Part 6

Colonel Wheeler was the standard-bearer of the flag of independence in the Hissawachee bottom. He had been a Captain in the Revolution; but Revolutionary titles showed a marked tendency to grow during the quarter of a century that followed the close of the war. An ex-officer's neighbors carried him forward with his advancing age; a sort of ideal promotion by brevet gauged the appreciation of military titles as the Revolution passed into history and heroes became scarcer. And emigration always advanced a man several degrees--new neighbors, in their uncertainty about his rank, being prone to give him the benefit of all doubts, and exalt as far as possible the lustre which the new-comer conferred upon the settlement. Thus Captain Wheeler in Maryland was Major Wheeler in Western Pennsylvania, and a full-blown Colonel by the time he had made his second move, into the settlement on Hissawachee Creek. And yet I may be wrong. Perhaps it was not the transplanting that did it. Even had he remained on the "Eastern Shore," he might have passed through a process of canonization as he advanced in life that would have brought him to a colonelcy: other men did. For what is a Colonel but a Captain gone to seed?

"Gone to seed" may be considered a slang expression; and, as a conscientious writer, far be it from me to use slang. And I take great credit to myself for avoiding it just now, since nothing could more perfectly describe Wheeler. His hair was grizzling, his shoulders had a chronic shrug, his under lip protruded in an expression of perpetual resistance, and his prominent chin and brow seemed to have been jammed together; the space between was too small. He had an air of defense; his nature was always in a "guard-against-cavalry" attitude. He had entered into the spirit of colonial resistance from childhood; he was born in antagonism to kings and all that are in authority; it was a family tradition that he had been flogged in boyhood for shooting pop-gun wads into the face of a portrait of the reigning monarch.

When he settled in the Hissawachee bottom, he of course looked about for the power that was to be resisted, and was not long in finding it in his neighbor, Captain Lumsden. He was the one opponent whom Lumsden could not annoy into submission or departure. To Wheeler this fight against Lumsden was the one delightful element of life in the Bottoms. He had now the comfortable prospect of spending his declining years in a fertile valley where there was a powerful foe, whose encroachments on the rights and privileges of his neighbors would afford him an inexhaustible theme for denunciation, and a delightful incitement to the exercise of his powers of resistance. And thus for years he had eaten his dinners with better relish because of his contest with Lumsden. Mordecai could not have had half so much pleasure in staring stiffly at the wicked Haman as Isaiah Wheeler found in meeting Captain Lumsden on the road without so much as a nod of recognition. And Haman's feelings were not more deeply wounded than Lumsden's.

Colonel Wheeler was not very happily married; for at home he could find no encroachments to resist. The perfect temper of his wife disarmed even his opposition. He had begun his married life by fighting his wife's Methodism; but when he came to the Hissawachee and found Methodism unpopular, he took up arms in its defense.

Such was the man whom Kike had selected as guardian--a man who, with all his disagreeableness, was possessed of honesty, a virtue not inconsistent with oppugnancy. But Kike's chief motive in choosing him was that he knew that the choice would be a stab to his uncle's pride. Moreover, Wheeler was the only man who would care to brave Lumsden's anger by taking the trust.

Wheeler lived in a log house on the hillside, and to this house, on the day after the return of Morton and Kike, there rode a stranger. He was a broad-shouldered, stalwart, swarthy man, of thirty-five, with a serious but aggressive countenance, a broad-brim white hat, a coat made of country jeans, cut straight-breasted and buttoned to the chin, rawhide boots, and "linsey" leggings tied about his legs below the knees. He rode a stout horse, and carried an ample pair of saddlebags.

Reining his horse in front of the colonel's double cabin, he shouted, after the Western fashion, "Hello! Hello the house!"

[Illustration: COLONEL WHEELER'S DOORYARD.]

At this a quartette of dogs set up a vociferous barking, ranging in key all the way from the contemptible treble of an ill-natured "fice" to the deep baying of a huge bull-dog.

"Hello the house!" cried the stranger.

"Hello! hello!" answered back Isaiah Wheeler, opening the door, and shouting to the dogs, "You, Bull, come here! Git out, pup! Clear out, all of you!" And he accompanied this command by threateningly lifting a stick, at which two of the dogs scampered away, and a third sneakingly retreated; but the bull-dog turned with reluctance, and, without smoothing his bristles at all, slowly marched back toward the house, protesting with surly growls against this authoritative interruption.

"Hello, stranger, howdy?" said Colonel Wheeler, advancing with caution, but without much cordiality. He would not commit himself to a welcome too rashly; strangers needed inspection. "'Light, won't you?" he said, presently; and the stranger proceeded to dismount, while the Colonel ordered one of his sons who came out at that moment to "put up the stranger's horse, and give him some fodder and corn." Then turning to the new-comer, he scanned him a moment, and said: "A preacher, I reckon, sir?"

