The Bishop of Cottontown: A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills
was the clang of a dinner bell.
"It is Mammy Maria," she said--"I must go. No--you must not walk
home with me. I'd rather be alone."
She did not intend it, but it was brutal to have said it that way--to
the sensitive heart it went to. He looked hurt for a moment and then
tried to smile in a weak way. Then he raised his hat gallantly,
turned and went off down the gulch.
Helen stood looking for the last time on the pretty arbor. Here she
had lost her heart--her life. She fell on the moss again and kissed
the stone. Then she walked home--in tears.
CHAPTER VII
HILLARD WATTS
It is good for the world now and then to go back to first principles
in religion. It would be better for it never to get away from them;
but, since it has that way of doing--of breeding away and breaking
away from the innate good--it is well that a man should be born in
any age with the faith of Abraham.
It matters not from what source such a man may spring. And he need
have no known pedigree at all, except an honest ancestry behind him.
Such a man was Hillard Watts, the Cottontown preacher.
Sprung from the common people of the South, he was a most uncommon
man, in that he had an absolute faith in God and His justice, and an
absolute belief that some redeeming goodness lay in every human
being, however depraved he may seem to the world. And so firm was his
faith, so simple his religion--so contrary to the worldliness of the
religion of his day,--that the very practice of it made him an
uncommon man.
As the overseer of General Jeremiah Travis's large estate before the
war, he proved by his success that even slaves work better for
kindness. Of infinite good sense, but little education, he had a mind
that went to the heart of things, and years ago the fame of his
homely but pithy sayings stuck in the community. In connection with
kindness to his negroes one of his sayings was, "Oh, kindness can't
be classified--it takes in the whole world or nothin'."
When General Travis got into dire financial straits once, he sent for
his overseer, and advised with him as to the expediency of giving up.
The overseer, who knew the world and its ways with all the good
judgment of his nature, dryly remarked: "That'll never do. Never let
the world know you've quit; an' let the undertaker that buries you be
the fust man to find out you're busted."
General Travis laughed, and that season one of his horses won the
Tennessee Valley Futurity, worth thirty-thousand dollars--and the
splendid estate was again free from debt.
There was not a negro on the place who did not love the overseer, not
one who did not carry that love to the extent of doing his best to
please him. He had never been known to punish one, and yet the work
done by the Travis hands was proverbial.
Among his duties as overseer, the entire charge of the Westmore
stable of thoroughbreds fell to his care. This was as much from love
as choice, for never was a man born with more innate love of all dumb
creatures than the preacher-overseer.
"I've allers contended that a man could love God an' raise horses, too,"
he would say; and it was ludicrous to see him when he went off to the
races, filling the tent trunk with religious tracts, which, after the
races, he would distribute to all who would read them. And when night
came he would regularly hold prayers in his tent--prayer-meetings in
which his auditors were touts, stable-boys and gamblers. And woe to the
stable-boy who uttered an oath in his presence or dared to strike or
maltreat any of his horses!
He preached constantly against gambling on the races. "That's the
Devil's end of it," he would say--"The Almighty lets us raise good
horses as a benefit to mankind, an' the best one wins the purse. It
was the Devil's idea that turned 'em into gambling machines."
No one ever doubted the honesty of his races. When the Travis horses
ran, the racing world knew they ran for blood.
Physically, he had been an athlete--a giant, and unconscious of his
strength. Incidentally, he had taken to wrestling when a boy, and as
a man his fame as a wrestler was coincident with the Tennessee
Valley. It was a manly sport which gave him great pleasure, just as
would the physical development of one of his race horses. Had he
lived in the early days of Greece, he would have won in the Olympian
wrestling match.
There was in Hillard Watts a trait which is one of the most
pronounced of his type of folks,--a sturdy, honest humor. Humor, but
of the Cromwell type--and withal, a kind that went with praying and
fighting. Possessed, naturally, of a strong mind of great good sense,
he had learned to read and write by studying the Bible--the only book
he had ever read through and through and which he seemed to know by
heart. He was earnest and honest in all things, but in his
earnestness and strong fight for right living there was the twinkle
of humor. Life, with him, was a serious fight, but ever through the
smoke of its battle there gleamed the bright sun of a kindly humor.
The overseer's home was a double log hut on the side of the mountain.
His plantation, he called it,--for having been General Travis's
overseer, he could not imagine any farm being less than a plantation.
It consisted of forty acres of flinty land on the mountain side--"too
po' to sprout cow-peas," as his old wife would always add--"but hits
pow'ful for blackberries, an' if we can just live till blackberry
time comes we can take keer ourselves."
Mrs. Watts had not a lazy bone in her body. Her religion was work:
"Hit's nature's remedy," she would add--"wuck and five draps o'
turpentine if you're feelin' po'ly."
She despised her husband's ways and thought little of his religion.
Her tongue was frightful--her temper worse. Her mission on
earth--aside from work--work--work--was to see that too much peace
and good will did not abide long in the same place.
