from their first uprearing at Tracadiegash or Gaspé, to that last laurel-hill near Tupelo in Mississippi—on the left of you lies history, character, local identity; on the right that great common place, that vast central prairie, lying stolidly spread out between the Rockies and the Blue Ridge, producing food. Heaven keep us from that central plain, one would say, and from the men and moods and motives that it breeds—but that out of it, in the very unidentified middle of it, the Lord upreared a Lincoln.

However, my beat lay so well to the south of it, lurked so far up in the mountain alley-ways and southern river-cañons, that I found much to study and more to see. The railway did little more than take me to the field of labor; the saddle or the wagon or the country stage must do the rest. My first trip was to the east of my dominions; my headquarters were at Knoxville, and from there I rode through some thousand miles of mountain and of cove; and different enough and remote enough it was from all that I had known before and from all that might know me or look askance upon a travelling-merchant selling snuff by sample. But this was but a breather, as it were; and on my second journey I was ordered to replace my predecessor, Jerry Sullivan, at his headquarters in Chattanooga, and take entire charge of that country. Already I had contracted a prejudice for the slow and unconventional modes of travelling; and after I had seen Jerry Sullivan, a genial Irishman, and had formal delivery of his office, and he had gone back with evident delight to his beloved New York, and I had sat there alone a day or two, I thought that I would open out the business westward. And looking at the map it occurred to me that the Tennessee River was the natural avenue to my domains in that direction. Luckily, I made the acquaintance of a young land-prospector, with romantic instincts like my own; and the second evening after this idea came to me, he and I were seated in a wooden dug-out canoe, my parcels of samples and his instruments in the waist of the boat, drifting swiftly down the brown stream at sunset, under the lofty shadow of the Lookout Mountain.

The stream was shallow, and its waters so opaque that six inches looked like six fathoms, and it happened not rarely that we ran upon a sand-bar in full mid-stream; but a hard shove at the pole would send us off, usually sideways, careening in the swirl. When we were not aground our time was rapid—some six or seven miles an hour, with the current, and the pole, and paddle. The mountains came close around us, and the shores contracted; and pretty soon the railway took a plunge into a tunnel and disappeared. No house nor light was in sight when the moon came out. For some twenty miles or more we swung down the swift stream silently, in a country that seemed quite unsettled. And as the night made it still harder to make out the deeper places, it is not surprising that after one long, gradual grate upon a mid-channel sand-bank, we settled in a bed that all our efforts were insufficient to dislodge us from. And Arthur Coe, my companion, by way of making the best night of it possible, and the moon and the mild May weather falling in, drew out a banjo from his traps in the bow and made melodies not unpleasant to a man who lay silent in the stern, looking at the stars and smoking his pipe.

A fine range of trees lined the opposite shore and, beyond, the forest rolled up in mountain-shoulders to the sky; but not a sign of human life was visible. So that we both started when, at the end of some negro melody, the refrain was taken up by a lusty chorus, and rang far out over the murmuring Tennessee. And in a few moments a large gum canoe filled with joyous darkies came to us from the further shore; and finding our trouble, nothing would do but they must pull us ashore and we spend the night with "Massa." Which we did, and a kind and queer old pair of gentry we found them, him and his wife, living alone with a dozen of old freed slaves, some dozen miles from anywhere. The old, wide, one-story plantation house stood in a clearing facing the river (which used to be much more of a river, with many steamers and cotton-craft, "befo' de wo’"); and we had quite a concert before we went to bed, with all the cigars and other accompaniment that we needed. There were no young people in the house, only old massa and missus and the old slaves; and we heard some story of deaths in battle from the latter, as we all sang a hymn together before we went to bed, and took one final glass of whiskey; and even the negroes were allowed a taste of something, for wetting their whistles they had blown so well.

Thus it was, almost every night; and the long days were spent in drifting down the river; and even Coe was in no hurry to get to the place where he was to survey his railway or prospect his town; and either the people were so lonely, or their good will was so great, that they gave orders for snuff in a way that was surprising. Only one thing struck us—the absence of young people; not only of young men, but of girls. Coe said he thought the people were too old to have any children; but what had become of the children they should have had twenty years ago? "War-time," said Coe, as if that explained it.

So we got down into Georgia, and then into northern Alabama; and the river wound so that we were two weeks on the way. Coe was to prospect near a town called Florence, or Tuscumbia; places that then we never had heard of.

