The slave ship
stood there in the storm that still raved, though with a sunken fury,
and saw no life upon its long stretches to one hand or the other.
I was wet through and torn by the forest; the bread and meat I had
abstracted from the plantation I was leaving was long ago eaten; I had
had little sleep and no shelter, I was half naked, burned and gaunt
as a wolf. As I stood there, back flashed to me Tolbooth Lane, Saint
Giles and the high roofs of the Luckenbooths. That, too, was witches’
weather, and Sandy Scott’s barn had proved no long shelter. Five years
ago, five lang, lang years ago! Suddenly night thicker than a knife
could cut descended on my soul. Through it I heard the river there
below me, swollen and hoarse, flinging itself to the sea. I said,
“Drowning’s short. Let’s be over with it!” and put myself into motion
toward the yellow flood that was already carrying logs and broken trees
enough.
A bank of earth and a row of huge, ghostly sycamores hid from me the
stream’s edge. As I came down, my head dizzy now and singing, I heard
bagpipes, and knew that I must be dead already and back in Scotland.
It was not the pipes but a man with a flute, seated before a kind of
cabin built up from a flatboat laden with skins and other matters, and
fastened to a sycamore in a backwater under the bank. I saw him and
checked myself and would have vanished among hazel and alder, but his
eye was keen or he heard the loosened stone and earth. He took the
flute from his lips and laid his hand upon a musket on the deck beside
him. “You there in the bushes! Better come out--but in case you mean
any harm, I’ll just state that I’m a dead shot!”
I left the alders and he saw that I was unarmed. It was the middle of
the day, the rain had halted and a cold and lurid light wrapped the
world. He stared at me.
“Well, I know what you are! You’re a runaway! Isn’t Daniel Askew’s land
over that-away?”
“You’re in the right,” I answered, and came to the water’s edge, a
strip of flood being yet between him and me. “If you’ve got a bite of
anything, remember that we are both men!”
“Why did you come racing down as though to a meeting?”
“I meant to plunge in and have life over that I was tired of. But life
has an awful amount of life in it. My mind’s changing.”
“If you think you can take my boat, you’re mistook.”
“I don’t, man!” I said. “You’ve got a gun. And I’m nigh dead, and you
look fresh and limber as a Maytime buck. What I’m asking you for is
just mercy.”
“I’m not putting across to the other side. As soon as the sky clears
and the old river stops her tossing a mite, I’m dropping on down to
Norfolk.”
As he spoke there rose before the inner eye a ship with heaped canvas.
If I could get to a ship, if a ship would take me aboard! Ships forever
wanted seamen and were never too cautious whence they came. It was like
threading a needle in the dark, but I threaded it, and willed Norfolk
port, not Carolina. _O what guided ye, David Scott?_
I said, “Take me to Norfolk, man! By any chance, are you knowing Daniel
Askew?”
He spat. “Yes, I know him.”
“Then you know why I’m running. If you hate him, you’ll not be anxious
to gratify him. If you love him, you’ll be serving him, for if I’m
taken I mean to murder him.”
“You may scalp him for all I care!” and he spat again. “I suppose you’d
make yourself useful? Jim Halfman that was my partner got drowned at
the falls.”
“Try me and see,” I said. “And in the name of all that’s good, man,
haven’t you anything to eat?”
He looked at me hard again, then rising brought a plank and with
it made a bridge from boat to shore. I came across, and ah, that
flatboat and its stinking skins seemed to me as fair as a palace! And
when he gave me venison and maize cakes to eat and poured for me half a
pint of rum and water, I felt that he was a kind of woodland god.
Christian Todd, that was his name, a man of forty and trader to the
Indians for half those years. He had an old hunting shirt and leggings
and an otter-skin cap, a long knife and a short knife, a musket and
powderhorn and bag of shot, and his flute. His hair and beard were long
and tawny yellow, and his gray eyes looked vague and never were so in
the least. His tongue lay silent nine-tenths of the time in the cavern
of his jaws. The other tenth, if there were no other need, he slowly
talked of Indians and their ways or of forest beasts and theirs.
The blue sky shone, the light played, the air grew balm. We loosed the
boat from the shore. There were two great oars and also a short mast
and small patched sail the color of a dead leaf. The hutch of a cabin,
the jut of his heaps of skins and other truck furnished cover for me
when boats passed us or we were hailed from the shore. Neither happened
often, for this is a hugeous river and country and the human life is
not numerous. Moreover, Christian Todd seemed to be known and his ways
respected. When he shouted, “Going down the river and I’m late!” none
overpersuaded or tried to prevent. The first night, the river still
rough and high, we laid to beside an ancient, broken landing, but the
second the moon was bright and the water wide and we went on with the
flood, one sleeping while the other waked. No one pursued, no one
summoned us in the name of the law.
“My luck has turned!” said David Scott, and was no more thankful or
in-seeing than that.
But I liked Christian Todd who never asked a question as to my past or
my future, who could keep a colorful silence, and who lived with the
great forest, not chopped it down. It is true he traded in the lives
of the beasts; there were heaped about us skins and fur of fox and
bear and marten and squirrel, doe and fawn and beaver. But David Scott
thought of that no otherwise than as a matter of course. David Scott
and Christian Todd. David Scott, twenty-seven years old, going down
James River on a flatboat, good meat and bread to eat and rum to drink,
and before him day and night a dream ship, tall and white as the moon,
that might even take him back to Scotland.
