The Bishop of Cottontown: A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills
shoulder, and the next instant he would have fired the load into the
face of the thing with its voice of the dead, had not something burst
on his head with a staggering, overpowering blow, and despite his
efforts to stand, his knees gave way beneath him and it seemed
pleasant for him to lie prone upon the floor....
When he awakened an hour afterwards, he sat up, bewildered. His gun
lay beside him, but the window was closed securely and bolted. No
night air came in. The Davenport and pillow were there as before. His
head ached and there was a bruised place over his ear. He walked into
his own room and lit the lamp.
"I may have fallen and struck my head," he said, bewildered with the
strangeness of it all. "I may have," he repeated--"but if I didn't
see Tom Travis's ghost to-night there is no need to believe one's
senses."
He opened the door and let in two setters which fawned upon him and
licked his hand. All his nervousness vanished.
"No one knows the comfort of a dog's company," he said, "who does not
love a dog?"
Then he bathed his face and head and went to sleep.
It was after midnight when Jack Bracken led Captain Tom in and put
him to bed.
"A close shave for you, Cap'n Tom," he said--"I struck just in time.
I'll not leave you another night with the door unlocked." Then: "But
poor fellow--how can we blame him for wandering off, after all those
years, and trying to get back again to his boyhood home."
CHAPTER XII
A MIDNIGHT GUARD
Jack Bracken rolled himself in his blanket on the cot, placed in the
room next to Captain Tom, and prepared to sleep again.
But the excitement of the night had been great; his sudden awakening
from sleep, his missing Captain Tom, and finding him in time to
prevent a tragedy, had aroused him thoroughly, and now sleep was far
from his eyes.
And so he lay and thought of his past life, and as it passed before
him it shook him with nervous sleeplessness.
It hurt him. He lay and panted with the strong sorrow of it.
Perhaps it was that, but with it were thoughts also of little Jack,
and the tears came into the eyes of the big-hearted outlaw.
He had his plans all arranged--he and the Bishop--and now as the
village blacksmith he would begin the life of an honest man.
Respected--his heart beat proudly to think of it.
Respected--how little it means to the man who is, how much to the man
who is not.
"Why," he said to himself--"perhaps after a while people will stop
and talk to me an' say as they pass my shop: 'Good mornin',
neighbor, how are you to-day?' Little children--sweet an' innocent
little children--comin' from school may stop an' watch the sparks fly
from my anvil, like they did in the poem I onct read, an' linger
aroun' an' talk to me, shy like; maybe, after awhile I'll get their
confidence, so they will learn to love me, an' call me Uncle
Jack--Uncle Jack," he repeated softly.
"An' I won't be suspectin' people any mo' an' none of 'em will be my
enemy. I'll not be carryin' pistols an' havin' buckets of gold an'
not a friend in the worl'."
His heart beat fast--he could scarcely wait for the morning to come,
so anxious was he to begin the life of an honest man again. He who
had been an outlaw so long, who had not known what it was to know
human sympathy and human friendship--it thrilled him with a rich,
sweet flood of joy.
Then suddenly a great wave swept over him--a wave of such exquisite
joy that he fell on his knees and cried out: "O God, I am a changed
man--how happy I am! jus' to be human agin an' not hounded! How can I
thank You--You who have given me this blessed Man the Bishop tells us
about--this Christ who reaches out an' takes us by the han' an' lifts
us up. O God, if there is divinity given to man, it is given to that
man who can lift up another, as the po' outlaw knows."
He lay silent and thoughtful. All day and night--since he had first
seen Margaret, her eyes had haunted him. He had not seen her before
for many years; but in all that time there had not been a day when he
had not thought of--loved--her.
Margaret--her loneliness--the sadness of her life, all haunted him.
She lived, he knew, alone, in her cottage--an outcast from society.
He had looked but once in her eyes and caught the lingering look of
appeal which unconsciously lay there. He knew she loved him yet--it
was there as plain as in his own face was written the fact that he
loved her. He thought of himself--of her. Then he said:
"For fifteen years I have robbed--killed--oh, God--killed--how it
hurts me now! All the category of crime in bitter wickedness I have
run. And she--once--and now an angel--Bishop himself says so."
"I am a new man--I am a respectable and honest man,"--here he arose
on his cot and drew himself up--"I am Jack Smith--Mr. Jack Smith, the
blacksmith, and my word is my bond."
He slipped out quietly. Once again in the cool night, under the stars
which he had learned to love as brothers and whose silent paths
across the heavens were to him old familiar footpaths, he felt at
ease, and his nervousness left him.
He had not intended to speak to Margaret then--for he thought she was
asleep. He wished only to guard her cabin, up among the stunted old
field pines--while she slept--to see the room he knew she slept
in--the little window she looked out of every day.
The little cabin was a hallowed spot to him. Somehow he knew--he felt
that whatever might be said--in it he knew an angel dwelt. He could
not understand--he only knew.
There is a moral sense within us that is a greater teacher than
either knowledge or wisdom.
For an hour he stood with his head uncovered watching the little
cabin where she lived. Everything about it was sacred, because
Margaret lived there. It was pretty, too, in its neatness and
cleanliness, and there were old-fashioned flowers in the yard and
old-fashioned roses clambered on the rock wall.