That day, at dawn, we ran on Muscle Shoals. Fresh from a night under the wild-grape vines, blossoming fragrantly, with a sweetness troubling to the spirit, acrid, whereunder we had slept like one drugged with love—we had got into our canoe at sunrise or before, and pushed out into the stream. It lay broad and still and shimmering—so broad that we ought to have noticed its two or three miles of surface could scarce cover but three or four inches of depth. But our eyelids were heavy with the wild grape—as if its breath had been some soul or phantasm of what was to be its fruit—and so we paddled dreamily to the mid-stream and ran aground.

"I say!" said Coe. But there was nothing to be said, and there we hung, two miles from either shore, and the sun rose full up stream, and gilded us.

In all that inland lake was but a hand's-depth of water, flowing swift and softly over sand and shells. We took to our poles; hard choosing it would be which way lay deepest; and, one at either end, "Now, then!" from Coe; and we moved, or didn't move, or for the most part spun around upon the grinding shells, and Coe fell out of the boat and splashed shallowly upon his back upon the sand.

So all that day we labored; and the sun grew hot, so that Coe at noon sought wading for the shore to some shelter in the wild grapes; but that, half a stone's-throw from the white clay bank ran swiftly some two fathoms deep of river Tennessee. So he came back and swore, and I laughed; and we set at it again. Meantime the slow, deep-laden scows, with appetizing tents for shade, spun downward close under that vine-shaded bank and jeered at us.

Late in the afternoon, raw-handed from the poles and raw in visage from a straight-down sun, we got away. Still breathless, burning, we two swung down the smooth stream, narrower, though still a half-mile wide; here it ran in curves by bold cliff-points, castellated into white, vine-garlanded turrets of the strangely worn and carven limestone. No Rhine could be so beautiful; for here all was unprofaned, silent, houseless, lined by neither road nor rail.

The sun was nearly setting, and Coe's soul turned to beauty, and again he began to marvel at the want of womankind. No country was visible behind the river-banks; and he stood up and studied carefully the shore through his field-glass.

"I think this is the spot," he said.

"Tuscumbia?" said I. But Coe was rapt in study of the river-bank.

"Do you see her?" said I, louder.

Suddenly Coe turned to me in some excitement. "Paddle hard—I think it's the place." And seizing his bow paddle he drove it into the stream so deep that had I not steadied the craft she had rolled over. Englishmen can never get used to inanimate objects; deft is not their word.

So we rounded, always approaching the shore, a bold promontory; in four successive terraces three-hundred feet of ranged limestone towers rose loftily, adorned with moss, and vines and myrtle-ivy, their bases veiled in a grand row of gum-trees lining the shore. No Rheinstein ever was finer, and as we turned one point, a beautiful rich-foliaged ravine came down to meet us, widening at the river to a little park of green and wild flowers, walled on both sides by the castled cliffs; in the centre the most unsullied spring I have ever seen. And all about, no sign of man; no house, or smoke, or road, or track, or trail.

"This is it," said Coe again, as the canoe grated softly on the dazzling sand, and he prepared to leap ashore.

"What," said I, "Tuscumbia?" For there is a legend of this place; and of Tuscumbia, the great chieftain, and the Indian maiden, and their trysting by the silent spring.

"No," said he; "Sheffield. That gorge is the only easy grade to the river for many miles. Through it we shall put our railroad, and this flat will do for terminal facilities—eh!" and he leaped clumsily; for the loud report of a shotgun broke the air and the charge whisked almost about our ears and flashed a hundred yards behind us in the Tennessee.

With one accord we ran up the ravine. There was no path, and the heavy vines and briers twined about our legs, and the tree-trunks of the Middle Ages still lay greenly, but when we sought to clamber over them, collapsed and let us to their punky middles.

Suddenly, as we rounded a bend between two gloomy ravages of rock, there stood before us a young girl, in the green light—her hair as black as I had ever seen, with such a face of white and rose! I stared at her helplessly; Coe, I think, cowered behind me. She looked at us inquiringly a moment; and then, as we neither spoke, turned up the side of the ravine, with her fowling-piece, and vanished by some way unknown to us. I would have followed her, I think, but Coe held me back by the coat-tails.

"Don't," said he. "She's quite welcome to a shot, I am sure."

2.

Nevertheless, after this one moment of chivalrous impulse, Coe set up his levelling-machine and began taking the gradients of the ravine up which this girl had gone. I have never known an Englishman upon whose heart you could make any impression until his stomach was provided for. Meantime I wandered on, admiring the red hibiscus blossom and liana vine that veiled the gorge in tropical luxuriance up to the myrtles of the limestone. Finally I emerged upon the plateau above the river, and found myself in a glorious, green, flowing prairie many miles broad and apparently as long as the brown Tennessee that lay hid behind me. In the midst of it one iron-furnace was already in blast.