"Yes, sir, I'm a Methodist preacher, and I heard that your wife was a member of the Methodist Church, and that you were very friendly; so I came round this way to see if you wouldn't open your doors for preaching. I have one or two vacant days on my round, and thought maybe I might as well take Hissawachee Bottom into the circuit, if I didn't find anything to prevent."

By this time the colonel and his guest had reached the door, and the former only said, "Well, sir, let's go in, and see what the old woman says. I don't agree with you Methodists about everything, but I do think that you are doing good, and so I don't allow anybody to say anything against circuit riders without taking it up."

Mrs. Wheeler, a dignified woman, with a placidly religious face--a countenance in which scruples are balanced by evenness of temperament--was at the moment engaged in dipping yarn into a blue dye that stood in a great iron kettle by the fire. She made haste to wash and dry her hands, that she might have a "good, old-fashioned Methodist shake-hands" with Brother Magruder, "the first Methodist preacher she had seen since she left Pittsburg."

Colonel Wheeler readily assented that Mr. Magruder should preach in his house. Methodists had just the same rights in a free country that other people had. He "reckoned the Hissawachee settlement didn't belong to one man, and he had fit aginst the King of England in his time, and was jist as ready to fight aginst the King of Hissawachee Bottom." The Colonel almost relaxed his stubborn lips into a smile when he said this. Besides, he proceeded, his wife was a Methodist; and she had a right to be, if she chose. He was friendly to religion himself, though he wasn't a professor. If his wife didn't want to wear rings or artificials, it was money in his pocket, and nobody had a right to object. Colonel Wheeler plumed himself before the new preacher upon his general friendliness toward religion, and really thought it might be set down on the credit side of that account in which he imagined some angelic book-keeper entered all his transactions. He felt in his own mind "middlin' certain," as he would have told you, that "betwixt the prayin' for he got from _such_ a wife as his, and his own gineral friendliness to the preachers and the Methodis' meetings, he would be saved at the last, _somehow or nother_." It was not in the man to reflect that his "gineral friendliness" for the preacher had its origin in a gineral spitefulness toward Captain Lumsden.

Colonel Wheeler's son was dispatched through the settlement to inform everybody that there would be preaching in his house that evening. The news was told at the Forks, where there was always a crowd of loafers; and each individual loafer, in riding home that afternoon, called a "Hello!" at every house he passed; and when the salutation from within was answered, remarked that he "thought liker'n not they had'n heern tell of the preacher's comin' to Colonel Wheeler's." And then the eager listener, generally the woman of the house, would cry out, "Laws-a-massy! You don't say! A Methodis'? One of the shoutin' kind, that knocks folks down when he preaches! What will the Captin' do? They do say he _does_ hate the Methodis' worse nor copperhead snakes, now. Some old quarrel, liker'n not. Well, I'm agoin', jist to see how _red_ikl'us them Methodis' _does_ do!"

The news was sent to Brady's school, which had "tuck up" for the winter, and from this centre also it soon spread throughout the neighborhood. It reached Lumsden's very early in the forenoon.

"Well!" said Lumsden, excitedly, but still with his little crowing chuckle; "so Wheeler's took the Methodists in! We'll have to see about that. A man that brings such people to the settlement ought to be lynched. But I'll match the Methodists. Where's Patty? Patty! O, Patty! Bob, run and find Miss Patty."

And the little negro ran out, calling, "Miss Patty! O' Miss Patty! Whah is ye?"

He looked into the smoke-house, and then ran down toward the barn, shouting, "Miss Patty! O! Miss Patty!"

Where was Patty?

_CHAPTER X._

PATTY IN THE SPRING-HOUSE.

Patty had that morning gone to the spring-house, as usual, to strain the milk.

Can it be possible that any benighted reader does not know what a spring-house is? A little log cabin six feet long by five feet wide, without floor, built where the great stream of water issues clear and icy cold from beneath the hill. The little cabin-like spring-house sits always in the hollow; as you approach it you look down upon the roof of rough shingles which Western people call "clapboards," you see the green moss that overgrows them and the logs, you see the new-born brook rush out from beneath the logs that hide its cradle, you lift the home-made latch and open the low door which creaks on its wooden hinges, you see the great perennial spring rushing up eagerly from its subterranean prison, you note how its clear cold waters lave the sides of the earthen crocks, and in the dim light and the fresh coolness, in the presence of the rich creaminess, you feel whole eclogues of poetry which you can never turn into words.

It was in just such a spring-house that Patty Lumsden had hidden herself.

