The Bishop of Cottontown: A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills
her exposed neck was within two feet of him bent in seeming innocence
over the tray. With a mischievous laugh he reached over and flipped
the hot ashes from his cigar upon her neck. She screamed affectedly
and danced about shaking off the ashes. Then with feigned maidenly
piquancy and many reproachful glances, she went out laughing good
humoredly.
He was good natured, and when she was gone he laughed boyishly.
Good nature is one of the virtues of impurity.
Still giggling she set the tray down in the kitchen and told
Cook-mother Charity about it. That worthy woman gave her a warning
look and said:
"The frisk'ness of this new gen'ration of niggers makes me tired.
Better let Marse Dick alone--he's a dan'g'us man with women."
In the dining-room Travis sat quiet and thoughtful. He was a
handsome man, turning forty. His face was strong, clean shaved,
except a light mustache, with full sensual lips and an unusually fine
brow. It was the brow of intellect--all in front. Behind and above
there was no loftiness of ideality or of veneration. His smile was
constant, and though slightly cold, was always approachable. His
manner was decisive, but clever always, and kind-hearted at times.
Contrary to his habit, he grew reminiscent. He despised this kind of
a mood, because, as he said, "It is the weakness of a fool to think
about himself." He walked to the window and looked out on the broad
fields of The Gaffs in the valley before him. He looked at the
handsomely furnished room and thought of the splendid old home. Then
he deliberately surveyed himself in the mirror. He smiled:
"'Survival of the fittest'--yes, Spencer is right--a great--great
mind. He is living now, and the world, of course, will not admit his
greatness until he is dead. Life, like the bull that would rule the
herd, is never ready to admit that other life is great. A poet is
always a dead rhymester,--a philosopher, a dead dreamer.
"Let Spencer but die!
"Tush! Why indulge in weak modesty and fool self-depreciation? Even
instinct tells me--that very lowest of animal intellectual
forces--that I survive because I am stronger than the dead.
Providence--God--whatever it is, has nothing to do with it except to
start you and let you survive by overcoming. Winds you up and
then--devil take the hindmost!
"It is brains--brains--brains that count--brains first and always.
This moral stuff is fit only for those who are too weak to
conquer. I have accomplished everything in life I have ever
undertaken--everything--and--by brains! Not once have I failed--I have
done it by intellect, courage--intuition--the thing in one that speaks.
"Now as to things of the heart,"--he stopped suddenly--he even
scowled half humorously. It came over him--his failure there, as one
who, sweeping with his knights the pawns of an opponent, suddenly
finds himself confronting a queen--and checkmated.
He walked to the window again and looked toward the northern end of
the valley. There the gables of an old and somewhat weather-beaten
home sat in a group of beech on a rise among the foothills.
"Westmoreland"--he said--"how dilapidated it is getting to be!
Something must be done there, and Alice--Alice,"--he repeated the
name softly--reverently--"I feel--I know it--she--even she shall be
mine--after all these years--she shall come to me yet."
He smiled again: "Then I shall have won all around. Fate? Destiny?
Tush! It's living and surviving weaker things, such for instance as
my cousin Tom."
He smiled satisfactorily. He flecked some cotton lint from his coat
sleeve.
"I have had a hard time in the mill to-day. It's a beastly business
robbing the poor little half-made-up devils."
He rang for Aunt Charity. She knew what he wished, and soon came in
bringing him his cocktail--his night-cap as she always called
it,--only of late he had required several in an evening,--a thing
that set the old woman to quarreling with him, for she knew the limit
of a gentleman. And, in truth, she was proud of her cocktails. They
were made from a recipe given by Andrew Jackson. For fifty years
Cook-mother Charity had made one every night and brought it to "old
marster" before he retired. Now she proudly brought it to his
grandson.
"Oh, say Mammy," he said as the old woman started out--"Carpenter
will be here directly with his report. Bring another pair of these
in--we will want them."
The old woman bristled up. "To be sure, I'll fix 'em, honey. He'll
not know the difference. But the licker he gits in his'n will come
outen the bottle we keep for the hosses when they have the colic. The
bran' we keep for gem'men would stick in his th'oat."
Travis laughed: "Well--be sure you don't get that horse brand in
mine."
CHAPTER III
JUD CARPENTER
An hour afterwards, Travis heard a well-known walk in the hall and
opened the door.
He stepped back astonished. He released the knob and gazed half
angry, half smiling.
A large dog, brindled and lean, walked complacently and
condescendingly in, followed by his master. At a glance, the least
imaginative could see that Jud Carpenter, the Whipper-in of the Acme
Cotton Mills, and Bonaparte, his dog, were well mated.
The man was large, raw-boned and brindled, and he, also, walked in,
complacently and condescendingly.
The dog's ears had been cropped to match his tail, which in his
infancy had been reduced to a very few inches. His under jaw
protruded slightly--showing the trace of bull in his make-up.
That was the man all over. Besides he had a small, mean, roguish ear.
The dog was cross-eyed--"the only cross-eyed purp in the worl'"--as
his master had often proudly proclaimed, and the expression of his
face was uncanny.
Jud Carpenter's eastern-eye looked west, and his western-eye looked
east, and the rest of the paragraph above fitted him also.