The inn ("The International Hotel") at Tuscumbia was very noisy. I was struck by this when I went to my room to dress for supper; I had only been able to get one room for myself and Coe; there were two beds in it, but only one wash-stand. Through the walls, which were very thin, I could hear at least four distinct feminine voices on the one side, and several upon the other. There were also some across the hall that seemed to be engaged in the same conversation; and that the speakers were young ladies I had fleeting but satisfactory evidence when I opened my door to set out my water-jug for a further supply.

"Look here, young man," said the landlord to me, when I again endeavored to get another room for Coe. "How many rooms do you reckon this yer house 'll hold, with fifty-seven guests all wantin' em?"

"Fifty-seven!" said I. The International Hotel was a small two-story wooden house with a portico. "How many can the hotel accommodate?"

"Thirty in winter," said the landlord. "In summer sixty to seventy."

I stared at the man until he explained. "You see, in the winter, they's most from the North. I hev accommodated seventy-four," added he, meditatively; "but they wuz all Southerners, an that wuz befo the wo'. They took a good bar'l of whiskey a day, they did—an' consid'able Bo'bon," and he ended with a sigh.

"Your present visitors seem chiefly young ladies," I hazarded.

"Hevn't you heard?" and mine host looked at me as if to reassure himself as to my social position. "They is society folks from Knoxville—down here givin' a play—'"'The Pirates of Penzance,’" and he handed me a newspaper wherein he pointed to a double-leaded announcement setting forth that the well-known Amateur Shakespeare Comedy Club of Knoxville, consisting of ladies and gentlemen of the upper social circles of that city, would appear in this well-known opera, the article closing with a tribute to the personal charms of Miss Birdie McClung, the principal member of the company.

"They hev come down in a Pullman cyar, all to themselves, quite special," said the innkeeper.

"Are any of them married, Colonel Kipperson?" said I, timidly.

The colonel looked at me with scorn; and just then a peal of rippling laughter, melodious as the waves of the Tennessee upon Muscle Shoals, rang through the thin partition, accompanied by the crash of some falling missile, I think, a hair-brush.

"Does that look as if they wuz married?" said he, and turned upon his heel, as one who gave me up at last. "Supper's at six," he added, relenting, at the door.

Coe turned up at supper, but we saw nothing of the fair actresses; and the evening we passed socially with the leading spirits of the hotel: Judge Hankinson, Colonel Wilkinson, General McBride, Tim Healy the railroad contractor, and two or three black bottles. Colonel Wilkinson and General McBride had been trying a case before Judge Hankinson, and both were disposed to criticize the latter's rulings, but amiably, as became gentlemen over a whiskey-bottle in the evening. At midnight, just as the judge was ordering a fourth bottle, the door opened and in walked a very beautiful young woman with black hair and eyes. "Good-evening, Miss Juliet," said the others as we rose and bowed.

Miss Juliet walked up to the judge, who with difficulty got up, and followed her out of the room. "Good-night, jedge," and in the pause that followed, General McBride remarked pathetically that "the jedge wasn't what he used to wuz."

"No," said the colonel, with a sigh, "I've seen the time when he wouldn't leave a third bottle of his own."

"What relation is Miss Juliet to Judge Wilkinson?" asked Coe.

The general and the colonel started; and Tim Healy looked apprehensively at the door.

"Young man," said the general, "I wouldn't ask that question, if I wuz you."

"The jedge ken still shoot," added the colonel.

All was forgiven when I had explained that Mr. Coe was an Englishman; and we went to bed. About two in the morning the adjoining rooms became suddenly populous with soft voices. Coe started to his elbow in his cot and called to me. "It's only the Amateur Shakespeare Comedy Club of Knoxville, returning from the play," said I; and I dropped asleep and dreamed confusedly of Tuscumbia the Indian chieftain, feminine voices, and the rippling waters of the Tennessee.

In the morning I got into the train for Chattanooga, leaving Coe behind. On the platform I noticed two graceful girls, dressed in white muslin, wide straw hats with white satin ribbon and sashes, white lace mitts and thick white veils; not so thick that I could not see that they were brunettes, with hair as black as only grows under Southern nights. The train was composed of two cars; the ordinary Southern local; differing from a Jersey accommodation only in that it had still more peanut shells and an added touch of emigrant-train and circus. At one end sat a tall gentleman in a stovepipe hat, who had removed his boots and was taking his ease in blue woollen stockings. At the other was a poor, pretty woman, with large, sad eyes, petting her emaciated husband, who was dying of consumption. Just as the train started, he had a terrible fit of coughing; now he leans his head upon her shoulder, and she rests her cheek upon his forehead. Behind me, but across the aisle, are the two young ladies in white muslin.