She brought clean crocks--earthenware milk pans--from the shelf outside, where they had been airing to keep them sweet; she held the strainer in her left hand and poured the milk through it until each crock was nearly full; she adjusted them in their places among the stones, so that they stood half immersed in the cold current of spring water; she laid the smooth pine cover on each crock, and put a clean stone atop that to secure it.

While she was thus putting away the milk her mind was on Morton. She wondered what her father had said to him yesterday. In the heart of her heart she resolved that if Morton loved her she would marry him in the face of her father's displeasure. She had never rebelled against the iron rule, but she felt herself full of power and full of endurance. She could go off into the wilderness with Morton; they would build them a cabin, with chinking and daubing, with puncheon floor and stick chimney; they would sleep, like other poor settlers, on beds of dry leaves, and they would subsist upon the food which Morton's unerring rifle would bring them from the forest. These were the humble cabin castles she was building. All girls weave a tapestry of the future; on Patty's the knight wore buck-skin clothes and a wolf-skin cap, and brought home, not the shields or spoils of the enemy, but saddles of venison and luscious bits of bear-meat to a lady in linsey or cheap cotton who looked out of no balcony but a cabin window, and who smoked her eyes with hanging pots upon a crane in a great fire-place. I know it sounds old-fashioned and sentimental in me to bay so, and yet how can it matter to a heart like Patty's what may be the scenery on the tapestry, if love be the warp and faith the woof?

[Illustration: PATTY IN THE SPRING-HOUSE.]

Morton on his part was at the same time endeavoring to plan his own and Patty's partnership future, but he drew a more cheerful picture than she did, for he had no longer any reason to fear Captain Lumsden's displeasure. He was at the moment going to meet the Captain, walking down the foot-path through the woods, kicking the dry beech leaves into billows before him and singing a Scotch love-song of Burns's which he had learned from his mother.

He planned one future, she another; and in after years they might have laughed to think how far wrong were both guesses. The path which Morton followed led by the spring-house, and Patty, standing on the stones inside, caught the sound of his fine baritone voice as he approached, singing tender words that made her heart stand still:

"Ghaist nor bogle shalt thou fear; Thou'rt to love and heaven sae dear Nocht of ill shall come thee near, My bonnie dearie."

And as he came right by the spring-house, he sang, now in a lower tone lest he should be heard at the house, but still more earnestly, and so audibly that the listening Patty could hear every word, the last stanza:

"Fair and lovely as thou art, Thou hast stown my very heart; I can die--but cannot part, My bonnie dearie."

And even as she listened to the last line, Morton had discovered that the spring-house door was ajar, and turned, shading his eyes, to see if perchance Patty might not be within. He saw her and reached out his hand, greeting her warmly; but his eyes yet unaccustomed to the imperfect light did not see how full of blushes was her face--for she feared that he might guess all that she had just been dreaming. But she was resolved at any rate to show him more kindness than she would have shown had it not been for the displeasure which she supposed her father had manifested. And so she covered the last crock and came and stood by him at the door of the spring-house, and he talked right on in the tender strain of his song. And she did not protest, but answered back timidly and almost as warmly.

And that is how little negro Bob at last found Patty at the spring-house and found Morton with her. "Law's sake! Miss Patty, done look for ye mos' every whah. Yer paw wants ye." And with that Bob rolled the whites of his eyes up, parted his black lips into a broad white grin, and looked at Morton knowingly.

_CHAPTER XI._

THE VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS.

"Ha! ha! good morning, Morton!" said the Captain. "You've been keeping Patty down at the spring-house when she should have been at the loom by this time. In my time young men and women didn't waste their mornings. Nights and Sundays are good enough for visiting. Now, see here, Patty, there's one of them plagued Methodist preachers brought into the settlement by Wheeler. These circuit riders are worse than third day fever 'n' ager. They go against dancing and artificials and singing songs and reading novels and all other amusements. They give people the jerks wherever they go. The devil's in 'em. Now I want you to go to work and get up a dance to-night, and ask all you can get along with. Nothing'll make the preacher so mad as to dance right under his nose; and we'll keep a good many people away who might get the jerks, or fall down with the power and break their necks, maybe."

Patty was always ready to dance, and she only said: "If Morton will help me send the invitations."

"I'll do that," said Morton, and then he told of the discomfiture he had wrought in a Methodist meeting while he was gone. And he had the satisfaction of seeing that the narrative greatly pleased Captain Lumsden.

"We'll have to send Wheeler afloat sometime, eh, Mort?" said the Captain, chuckling interrogatively. Morton did not like this proposition, for, notwithstanding theological, differences about election, Mrs. Wheeler was a fast friend of his mother. He evaded an answer by hastening to consult with Patty and her mother concerning the guests.