He sat down in the path--the little white sanded path down which he
knew she went every day, and so made sacred by her footsteps.
"Perhaps, I am near one of them now," he said--and he kissed the
spot.
And that night and many others did the outlaw watch over the lonely
cabin on the mountain side. And she, the outcast woman, slept within,
unconscious that she was being protected by the man who had loved her
all his life.
CHAPTER XIII
THE THEFT OF A CHILDHOOD
The Watts children were up the next morning by four o'clock.
Mrs. Watts ate, always, by candle-light. The sun, she thought, would
be dishonored, were he to find her home in disorder, her breakfast
uncooked, her day's work not ready for her, with his first beams.
For Mrs. Watts did not consider that arising at four, and cooking and
sweeping and tidying up the cabin, and quarreling with the Bishop as
"a petty old bundle of botheration"--and storming around at the
children--all by sun-up--this was not work at all.
It was merely an appetizer.
The children were aroused by her this morning with more severity than
usual. Half frightened they rolled stupidly out of their
beds--Appomattox, Atlanta, and Shiloh from one, and the boys from
another. Then they began to put on their clothes in the same
listless, dogged, mechanical way they had learned to do
everything--learned it while working all day between the whirl of the
spindle and the buzz of the bobbin.
The sun had not yet risen, and a cold gray mist crept up from the
valley, closing high up and around the wood-girdled brow of the
mountain as billows around a rock in the sea. The faint, far-off
crowing of cocks added to the weirdness; for their shrill voices
alone broke through the silence which came down with the mist. Around
the brow of Sand Mountain the vapor made a faint halo--touched as it
was by the splendid flush of the East.
It was all grand and beautiful enough without, but within was the
poverty of work, and the two--poverty and work--had already had their
effect on the children, except, perhaps, Shiloh. She had not yet been
in the mill long enough to be automatonized.
Looking out of the window she saw the star setting behind the
mountain, and she thought it slept, by day, in a cavern she knew of
there.
"Wouldn't it be fine, Mattox," she cried, "if we didn't have to work
at the mill to-day an' cu'd run up on the mountain an' pick up that
star? I seed one fall onct an' I picked it up."
For a moment the little face was thoughtful--wistful--then she added:
"I wonder how it would feel to spen' the day in the woods onct.
Archie B. says it's just fine and flowers grow everywhere. Oh, jes'
to be 'quainted with one Jeree--like Archie B. is--an' have him come
to yo' winder every mornin' an' say, '_Wake up, Pet! Wake up, Pet!
Wake up, Pet!_' An' then hear a little 'un over in another tree say,
'_So-s-l-ee-py--So-s-l-ee-py!_'"
Her chatter ceased again. Then: "Mattox, did you ever see a rabbit? I
seen one onct, a settin' up in a fence corner an' a spittin' on his
han's to wash his face."
She laughed at the thought of it. But the other children, who had
dressed, sat listlessly in their seats, looking at her with
irresponsive eyes, set deep back into tired, lifeless, weazened
faces.
"I'd ruther a rabbit 'ud wash his face than mine," drawled Bull Run.
Mrs. Watts came in and jerked the chair from under him and he sat
down sprawling. Then he lazily arose and deliberately spat, between
his teeth, into the fireplace.
There was not enough of him alive to feel that he had been imposed
upon.
For breakfast they had big soda biscuits and fried bacon floating in
its own grease. There was enough of it left for the midday lunch.
This was put into a tin pail with a tight fitting top. The pail, when
opened, smelt of the death and remains of every other soda biscuit
that had ever been laid away within this tightly closed mausoleum of
tin.
They had scarcely eaten before the shrill scream of the mill-whistle
called them to their work.
Shiloh, at the sound, stuck her small fingers into her ears and
shuddered.
Then the others struck out across the yard, and Shiloh followed.
To this child of seven, who had already worked six months in the
factory, the scream of the whistle was the call of a frightful
monster, whose black smoke-stack of a snout, with its blacker breath
coming out, and the flaming eyes of the engine glaring through the
smoke, completed the picture of a wild beast watching her. Within,
the whirr and tremble of shuttle and machinery were the purr and
pulsation of its heart.
She was a nervous, sensitive child, who imagined far more than she
saw; and the very uncanniness of the dark misty morning, the silence,
broken only by the tremble and roar of the mill, the gaunt shadows of
the overtopping mountain, filled her with childish fears.
Nature can do no more than she is permitted; and the terrible strain
of twelve hours' work, every day except Sunday, for the past six
months, where every faculty, from hand and foot to body, eye and
brain, must be alert and alive to watch and piece the never-ceasing
breaking of the threads, had already begun to undermine the
half-formed framework of that little life.
As she approached the mill she clung to the hand of Appomattox, and
shrinking, kept her sister between herself and the Big Thing which
put the sweet morning air a-flutter around its lair. As she drew near
the door she almost cried out in affright--her little heart grew
tight, her lips were drawn.
"Oh, it can't hurt you, Shiloh," said her sister pulling her along.
"You'll be all right when you get inside."
There was a snarling clatter and crescendo tremble, ending in an
all-drowning roar, as the big door was pushed open for a moment, and
Shiloh, quaking, but brave, was pulled in, giving the tiny spark of