So we jangle on through the hot Southern June morning; and pretty soon one of the girls in white comes over and takes the seat behind me. She has thrown off her veil, and I assure you a more beautiful face I never saw; it's all very well to talk of a neck like a lily and cheeks like a rose, and eyes

 

"Whose depths unravel the coiled night
And see the stars at noon——"

 

but when you really see them you fall down and worship the aggregation whose inventoried details, in any novel, would excite weariness. Meantime, her sister had stretched herself out upon the other seat, pointing one dainty russet leather foot beneath the muslin, and disposed her handkerchief across her eyes.

How to speak to this fair beauty so close behind me I know not; I can almost feel her eyes in the back of my head; so near that I dare not look round; I fear she may be another daughter of Judge Wilkinson's. And the train jangles on, and we are winding through green dense forests, up to the mountains. I wait half an hour for propriety, and then look around; I catch her deep eyes full, "bows on," as it were, her lips parted as if almost to speak, and I—shrink back in confusion. I hear her give a little sound, whether a sigh or a murmur I am not sure; but pretty soon I hear her struggling with her window. This is my chance; and I rise and with the politest bow I know and "permit me," I seek to help her; but the sash is old and grimed and the angle inconvenient. Finally I have to go around into her seat; and leaning over her, I get a purchase and the window goes up with a bang and a cloud of dust that sets us both sneezing. "It is very hot," I say, standing with my hand upon her seat irresolute.

"Do you know, I thought you were never going to speak?" she says.

I sit down on the seat beside her.

"I hate being unsociable in a railway journey; but, of course, I couldn't speak first. And now there's so little time left," she adds, regretfully.

"Where are you going—not to Chattanooga?"

"Only to Scott's Plains. What's your name?"

"Horatio Higgmbotham," I have to reply, fearing she will laugh, though the name is well known in Salem. She does not laugh at all, but smiles divinely.

"My name is Jeanie Bruce. And that's my sister May. Come over, and I'll introduce you."

We walk across the car, and Miss Jeanie says to Miss May (who, it appears, is not asleep), "May, I want to introduce to you my friend, Mr. Higginbotham. Mr. Higginbotham, Miss May Bruce."

I bow to the more languid beauty, who does not rise, but smiles a twin sister of Miss Jeanie's smile, showing her little white teeth and tapping her little foot in a way to make a man distracted which to look at.

"I thought you didn't seem to be getting on very well," says the recumbent May, "but now, I suppose, I can go to sleep," and she pulls the lace handkerchief back over her eyes, and Jeanie leads me (it is the word) back to our seat on the other side of the car. "We are twin sisters; and some people can't tell one from the other. Could you?" And she takes off her hat, pushes the soft black mass back from her brow, and looks at me, frankly, sweetly.

"I shouldn't want to," I say. I think I am getting on; but she looks at me as if puzzled, half displeased.

"May is engaged," she answers, "and I am not. I have been, though."

"Dear me," I answer, heedlessly; "how old——"

"Seventeen. But I never had a gen'leman ask me such a question before."

She is silent; I speechless. Yet I wish she would pronounce the t in "gentleman." She does not bear malice long, but asks "where I come from?"

"Boston," I say; "and I am twenty-three."

She laughed merrily, in forgiveness, with a dear, lovable, quick sense of humor. Then she scans me curiously.

"I never saw a gen'leman from Boston before."

"There are some there," I answer, humbly.

"Of course we see plenty of commercial travellers," she says, and the conversation languishes. I look out the window, for suggestions, at the tall mountain timber and the bearded gray moss. It suggests nothing but partridges.

"But you have not yet told me whether you can tell us apart."

Thus challenged, I bring my eyes to hers; there is something dazzling about them that always makes it hard to see her face, except when she is looking away; my eyes wander not from hers, until she does look away—out the window—and I suddenly see something familiar in the face.

"Is there much shooting about here?" I ask, abruptly, meaning game.

"Yes, there is a terrible deal. Why, my cousin, Kirk Bruce, was only eighteen when he killed another gen'leman at school."

"Dear me, I didn't mean men," I say. "I meant quail and partridges. And I thought I had seen you yesterday with a shot-gun down in that green bottom by the Tennessee. It might have been men, though; for your shot whistled about the ears of my friend, Mr. Coe."

"I wondered you didn't remember me when you got upon the train," answers Jeanie. "Where is Mr. Coe?"

"He stayed behind at Sheffield," I say. "Do you belong to the 'Pirates of Penzance’?"

"Mercy, no—they're city people from Knoxville—we've only spent two winters there getting our education in music."