Those who got "invites" danced cotillions and reels nearly all night. Morton danced with Patty to his heart's content, and in the happiness of Morton's assured love and of a truce in her father's interruptions she was a queen indeed. She wore the antique earrings that were an heir-loom in her mother's family, and a showy breast-pin which her father had bought her. These and her new dress of English calico made her the envy of all the others. Pretty Betty Harsha was led out by some one at almost every dance, but she would have given all of these for one dance with Morton Goodwin.

Meantime Mr. Magruder was preaching. Behold in Hissawachee Bottom the world's evils in miniature! Here are religion and amusement divorced--set over the one against the other as hostile camps.

Brady, who was boarding for a few days with the widow Lumsden, went to the meeting with Kike and his mother, explaining his views as he went along.

"I'm no Mithodist, Mrs. Lumsden. Me father was a Catholic and me mother a Prisbytarian, and they compromised on me by making me a mimber of the Episcopalian Church and throyin' to edicate me for orders, and intoirely spoiling me for iverything else but a school taycher in these haythen backwoods. But it does same to me that the Mithodists air the only payple that can do any good among sich pagans as we air. What would a parson from the ould counthry do here? He moight spake as grammathical as Lindley Murray himsilf, and nobody would be the better of it. What good does me own grammathical acquoirements do towards reforming the sittlement? With all me grammar I can't kape me boys from makin' God's name the nominative case before very bad words. Hey, Koike? Now, the Mithodists air a narry sort of a payple. But if you want to make a strame strong you hev to make it narry. I've read a good dale of history, and in me own estimation the ould Anglish Puritans and the Mithodists air both torrents, because they're both shet up by narry banks. The Mithodists is ferninst the wearin' of jewelry and dancin' and singin' songs, which is all vairy foolish in me own estimation. But it's kind o' nat'ral for the mill-race that turns the whale that fades the worruld to git mad at the babblin', oidle brook that wastes its toime among the mossy shtones and grinds nobody's grist. But the brook ain't so bad afther all. Hey, Mrs. Lumsden?"

Mrs. Lumsden answered that she didn't think it was. It was very good for watering stock.

"Thrue as praychin', Mrs. Lumsden," said the schoolmaster, with a laugh. "And to me own oi the wanderin' brook, a-goin' where it chooses and doin' what it plazes, is a dale plizenter to look at than, the sthraight-travelin' mill-race. But I wish these Mithodists would convart the souls of some of these youngsters, and make 'em quit their gamblin' and swearin' and bettin' on horses and gettin' dthrunk. And maybe if some of 'em would git convarted, they wouldn't be quoite so anxious to skelp their own uncles. Hey, Koike?"

Kike had no time to reply if he had cared to, for by this time they were at the door of Colonel Wheeler's house. Despite the dance there were present, from near and far, all the house would hold. For those who got no "invite" to Lumsden's had a double motive for going to meeting; a disposition to resent the slight was added to their curiosity to hear the Methodist preacher. The dance had taken away those who were most likely to disturb the meeting; people left out did not feel under any obligation to gratify Captain Lumsden by raising a row. Kike had been invited, but had disdained to dance in his uncle's house.

Both lower rooms of Wheeler's log house were crowded with people. A little open space was left at the door between the rooms for the preacher, who presently came edging his way in through the crowd. He had been at prayer in that favorite oratory of the early Methodist preacher, the forest.

Magruder was a short, stout man, with wide shoulders, powerful arms, shaggy brows, and bristling black hair. He read the hymn, two lines at a time, and led the singing himself. He prayed with the utmost sincerity, but in a voice that shook the cabin windows and gave the simple people a deeper reverence for the dreadfulness of the preacher's message. He prayed as a man talking face to face with the Almighty Judge of the generations of men; he prayed with an undoubting assurance of his own acceptance with God, and with the sincerest conviction of the infinite peril of his unforgiven hearers. It is not argument that reaches men, but conviction; and for immediate, practical purposes, one Tishbite Elijah, that can thunder out of a heart that never doubts, is worth a thousand acute writers of ingenious apologies.

When Magruder read his text, which was, "Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God," he seemed to his hearers a prophet come to lay bare their hearts. Magruder had not been educated for his ministry by years of study of Hebrew and Greek, of Exegesis and Systematics; but he knew what was of vastly more consequence to him--how to read and expound the hearts and lives of the impulsive, simple, reckless race among whom he labored. He was of their very fibre.

He commenced with a fierce attack on Captain Lumsden's dance, which was prompted, he said, by the devil, to keep men out of heaven. With half a dozen quick, bold strokes, he depicted Lumsden's selfish arrogance and proud meanness so exactly that the audience fluttered with sensation. Magruder had a vicarious conscience; but a vicarious conscience is good for nothing unless it first cuts close at home. Whitefield said that he never preached a sermon to others till he had first preached it to George Whitefield; and Magruder's severities had all the more effect that his audience could see that they had full force upon himself.