The Bishop of Cottontown: A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills
night. That which poured, like pulverized snow, from the mouth of the
flues into the pick-room--where the cotton fell before being pressed
into bales--scarcely had time to be tramped down and packed off in
baskets to the tall, mast-like screws which pressed the bales and
bound them with ties, ere the seed cotton came pouring in again from
wagon bed and basket.
The gin hummed and sawed and sang and creaked, but it could not
devour the seed cotton fast enough from the piles of the incoming
fleece.
Those grew lighter and larger all the time.
The eight Tennessee sugar-mules, big and sinewy, hitched to the lever
underneath the gin-house at The Gaffs, sweated until they sprinkled
in one continual shower the path which they trod around the
pivot-beam from morning until night.
Around--around--forever around.
For the levers turned the pivot-beam, and the pivot-beam turned the
big shaft-wheel which turned the gin-wheel, and the gin had to go or
it seemed as if the valley would be smothered in cotton.
Picked once, the fields still looked like a snowfall in November, if
such a thing were possible in a land which scarcely felt a dozen
snowfalls in as many years.
Dust! There is no dust like that which comes from a gin-house. It may
be tasted in the air. All other dust is gravel compared to the
penetrating fineness of that diabolical, burning blight which flies
out of the lint, from the thousand teeth of the gin-saws, as diamond
dust flies from the file.
It is all penetrating, consumptive-breeding, sickening, stifling,
suffocating. It is hot and has a metallic flavor; and it flies from
the hot steel teeth of the saws, as pestilence from the hot breath of
the swamps.
It is linty, furry, tickling, smothering, searing.
It makes one wonder why, in picturing hell, no priest ever thought of
filling it with cotton-gin dust instead of fire.
And it clings there from the Lint to the Loom.
Small wonder that the poor little white slaves, taking up their
serfdom at the loom where the negro left off at the lint, die like
pigs in a cotton-seed pen.
There was cotton everywhere--in the fields, unpicked; in the
gin-houses, unginned. That in the fields would be plowed under next
spring, presenting the strange anomaly of plowing under one crop to
raise another of the same kind. But it has been done many times in
the fertile Valley of the Tennessee.
There is that in the Saxon race that makes it discontented, even with
success.
There was cotton everywhere; it lay piled up around the gin-houses
and screws and negro-cabins and under the sheds and even under the
trees. All of it, which was exposed to the weather, was in bales,
weighing each a fourth of a ton and with bulging white spots in their
bellies where the coarse cotton baling failed to cover their
nakedness.
It was cotton--cotton--cotton. Seed,--ginned,--lint,--baled,--cotton.
The Gaffs was a fine estate of five thousand acres which had been
handed down for several generations. The old home sat in a grove of
hickory, oak and elm trees, on a gentle slope. Ancient sentinels, and
they were there when the first Travis came from North Carolina to the
Tennessee Valley and built his first double-log cabin under the
shelter of their arms.
From the porch of The Gaffs,--as the old home was called--the
Tennessee River could be seen two miles away, its brave swift channel
glittering like the flash of a silver arrow in the dark green wood
which bordered it.
Back of the house the mountain ridge rolled; not high enough to be
awful and unapproachable, nor so low as to breed contempt from a too
great familiarity. Not grand, but the kind one loves to wander over.
CHAPTER II
RICHARD TRAVIS
Strength was written in the face of Richard Travis--the owner of The
Gaffs--intellectual, physical, passion-strength, strength of purpose
and of doing. Strength, but not moral strength; and hence lacking all
of being all-conquering.
He had that kind of strength which made others think as he thought,
and do as he would have them do. He saw things clearly, strongly,
quickly. His assurance made all things sure. He knew things and was
proud of it. He knew himself and other men. And best of all, as he
thought, he knew women.
Richard Travis was secretary and treasurer of the Acme Cotton Mills.
To-night he was alone in the old-fashioned but elegant dining-room of
the Gaffs. The big log fire of ash and hickory was pleasant, and the
blaze, falling in sombre color on the old mahogany side-board which
sat opposite the fireplace, on the double ash floor, polished and
shining, added a deeper and richer hue to it. From the toes of the
dragon on which it rested, to the beak of the hand-carved eagle,
spreading his wings over the shield beneath him, carved in the solid
mahogany and surrounded by thirteen stars, all was elegance and
aristocracy. Even the bold staring eyes of the eagle seemed proud of
the age of the side-board, for had it not been built when the stars
numbered but thirteen? And was not the eagle rampant then?
The big brass andirons were mounted with the bronzed heads of
wood-nymphs, and these looked saucily up at the eagle. The
three-cornered cupboard, in one corner of the room, was of cherry,
with small diamond-shaped windows in front, showing within rare old
sets of china and cut glass. The handsome square dining table matched
the side-board, only its dragon feet were larger and stronger, as if
intended to stand up under more weight, at times.
Everything was ancient and had a pedigree. Even the Llewellyn setter
was old, for he was grizzled around the muzzle and had deep-set,
lusterless eyes, from which the firelight, as if afraid of their very
uncanniness, darted out as soon as it entered. And he carried his
head to one side when he walked, as old and deaf dogs do.