"Is Knoxville a musical city?"

"The advantages there are considered exceptional. We were at the Convent of Sacré Cœur."

"At the convent?" I ask.

"All our best schools are the convents, you know, for us girls. At Sacré Cœur we have instruction from Signor Maucini. I have learned seventeen pieces, but May knows twenty-four and two duets."

"Sonatas?" I say. "Concertos? Chopin? Beethoven?"

Miss Bruce shakes her head. "No," she answers, with some pride. "Our music is all operatic. Of course, I can play 'The Monastery Bells' and 'The Shepherd's Dream'; but now I'm learning 'Il Trovatore.' My sister can play a concert-piece upon 'La Cenerentola.’"

"What else do you learn?"

"French—and dancing—and embroidery. But I suppose you are terribly learned," and Miss Jeanie takes a wide and searching gaze of my poor countenance with her beautiful soft eyes.

"Not at all. I am a commercial traveller," I say to justify my blushes. It was malicious of me; for she looks pained.

"Nearly all our young gen'lemen have got to go into business since the war. My cousin Bruce——"

(There was an inimitable condescension in her accent of the "our.")

"The one who shot the other boy at school? don't you think you have too much of that kind of shooting?"

"As a gen'leman he had to do it—in self-defence. Of course, they were both very young gen'lemen. The other gen'leman had his revolver out first."

"You ought not to carry revolvers so much."

"There! that's just what I've often said. But how can you help it?"

"I help it."

"You don't say you haven't so much as a pistol with you?" And her gentle eyes are so full open that in looking into them I forget my answer.

"Well, anyhow, it wasn't Cousin Kirk's fault. He didn't have any revolver, either, when he first went out of the house; but another scholar he ran up and made him take one. Mother didn't ever want him to go to that school anyhow; several of our family had got shot there before by this other boy's family. This other boy, you see, liked a young lady Cousin Kirk was attentive to; and he sent word in to him one day to come out of the school-house to see him. And the other young gen'lemen in the school, they warned Cousin Kirk not to see him, as he wasn't armed. He'd never ought to have gone out unarmed. But he went. And as soon as they met he shot Cousin Bruce in the right arm. And a friend that was with him gave Cousin Bruce his pistol; and he had to fire; and he killed him; and Cousin Bruce always says that man's face haunts him yet. And the mother of the young man was almost crazy; and afterward she called at the school with a revolver, dressed in deep mourning. And when Cousin Bruce came into the parlor he didn't know who she was; and she shot at him through the crape veil. But, of course, she didn't hit him. And Cousin Bruce always says that man's face haunts him yet."

(I have endeavored to set down this conversation just as it happened. At the time I did not know at all what to make of Miss Jeanie Bruce. I had seen no girls like her in Salem, or even Boston. Her English was poor, her education deficient, her manners free. On all these points she was about on a par with the shop-girls in Lynn. But she was not at all like a Lynn shop-girl. Had I supposed it possible for there to be any ladies except according to the Salem and Boston standards, I should have set her down for a lady at the time.)

Here we arrived at Decatur, where I had the pleasure of taking the two Misses Bruce in to dinner, in a hotel built alongside of the railroad track, as the principal street of the town. In the long dining-room were six transverse tables, over every one of which was a huge wooden fan like the blade of a paddle. The six fans were connected together, and at the back of the room a small bare-footed negro swung the entire outfit to and fro by means of a long pole like a boat-hook; and with a great swish! swish! disturbed in regular oscillations the clouds of flies. Miss Jeanie took off the lace mitts at the dinner-table, and upon one forefinger of her pretty white hand I noticed a ring—a single band of gold setting a small ruby.

When we got back into the cars and May had gone to sleep again, I reproached Jeanie with telling me she was not engaged. "I, too, was going to spend this winter at Knoxville, and I had hoped to see something of you."

"I am not engaged," said Miss Jeanie. "The ring was given me by a gen'leman, but I do not care for him at all. I only promised to wear it a few weeks, because he bothered so. I'll tell you what," she said, "to show I don't care for him and remind you to be sure and call, I'll give it to you."

I was in some surprise, you may suppose. "But I can't take a gentleman's ring——"

"It's my ring, I tell you," said Miss Jeanie. "And if you don't take it, I shan't believe you're coming to see me, and I won't give you my address—there!"

What could I do? I took the ring. When I got that night to Knoxville, I wrote at once to Jerry Sullivan. If they had spent two winters in Knoxville, he might have met them, or, at least, known something about them.

 

"Knoxville, June 30, 188—

"Dear Jerry: Tell me all you know about Miss Jeanie Bruce.

