I am not very well provided for, myself, but still I would not turn my back on a homeless orphan. If he will go with me I will give him a home, and loving regard — I will do for him as I would have another do for a child of my own in misfortune.”
One after another the people stepped forward and wrung the stranger’s hand with cordial good will, and their eyes looked all that their hands could not express or their lips speak.
“Said like a true man,” said one.
“You was a stranger to me a minute ago, but you ain’t now,” said another.
“It’s bread cast upon the waters — it’ll return after many days,” said the old lady whom we have heard speak before.
“You got to camp in my house as long as you hang out here,” said one. “If tha hain’t room for you and yourn my tribe’ll turn out and camp in the hay loft.”
A few minutes afterward, while the preparations for the funeral were being concluded, Mr. Hawkins arrived at his wagon leading his little waif by the hand, and told his wife all that had happened, and asked her if he had done right in giving to her and to himself this new care? She said:
“If you’ve done wrong, Si Hawkins, it’s a wrong that will shine brighter at the judgment day than the rights that many a man has done before you. And there isn’t any compliment you can pay me equal to doing a thing like this and finishing it up, just taking it for granted that I’ll be willing to it. Willing? Come to me; you poor motherless boy, and let me take your grief and help you carry it.”
When the child awoke in the morning, it was as if from a troubled dream. But slowly the confusion in his mind took form, and he remembered his great loss; the beloved form in the coffin; his talk with a generous stranger who offered him a home; the funeral, where the stranger’s wife held him by the hand at the grave, and cried with him and comforted him; and he remembered how this, new mother tucked him in his bed in the neighboring farm house, and coaxed him to talk about his troubles, and then heard him say his prayers and kissed him good night, and left him with the soreness in his heart almost healed and his bruised spirit at rest.
And now the new mother came again, and helped him to dress, and combed his hair, and drew his mind away by degrees from the dismal yesterday, by telling him about the wonderful journey he was going to take and the strange things he was going to see. And after breakfast they two went alone to the grave, and his heart went out to his new friend and his untaught eloquence poured the praises of his buried idol into her ears without let or hindrance. Together they planted roses by the headboard and strewed wild flowers upon the grave; and then together they went away, hand in hand, and left the dead to the long sleep that heals all heartaches and ends all sorrows.
CHAPTER III.
Whatever the lagging dragging journey may have been to the rest of the emigrants, it was a wonder and delight to the children, a world of enchantment; and they believed it to be peopled with the mysterious dwarfs and giants and goblins that figured in the tales the negro slaves were in the habit of telling them nightly by the shuddering light of the kitchen fire.
At the end of nearly a week of travel, the party went into camp near a shabby village which was caving, house by house, into the hungry Mississippi. The river astonished the children beyond measure. Its mile-breadth of water seemed an ocean to them, in the shadowy twilight, and the vague riband of trees on the further shore, the verge of a continent which surely none but they had ever seen before.
“Uncle Dan’l” (colored,) aged 40; his wife, “aunt Jinny,” aged 30, “Young Miss” Emily Hawkins, “Young Mars” Washington Hawkins and “Young Mars” Clay, the new member of the family, ranged themselves on a log, after supper, and contemplated the marvelous river and discussed it. The moon rose and sailed aloft through a maze of shredded cloud-wreaths; the sombre river just perceptibly brightened under the veiled light; a deep silence pervaded the air and was emphasized, at intervals, rather than broken, by the hooting of an owl, the baying of a dog, or the muffled crash of a carving bank in the distance.
The little company assembled on the log were all children (at least in simplicity and broad and comprehensive ignorance,) and the remarks they made about the river were in keeping with the character; and so awed were they by the grandeur and the solemnity of the scene before them, and by their belief that the air was filled with invisible spirits and that the faint zephyrs were caused by their passing wings, that all their talk took to itself a tinge of the supernatural, and their voices were subdued to a low and reverent tone. Suddenly Uncle Dan’l exclaimed:
“Chil’en, dah’s sum fin a comin!”
All crowded close together and every heart beat faster.
Uncle Dan’l pointed down the river with his bony finger.
A deep coughing sound troubled the stillness, way toward a wooded cape that jetted into the stream a mile distant. All in an instant a fierce eye of fire shot out from behind the cape and sent a long brilliant pathway quivering athwart the dusky water. The coughing grew louder and louder, the glaring eye grew larger and still larger, glared wilder and still wilder. A huge shape developed itself out of the gloom, and from its tall duplicate horns dense volumes of smoke, starred and spangled with sparks, poured out and went tumbling away into the farther darkness. Nearer and nearer the thing came, till its long sides began to glow with spots of light which mirrored themselves in the river and attended the monster like a torchlight procession.
“What is it! Oh, what is it, Uncle Dan’l!”
With deep solemnity the answer came:
“It’s de Almighty! Git down on yo’ knees!”
It was not necessary to say it twice. They were all kneeling, in a moment. And then while the mysterious coughing rose stronger and stronger and the threatening glare reached farther and wider, the negro’s voice lifted up its supplications:
“O Lord’, we’s ben mighty wicked, an’ we knows dat we ‘zerve to go to de bad place, but good Lord, deah Lord, we ain’t ready yit, we ain’t ready — let dese po’ chilen hab one mo’ chance, jes’ one mo’ chance. Take de ole niggah if you’s got to hab somebody. — Good Lord, good deah Lord, we don’t know whah you’s a gwyne to, we don’t know who you’s got yo’ eye on, but we knows by de way you’s a comin’, we knows by de way you’s a tiltin’ along in yo’ charyot o’ fiah dat some po’ sinner’s a gwyne to ketch it. But good Lord, dose chilen don’t b’long heah, dey’s f’m Obedstown whah dey don’t know nuffin, an’ you knows, yo’ own sef, dat dey ain’t ‘sponsible. An’ deah Lord, good Lord, it ain’t like yo’ mercy, it ain’t like yo’ pity, it ain’t like yo’ longsufferin’ lovin’ kindness for to take dis kind o’ ‘vantage o’ sick little chil’en as dose is when dey’s so many ornery grown folks chuck full o’ cussedness dat wants roastin’ down dah. Oh, Lord, spah de little chil’en, don’t tar de little chil’en away f’m dey frens, jes’ let ‘em off jes’ dis once, and take it out’n de ole niggah. HEAH I IS, LORD, HEAH I IS! De ole niggah’s ready, Lord, de ole — — ”
The flaming and churning steamer was right abreast the party, and not twenty steps away. The awful thunder of a mud-valve suddenly burst forth, drowning the prayer, and as suddenly Uncle Dan’l snatched a child under each arm and scoured into the woods with the rest of the pack