He lay on a rug before the fire. He had won this license, for
opposite his name on the kennel books were more field-trials won than
by any other dog in Alabama. And now he dozed and dreamed of them
again, with many twitchings of feet, and cocked, quivering ears, and
rigid tail, as if once more frozen to the covey in the tall
sedge-grass of the old field, with the smell of frost-bitten
Lespedeza, wet with dew, beneath his feet.
Travis stooped and petted the old dog. It was the one thing of his
household he loved most.
"Man or dog--'tis all the same," he mused as he watched the dreaming
dog--"it is old age's privilege to dream of what has been done--it is
youth's to do."
He stretched himself in his big mahogany chair and glanced down his
muscular limbs, and drew his arms together with a snap of quick
strength.
Everything at The Gaffs was an open diary of the master's life. It is
so in all homes--that which we gather around us, from our books to
our bed-clothes, is what we are.
And so the setter on the rug meant that Richard Travis was the best
wing-shot in the Tennessee Valley, and that his kennel of Gladstone
setters had won more field trials than any other kennel in the South.
No man has really hunted who has never shot quail in Alabama over a
well-broken setter. All other hunting is butchery compared to the
scientific sweetness of this sport.
There was a good-night, martial, daring crow, ringing from the
Hoss-apple tree at the dining-room window. Travis smiled and called
out:
"Lights waked you up, eh, Dick? You're a gay Lothario--go back to
sleep."
Richard Travis had the original stock--the Irish Greys--which his
doughty old grandsire, General Jeremiah Travis, developed to
championship honors, and in a memorable main with his friend, General
Andrew Jackson, ten years after the New Orleans campaign, he had
cleared up the Tennesseans, cock and pocket. It was a big main in
which Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama were pitted against each other,
and in which the Travis cocks of the Emerald Isle strain, as Old
Hickory expressed it, "stood the steel like a stuck she-b'ar,
fightin' for her cubs."
General Travis had been an expert at heeling a cock; and it is said
that his skill on that occasion was worth more than the blood of his
Greys; for by a peculiar turn of the gaffs,--so slight as to escape
the notice of any but an expert--his champion cock had struck the
blow which ended the battle. With the money won, he had added four
thousand acres to his estate, and afterwards called it The Gaffs.
And a strong, brave man had been General Jeremiah Travis,--pioneer,
Indian fighter, Colonel in the Creek war and at New Orleans, and a
General in the war with Mexico.
His love for the Union had been that of a brave man who had gone
through battles and shed his blood for his country.
The Civil War broke his heart.
In his early days his heart had been in his thoroughbred horses and
his fighting cocks, and when he heard that his nephew had died with
Crockett and Bowie at the Alamo, he drew himself proudly up and said:
"A right brave boy, by the Eternal, and he died as becomes one
crossed on an Irish Grey cock."
That had been years before. Now, a new civilization had come on the
stage, and where the grandsire had taken to thoroughbreds, Richard
Travis, the grandson, took to trotters. In the stalls where once
stood the sons of Sir Archie, Boston, and imported Glencoe himself,
now were sons of Mambrino Patchin, and George Wilkes and Harold. And
a splendid lot they were--sires,--brood mares and colts, in the
paddocks of The Gaffs.
Travis took no man's dust in the Tennessee Valley. At county fairs he
had a walk-over.
He had inherited The Gaffs from his grandfather, for both his parents
died in his infancy, and his two remaining uncles gave their lives in
Virginia, early in the war, following the flag of the Confederacy.
One of them had left a son, whom Richard Travis had educated and who
had, but the June before, graduated from the State University.
Travis saw but little of him, since each did as he pleased, and it
did not please either of them to get into each other's way.
There had been no sympathy between them. There could not be, for they
were too much alike in many ways.
There can be no sympathy in selfishness.
All through the summer Harry Travis had spent his time at picnics and
dances, and, but for the fact that his cousin now and then missed one
of his best horses from the stable, or found his favorite gun put
away foul, or his fishing tackle broken, he would not have known that
Harry was on the place.
Cook-mother Charity kept the house. Bond and free, she had spent all
her life at The Gaffs. Of this she was prouder than to have been
housekeeper at Windsor. Her word was law; she was the only mortal who
bossed, as she called it, Richard Travis.
Usually, friends from town kept the owner company, and The Gaffs'
reputation for hospitality, while generous, was not unnoted for its
hilarity.
To-night Richard Travis was lonely. His supper tray had not been
removed. He lit a cigar and picked up a book--it was Herbert Spencer,
and he was soon interested.
Ten minutes later an octoroon house-girl, with dark Creole eyes, and
bright ribbons in her hair, came in to remove the supper dishes. She
wore a bright-colored green gown, cut low. As she reached over the
table near him he winced at the strong smell of musk, which beauties
of her race imagine adds so greatly to their aesthetic _status-quo_.
She came nearer to him than was necessary, and there was an attempted
familiarity in the movement that caused him to curve slightly the
corner of his thin, nervous lip, showing beneath his mustache. She
kept a half glance on him always. He smoked and read on, until the
rank smell of her perfume smote him again through the odor of his
cigar, and as he looked up she had busied around so close to him that