"Yours,

"H. Higginbotham."

 

To which the answer came by telegram:

 

"H. Higginbotham, Knoxville:

"It would take too long.

"Sullivan."

3.

I had deferred my call upon Miss Bruce until I should receive Sullivan's answer to my letter; but when his telegram came I was in a quandary. It struck me as ambiguous. And what could be the extreme haste that made a telegram advisable? Or, perhaps, was the whole thing only one of Jerry Sullivan's jokes?

Meantime I was wearing Miss Jeanie Bruce's ring. Once it struck me that if I did not mean to call upon her, I ought to send it back. But I did mean to call upon her. There never was any question about that, from the first. I did not in the least approve of her, but I meant to call upon her, if only to tell her so. Her conversation had revealed a certain indifference to human life, but she had very soft and gentle eyes. Like the face of the boy whom Cousin Kirk had shot, they "haunted me yet."

Coe noticed my ring. Oddly enough, though a foreigner, he had got into the ways of the people quicker than I had; and I saw him looking at it one day, though he said nothing. That is, nothing of the ring; he did ask me whether I had been to see Miss Bruce. So I went; they boarded in a small frame house that belonged to a Mrs. Judge Pennoyer. I suspect it was this female justice who came to the door; it was a Monday afternoon and the house was odorous with soup; but Miss Jeanie was "very much engaged." The Friday following she was out; and Wednesday I met her walking on the principal street of Knoxville with a tall young man.

"Try Saturday," said Coe that evening. "I want you to ask those girls for my trip up over the line." During the summer, Coe had got some rusty rails spiked upon his right of way; and now wished to invite the youths and ladies of Tennessee to run over them in a trial trip.

That day I found Miss Jeanie alone in the parlor, almost as if awaiting me. "I began to think you had forgotten us," said she, softly. Dear me how soft her eyes were! I said that I had called there many times.

"You could scarcely expect me to let you in when another gen'leman was here!" said she. "Especially when—" I saw her look at the ring; but she checked herself. My afternoon calls in Salem had not so exclusively monopolized the lady's attention, and I looked at her, puzzled. Just then the front door bell rang; and I was confident I heard Mrs. Judge Pennoyer tell some one that Miss Jeanie "was very much engaged."

My conversation languished. I think that Miss Bruce was disappointed. "Shall I play to you?" I saw her hesitate between "The Shepherd Boy" and a romance of Brinley Richards; and I hastened to reply, "I would rather talk."—"But you don't talk," cried she. "But I look."—"You can look while I play."—"Not so well," said I.—"I have a new piece—one they sent me from the convent, the Sacré Cœur, you know, where I was for some years. It is called the 'Tears of Love.' The musical instruction of the convent was very good. Sister Ignatia had studied in Italy. I suppose it was better than outside—don't you?"

I had never studied in a convent, and I don't think I made much answer, for she went on, "Of course, you know, it is pleasanter in other ways. One has so much more liberty. Yet the most Kentucky ladies are all educated in convents. But I felt that I wished to see more of society. At the Sacré Cœur they do not allow you to receive your gen'lemen friends except in the presence of the mother superior."

There was a freshness, a simplicity of method in this young lady's playing with the boys that quite took my breath away, and to relieve the situation I deemed it best to submit to the "Tears of Love." Of this piece of music I remember little, save that the composer was continually bringing the left hand over the right to execute unnecessary arpeggios in the treble notes. Jeanie's girlish figure was so round, and swayed so easily, that I thought this part of the music very pretty.

Then I bethought myself of the object of my visit; and I invited Miss Jeanie and Miss May, on Mr. Coe's behalf, to make the railroad trip. A Salem instinct made me include Mrs. Judge Pennoyer; I then saw in Miss Bruce's look that it had been unnecessary. Only when I got out the door did I remember that the ring had, after all, been my main object; to return it, I mean.

On the other side of the street, along by a low white-painted paling, lowered a heavy, hulking fellow in a rusty black frock coat, a great deal of white shirt, and a black clerical tie. In this garb I recognized the Southern University man, and in the man I had a premonition I saw the redoubtable "Cousin Kirk."

4.

Coe was chartered by the sovereign States of Florida and Alabama to construct his line "from that part of the Atlantic Ocean called the Gulf of Mexico, in the former State," to a point "at or near" the Tennessee River in the latter. And so "a point at or near the Tennessee River" was the first object of our journey, and this proved as definite a designation as we could give it; though it had public parks and corner lots and a name—on paper. Its name in reality was "Cat Island," the only native settlement being on a beautifully wooded island thus called, midstream in the river.