The dog's pedigree, as his master had drawlingly proclaimed, was
"p'yart houn', p'yart bull, p'yart cur, p'yart terrier, an' the rest
of him--wal, jes' dog."
Reverse this and it will be Carpenter's: Just dog, with a sprinkling
of bull, cur, terrier, and hound.
Before Richard Travis could protest, the dog walked deliberately to
the fireplace and sprang savagely on the helpless old setter dreaming
on the rug. The older dog expostulated with terrific howls, while
Travis turned quickly and kicked off the intruder.
He stood the kicking as quietly as if it were part of the programme
in the last act of a melodrama in which he was the villain. He was
kicked entirely across the room and his head was driven violently
into the half-open door of the side-board. Here it came in contact
with one of Cook-mother's freshly baked hams, set aside for the
morrow's lunch. Without even a change of countenance--for, in truth,
it could not change--without the lifting even of a hair in surprise,
the brute seized the ham and settled right where he was, to lunch.
And he did it as complacently as he had walked in, and with a
satisfied growl which seemed to say that, so far as the villain was
concerned, the last act of the melodrama was ending to his entire
satisfaction.
Opening a side door, Travis seized him by the stump of a tail and one
hind leg--knowing his mouth was too full of ham to bite anything--and
threw him, still clutching the ham, bodily into the back yard.
Without changing the attitude he found himself in when he hit the
ground, the brindled dog went on with his luncheon.
The very cheek of it set Travis to laughing. He closed the door and
said to the man who had followed the dog in: "Carpenter, if I had
the nerve of that raw-boned fiend that follows you around, I'd soon
own the world."
The man had already taken his seat by the fire as unaffectedly as had
the dog. He had entered as boldly and as indifferently and his two
deep-set, cat-gray cross-eyes looked around as savagely.
He was a tall, lank fellow, past middle age, with a crop of stiff,
red-brown hair, beginning midway of his forehead, so near to an
equally shaggy and heavy splotch of eyebrows as to leave scarce a
finger's breadth between them.
He was wiry and shrewd-looking, and his two deep-set eyes seemed
always like a leopard's,--walking the cage of his face, hunting for
some crack to slip through. Furtive, sly, darting, rolling hither and
thither, never still, comprehensive, all-seeing, malicious and deadly
shrewd. These were the eyes of Jud Carpenter, and they told it all.
To this, add again that they looked in contrary directions.
As a man's eye, so is the tenor of his life.
Yet in them, now and then, the twinkle of humor shone. He had a
conciliatory way with those beneath him, and he considered all the
mill hands in that class. To his superiors he was a frowning, yet
daring and even presumptuous underling.
Somewhat better dressed than the Hillites from whom he sprang was
this Whipper-in of the Acme Cotton Mills--somewhat better dressed,
and with the air of one who had arisen above his surroundings. Yet,
withal, the common, low-born, malicious instinct was there--the
instinct which makes one of them hate the man who is better educated,
better dressed than he. All told, it might be summed up and said of
Jud Carpenter that he had all the instincts of a Hillite and all the
arrogance of a manager.
"Nobody understands that dog, Bonaparte, but me," said Carpenter
after a while--"he's to dogs what his namesake was to man. He's the
champ'un fighter of the Tennessee Valley, an' the only cross-eyed
purp in the worl', as I have often said. Like all gen'uses of course,
he's a leetle peculiar--but him and me--we understan's each other."
He pulled out some mill papers and was about to proceed to discuss
his business when Travis interrupted:
"Hold on," he said, good humoredly, "after my experience with that
cross-eyed genius of a dog, I'll need something to brace me up."
He handed Carpenter a glass and each drank off his cocktail at a
quaff.
Travis settled quickly to business. He took out his mill books, and
for an hour the two talked in a low tone and mechanically. The
commissary department of the mill was taken up and the entire
accounts gone over. Memoranda were made of goods to be ordered. The
accounts of families were run over and inspected. It was tedious
work, but Travis never flagged and his executive ability was quick
and incisive. At last he closed the book with an impatient gesture:
"That's all I'll do to-night," he muttered decisively. "I've other
things to talk to you about. But we'll need something first."
He went to the side-board and brought out a decanter of whiskey, two
goblets and a bowl of loaf sugar.
He laughed: "Mammy knows nothing about this. Two cocktails are the
limit she sets for me, and so I keep this private bottle."
He made a long-toddy for himself, but Carpenter took his straight. In
all of it, his furtive eyes, shining out of the splotch of eyebrows
above, glanced inquiringly around and obsequiously followed every
movement of his superior.
"Now, Carpenter," said the Secretary after he had settled back in his
chair and lit a cigar, handing the box afterwards to the other--"You
know me--you and I--must understand each other in all things."
"'Bleeged to be that way," drawled the Whipper-in--"we must wu'ck
together. You know me, an' that Jud Carpenter's motto is, 'mum, an'
keep movin'.' That's me--that's Jud Carpenter."
Travis laughed: "O, it's nothing that requires so much heavy villain
work as the tone of your voice would suggest. We're not in a
melodrama. This is the nineteenth century and we're talking business
and going to win a thing or two by common sense and business ways,
eh?"
Carpenter nodded.
"Well, now, the first is quite matter of fact--just horses. I believe
we are going to have the biggest fair this fall we have ever had."