Elder Butts, the Hard-Shell preacher, used to say: "She can go to the
full of the moon mighty nigh every month 'thout raisin' a row, if
hard pressed for time an' she thinks everybody else around her is
miser'ble. But if things look too peaceful and happy, she'll raise
sand in the last quarter or bust. The Bishop's a good man, but if he
ever gits to heaven, the bigges' diamon' in his crown'll be because
he's lived with that old 'oman an' ain't committed murder. I don't
believe in law suits, but if he ain't got a damage case agin the
preacher that married him, then I'm wrong."
But no one ever heard the old man use harsher language in speaking of
her than to remark that she was "a female Jineral--that's what
Tabitha is."
Perhaps she was, and but for her the Bishop and his household had
starved long ago.
"Furagin' is her strong point"--he would always add--"she'd made
Albert Sydney Johnston a great chief of commissary."
And there was not an herb of any value that Mrs. Watts did not know
all about. Any fair day she might be seen on the mountain side
plucking edibles. Ginseng was her money crop, and every spring she
would daily go into the mountain forests and come back with enough of
its roots to help them out in the winter's pinch.
"Now, if anybody'll study Nature," she would say, "they'll see she
never cal'c'lated to fetch us here 'ithout makin' 'lowance fur to
feed us. The fus' thing that comes up is dandelions--an' I don't want
to stick my tooth in anything that's better than dandelion greens
biled with hog-jowl. I like a biled dinner any way. Sas'fras tea
comes mighty handy with dandelions in the spring, an' them two'll
carry us through April. Then comes wild lettice an' tansy-tea--that's
fur May. Blackberries is good fur June an' the jam'll take us through
winter if Bull Run and Appomattox ain' too healthy. In the summer we
can live on garden truck, an' in the fall there is wild reddishes an'
water-cresses an' spatterdock, an' nuts an' pertatoes come in mighty
handy fur winter wuck. Why, I was born wuckin'--when I was a gal I
cooked, washed and done house-work for a family of ten, an' then had
time to spin ten hanks o' yarn a day."
"Now there's the old man--he's too lazy to wuck--he's like all
parsons, he'd rather preach aroun' all his life on a promise of
heaven than to wuck on earth for cash!"
"How did I ever come to marry Hillard Watts? Wal, he wa'n't that
triflin' when I married him. He didn't have so much religiun then.
But I've allers noticed a man's heredity for no-countness craps out
after he's married. Lookin' back now I reckin' I married him jes' to
res' myself. When I'm wuckin' an' git tired, I watches Hillard doin'
nothin' awhile an' it hopes me pow'ful."
"He gits so busy at it an' seems so contented an' happy."
Besides his wife there were five grandchildren in his
family--children of the old man's son by his second wife. "Their
father tuck after his stepmother," he would explain regretfully, "an'
wucked hisself to death in the cotton factory. The dust an' lint give
him consumption. He was the only man I ever seed that tuck after his
stepmother"--he added sadly.
An old soldier never gets over the war. It has left a nervous shock
in his make-up--a memory in all his after life which takes precedence
over all other things. The old man had the naming of the
grandchildren, and he named them after the battles of the Civil war.
Bull Run and Seven Days were the boys. Atlanta, Appomattox and Shiloh
were the girls. His apology for Shiloh was: "You see I thout I'd name
the last one Appomattox. Then came a little one befo' her mammy died,
so weak an' pitiful I named her Shiloh."
It was the boast of their grandmother--that these children--even
little Shiloh--aged seven--worked from ten to twelve hours every day
in the cotton factory, rising before day and working often into the
night, with forty minutes at noon for lunch.
They had not had a holiday since Christmas, and on the last
anniversary of that day they had worked until ten o'clock, making up
for lost time. Their pay was twenty-five cents a day--except Shiloh,
who received fifteen.
"But I'll soon be worth mo', pap," she would say as she crawled up
into the old man's lap--her usual place when she had eaten her supper
and wanted to rest. "An you know what I'm gwine do with my other
nickel every day? I'm gwine give it to the po' people of Indy an'
China you preaches about."
And thus she would prattle--too young to know that, through the
cupidity of white men, in this--the land of freedom and
progress--she--this blue-eyed, white-skinned child of the Saxon race,
was making the same wages as the Indian sepoy and the Chinese coolie.
It was Saturday night and after the old man had put Shiloh to bed, he
mounted his horse and rode across the mountain to Westmoreland.
"Oh," said the old lady--"he's gwine over to Miss Alice's to git his
Sunday School less'n. An' I'd like to know what good Sunday school
less'ns 'll do any body. If folks'd git in the habit of wuckin' mo'
an' prayin' less, the worl'ud be better off, an' they'd really have
somethin' to be thankful fur when Sunday comes, 'stid of livin' frum
han' to mouth an' trustin' in some unknown God to cram feed in you'
crops."
Hardened by poverty, work, and misfortune, she was the soul of
pessimism.
CHAPTER VIII
WESTMORELAND
From The Gaffs to Westmoreland, the home of Alice Westmore, was
barely two miles up the level white pike.
Jim sat in the buggy at The Gaffs holding the horses while Richard
Travis, having eaten his supper, was lighting a cigar and drawing on
his overcoat, preparatory to riding over to Westmoreland.
The trotters stood at the door tossing their heads and eager to be
off. They were cherry bays and so much alike that even Jim sometimes
got them mixed. They were clean-limbed and racy looking, with flanks