"Wouldn't do to call it that, you know," said Coe, in a burst of frankness. "Famous place for chills and fever; everybody born on Cat Island, white or black, turns clay-color! So we thought of Bagdad—from its resemblance to the Euphrates."

Mrs. Judge Pennoyer had come; but so had a strange young man whose name I found was Raoul. He devoted himself to Miss May with a simplicity of purpose amazing to a Northern ear. Hardly any one knew of the expedition at Knoxville, but when we arrived at Bagdad that spacious plain was peopled in a way to delight the speculator. "Who are they?" I asked of Coe, puzzled at his evident anxiety where I expected pride. "Who are they, O Caliph of Bagdad?"

"Who are they? The Mesopotamians. Dash it," he added, "they've come, with their wives and children, for the trip."

So, indeed, they had. Tim Healy met us as we alighted on the platform of the old railroad station—there was, indeed, a platform, but nothing more—and grasping Coe and me warmly by the hand said, rapidly, in the latter's ear, "had to invite a few of them, you know—prominent gen'lemen of the neighborhood—valuable political influence" and then, aloud, "General McBride, gen'lemen. Mrs. McBride. Judge Hankinson, I think you know. Mr. Coe, I want you to to know Senator Langworthy; one of our most prominent citizens, gen'lemen, an I had the grea-at-est difficulty in persuading the senator to to come along. I told him, Mr. Coe, we could show him something of a railroad already—" Coe expressed his acknowledgments.

"Sir, it was a pleasure to study the developments of my country. It does not need to be a citizen of Bagdad to appreciate the advantages of your location," and the senator waved his hand in the direction of a rusty line of track I then first perceived winding across the prairie from the Tennessee. "Let me introduce to you Mrs. Langworthy." A pale lady, with bonnet strings untied and a baby at the breast, was indicated by the second gesture; she looked worn and world-weary, but I lived to learn she had an endurance of hardship Stanley might have envied, and a relish for fried cakes and bacon in the small hours of night that I am sure only an optimist could feel. "My partner, Mr. Hanks. My wife's sister, Miss McClung."

By this time we were ready to start. A brand-new locomotive decorated with flowers had backed down awkwardly from the new-laid track to the junction; and we entered what Coe with some pride informed me was the directors car. It contained one long saloon, two state-rooms, a minute kitchen, and a glass gallery behind.

It was amazing how we all got into it; and when we had, I counted three babies, seven old women, and a dog, besides some twenty men. All had brought their luncheon-baskets, and the babies (except that appertaining unto Mrs. Senator Langworthy) were consoled with bottles. After a prodigious deal of whistling, we were off, and Bagdad resumed its quietude—at least, we thought so; but even then a distant shouting was heard, and Colonel Wilkinson, his wife, and two urchin boys were descried, hastening down the track from the direction of the Bagdad Hotel. Judge Hankinson pulled the bell-cord and then thrust his head out of a window and roared to the engineer. "Stop, driver, it's Colonel Wilkinson. How are you, Colonel?" he added to that gentleman, who had arrived, and was mopping himself with a red silk handkerchief, his wife and offspring still some laps behind. "Almost thought you'd be left."

"Great heavens, I wish he was," groaned Coe in my ear.

"Never mind, the judge hasn't brought Miss Julia," said Tim Healy; and this time we were really off.

I have neither time nor memory to describe that day; though it was very funny while it lasted, perhaps all the funnier that there was no one to share the humor of it. Everybody was great on the development of the country, and everybody made speeches. We stopped at least twenty times in the first fifteen miles to look at a seam of coal, or a field of iron, or a marble quarry (suitable for the Alhambra Palace or the new State capitol, sir), or, at least, one of the most wonderful mineral springs of the world—only waiting the completion of Colonel Coe's line of railroad to become another Saratoga. At all these places we got off the train, and went in a long, straggling, irregular file to inspect; Mrs. Senator Langworthy ruthlessly interrupting the repast of her youngest-born at such moments, and leaving him upon a car-seat in charge of the fireman. At the quarry or mineral spring the proprietor would take his turn in making a little stump speech, standing on the edge and gesticulating into the pool, while the rest of us stood grouped around the margin. Meantime Miss May Bruce and Raoul would go to walk in the woods; and we would hear the engine whistling wildly for us to return. It was a novel interruption to a flirtation, that railway-whistle; but everybody looked upon us amiably as we hurried down to the track; live and let live, and take your time for happiness; no schedule time, as at Salem.