Now and then Christian Todd took up his flute. He played strange airs,
Indian maybe. By now I knew well the melodies of the Negroes. It was
not these, nor was it English or Scots. He may have taken them from the
Indians or from himself. He was a strange, Panlike creature.
So I went, so safely and securely, down to Norfolk. It was as though,
suddenly, a warlock had taken me up.
The river grew enormously broad, the sea was felt, the sun glistened
against gull wings and the sails of tall ships. Now I saw, though still
afar, that small, rude, port town that I had not seen since the _King
William_ bore me by it. And not a hitch; as smoothly had we gone as
though Heaven had said, Let it be so! Christian Todd pointed. “That
black mark’s my landing. The merchant there in the brick house takes my
skins.”
“It’ll be dusk before we get there. Am I at all like Jim Halfman?”
“Not the least bit. And there’s always a power of people around.”
I shook myself and woke up and tried to plan. The sun was setting,
fiery red. Flood and our small sail carrying us on, Christian Todd
picked up his flute and began to play an air sweet as the throat of
the mocking bird and melancholy as the whippoorwill. In his boat, in
the forest, he was a wise man, but I knew without being told that in a
white man’s town with white man’s law around, his magic would depart.
And yet I could not plan. I was in a dream and yet not so. And what it
might be I did not know, but I never truly doubted that now at last I
was quitting Virginia who had dreamed so often of quitting it. I say I
do not know, and yet maybe I do.
The sun went down. There flared a great, red, autumnal afterglow. We
were over toward the southern shore, and now the landing, the brick
houses of the merchants and the town beyond increased in size, and the
anchored ships in number. I had reached the point that I might easily
stay upon the flatboat through the night, leaving my wits to work
at dawn, and just as I rested upon that and looked again at the sky
that flamed as though the earth beneath were on fire, and at the wide
water and smelled the sea, the lanterns were lighted upon a large ship
swinging at anchor close before us.
“I don’t know her,” said Christian Todd. “But then I forget ships,
being gone so long in the land of canoes.”
It was not so dark but that much of her might be seen, lying there
under bare masts, and now we drew nearer and nearer. She had a
collected and tidy look, her boats were in, her men aboard. We heard
the bo’sn’s pipe. “She’s a creature ready for the sea,” said David
Scott, and his voice had to himself a fatal and resonant sound.
“Aye, at dawn the stag will be gone.”
We were moving past her, we saw her name. The great lantern showed it.
_Janet._ The _Janet_ of Bristol.
David Scott stood up. “Bring her to a bit.” He hailed the ship.
“_Janet_, ahoy!”
A man leaning over the rail answered. “Ye crazed wee boatie, what d’ ye
want?”
I shouted back, “I wad gae tae sea. Tak me and ye’ll find me useful!”
Two more heads appeared. There seemed a colloquy, then the first man
called out, “Come aboard then if your health’s na cracked!”
“This is my ship, Christian Todd,” I said, and we lowered sail and
took up oars. When we got to her side I thanked him. “If there’s Fate
or Necessity or something of that kind, then these three days have
been just at its beck! Maybe all days are. You’ve been a spirit of
deliverance to me, sent out of the wood, and I’m thanking you, man!”
“I was lying under a tree smoking oncet,” said Christian Todd, “and all
of a sudden I sat up and said as loud as ever I spoke in my life, ‘By
Jiminy! there’s very few things that aren’t meant!’ Well, there’s my
hand, and think of Virginia kindly!”
So we parted, and I climbed the side of the ship, using the rope they
dropped for me. When I stood on the deck and looked back, Christian
Todd had pushed off; up went his dead-leaf sail, he swung toward
Norfolk. The red of the sky had grown purple and a huge, round moon was
coming up from the east.
“Are ye a mariner?” said the voice that, I now perceived, belonged to
the first mate.
“I was one summer, for fun, on a brig that went from Berwick to Glasgow
by the Hebrides.”
“‘For fun.’ D’ye hear that, Michaelson? I’m always telling ye that the
sea and the ship and the trade have got their glints. All right, my
billie, my name’s Mr. McNaughton. And now I’ll be taking you to cabin
and the auld man.”
By the lantern I saw that he was red Scot, red as a fox, lean and dry,
and six feet two. Of the sailors with him, one, Michaelson, had been
born in Stirling; the other, Dory, was an Englishman. I gazed around
me, but little could be seen now save by moonlight. It seemed, however,
a tidy, fine ship, and I heard men laughing in the forecastle.
So we went to the great cabin. “Come in, Mr. McNaughton, and whom
have you got there?” said a full, reasonable voice. And to cap the
strangeness of a strange day, it seemed to David Scott that he had
heard that voice before.
CHAPTER VIII
The man to whom it belonged sat at the table with a bottle of wine
and a chart before him. He was rather tall and full of figure, with a
reddish-brown beard, a big nose and dark, hawk eyes, and might be just
this side of fifty. “What have you got here, Mr. McNaughton?” He had
a full, deep, slow, rumbling voice. “Who are you?” He stared at me,
standing in the yellow light, ragged and gaunt and unshorn. “You’re a
runaway, that’s what you are! What are you doing in this galley, may I
ask, Mr. McNaughton?”
The mate explained. “Maybe there ought to have been inquiries, sir.
But I was leaning on the rail, and he came by, and it was as though a