By the hot noon we were above the river valley and winding up the folds of fir-forest that clothed the shaggy shoulders of the mountain. Engine No. 100 puffed and strained, and reeled up before us like a drunken man. We had had our dinner; the sexes began to separate, and even the Langworthy baby went to sleep. Raoul and May were riding on the engine. I left Miss Jeanie Bruce and joined the gentlemen who were sitting cross-legged and contented in the smoking end of the car, from the glass-housed platform of which we looked already back upon the great central plain from the rising Appalachians.

"Oh, it's a glorious country," said "Colonel" Coe; and, I think, winked at me.

"Why, Senator," said the judge, "I have seen a corner-lot sold at Bagdad six times in one day, 'n a thousan' dollars higher every time."

"General," said the senator, "do you know what the original purchase of the Bagdad Land and Investment Company aggregated for the whole eighteen hundred acres?"

There was a silence. Everybody looked at me. It dawned upon me that I was the "general," and I wondered why I ranked poor Coe.

"I've no idea," I hastened to add; fearing the senator had followed Coe's wink.

"Thirty thousand dollars," answered General McBride, as if it were a game of "school-teacher." "And they sold three hundred acres for——"

"Fifteen hundred thousand dollars," resumed Judge Hankinson, with intense solemnity.

"Paper?" said Tim Healy.

"Cash, Captain Healy," said the judge, fiercely, "cash."

"I want to know!—Was that the lot you bought of widow Enraghty, Judge?"

A roar of laughter greeted Tim's answer. People tipped back their chairs, slapping their thighs; the Langworthy baby woke up and cried, and even the judge screwed up his whiskey-softened old face in vain.

"Tell us about it, Judge," said Raoul, who had come back from the engine and was peering over our shoulders. "I'm a young lawyer, and I want to know these tricks."

"Young man," said the judge, "I'll tell you, and let it be a warning to you when you're married, to be honest and say so" (Raoul blushed violently). "The fact was, I had been acquainted with the widow Enraghty more than fifty years—her husband had got killed in the forties, an' she was sixty-five if she was a day, and she owned that valuable corner lot opposite the new Court-house and by the building of the Board of Trade." ("Not built yet," whispered Coe to me.) "I'd been dickering with her for weeks; but I stood at four thousand, and she wanted five. Now I rode up that morning (it was a fine day; warm and spring-like, and I felt rather sanguine) and I said, What's your price, Mrs. Enraghty, to-day?' 'Six thousand,' said she. This raise made me kind o' nervous, an I got rash. 'I'll give you three thousand,' said I, 'cash.' 'Here's your deed,' says widow Enraghty. And I declare she had it all ready. I looked at it carefully; it seemed all right, and I paid her the money. I kinder noticed there was a young fellow sittin' in the room. Well, sir!"

"Well, Judge?" The judge's manner grew impressive.

"Next week that young fellow—Bill Pepper he was, an he was just twenty-one—he brought an ejectment against me. She had married him. that morning. So Bill Pepper kep' the land, and Mrs. Pepper kep' the money."

In the laughter that followed, I became conscious of Raoul pinching my arm mysteriously. "I want a word with you in private," said he. "Would you mind coming out upon the cow-catcher? It's been railed off on purpose for observation," he added, answering my look of amazement, "and it's a first-rate place to see the cobweb trestle from. It's something about the young ladies," he added, seeing that I still hesitated, "and there's really no other place."

I looked through the car, but perceived the ladies were sitting in earnest conclave. On the front platform Mrs. Langworthy and the baby were taking the air. In the cab of the engine were the two girls. I suppose I made a gesture of assent, for Raoul nodded to the engineer, who slowed to a halt that almost threw the Langworthy's domestic group into the bed of a brawling mountain stream some three hundred feet below.

"These gen'lemen want to ride on the pilot," shouted the engineer in explanation; and we took our way to that exalted perch, where, sitting cross-legged and with hands nervously gripping the rail, I listened to Raoul's story.

The Misses Bruce, he said, were wild not to go back that day with the railroad party; but to drive to the end of the location through the woods.

"Great Heavens! " said I, "but only Coe and I are going, with Captain Healy. There is nothing but tents——"

"The ladies are used to camping out."

"But it will be so rough—there are two thousand niggers in camp!"

"The ladies are not afraid."

I certainly was; for just then, with a preliminary corkscrew-like lurch, the engine began climbing the famous cobweb trestle; the earth suddenly vanished beneath us and we looked down through a lath-like tracery of wooden girders to the foaming stream, now four hundred feet below. I heard a cry behind, and looking timidly around, I saw the pale face of Jeanie at one engine window and of May Bruce at the other.

"But—but there is no chaperone," I gasped.

"Mrs. Judge Pennoyer has agreed to come," answered Mr. Raoul, sweetly.