The cleared s.p.a.ce was there to show where something had been cultivated; the bare earth was raked level. Not so much as the hole from which my beet had been ravished remained in circ.u.mstantial evidence. The rest of the party arrived while I stood transfixed, the picture of detected guilt. To the rustle of the corn, and the shuffle of feet over the furrows succeeded a horrible hush. Then, a chorus of mocking girlish cackles, led by Paulina Hobson's discordant screech, smote the sunset air and covered me with a pall of infamy. Paulina caught at the fence for support as she laughed; Madeline bent double and reeled sideways.

I clutched my father's hand, drowning and suffocating in the waves of despairing agony; I shook my tight fist at the insulting quartette.

"They--_they_--took it! It was here this morning. It was here just after dinner to-day!"

"Be quiet, girls!" ordered my judge-advocate. "Molly! I want the exact truth. If you accuse them, you must prove what you say. Things have gone too far to stop here. Didn't you say that Spotswoode knew something about the affair?"

"He knows all about it. He helped me, ever so many times, and he saw how big it was," I e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed vehemently.

"We shall probably find him at the stables, feeding the horses."

Back we trudged by my air-line, well-worn but narrow. I fancy that my father took note of my familiarity with the path, but he did not speak of it. I marched in front of him, gloomy and desperate. Some of the others talked low as they straggled along. The girls kept up a hissing whispering, for which I hated them with my whole soul. I think that my mother and Miss Davidson shed some furtive tears, for my case was black, and they were tender-hearted.

Spotswoode was looking after his plough-horses, as my father had conjectured. At his master's shout, he emerged from the stalls and presented himself in the stable door. Ungainly, dirty, bare-footed, his ragged wool hat on the back of his unkempt woolly poll, his jaw dropping in idiotic amazement at sight of the party--he was a ludicrous figure in the bath of late sunshine that brought out every uncomely item of the picture. Preoccupied and distraught as I was, I saw how the dust from the stable floor floated in golden clouds to the cobwebbed rafters, as the sun struck past the man in the doorway and glorified the murky interior.

I rushed through the yard, heedless of manure heaps, and young pigs and calves scattered by my impetuous approach.

"Oh, Spotswoode!" in a voice that cracked and went to pieces as I ran, "somebody has stolen my beet! You can tell father--"

A hot valve closed in my windpipe and shut out the rest.

Spotswoode's jaw hung more loosely; his eyes were utterly vacant.

"Ya-as, little Mistis!" he drawled, and slunk back into the stable.

"What do you mean, sir? Come back here, this minute!" called his master.

When he reappeared, he carried in both hands, extended, after the similitude of a pre-historic monkey making a votive offering--something dark-red and pot-bellied, and more immense than I had dreamed it could look. A cl.u.s.ter of cropped leaves crowned it, a taper root, a foot long, depended from the bottom.

"I done been dig it up fo' you an' wash it, dis ebenin', 'stid o'

termorrer," drawled my vindicator. "So's ter hab it all ready fur the Fyar."

Mute and triumphant, I received it in a rapturous embrace, set it on a bench by the stable door, and pa.s.sed the hem of my muslin ap.r.o.n about it. The ends just met.

"That's how I knew how big it was," I said simply. "Mother told me that my ap.r.o.n was a yard wide. I measured it while it was in the ground."

The beet--and its history--went to the Fair, and a prize was awarded to "_Miss Mary Hobson Burwell, For best specimen of Mangel Wurzel, raised by Herself._"

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Chapter XIII

Two Adventures

[Ill.u.s.tration]

In a country neighborhood where half the people were cousins to the other half, gossip could not but spring up and flourish as lushly as pursley,--named by the Indians, "the white man's foot."

The gossip was usually kindly; sometimes it was captious, now and then it was almost malicious. Everything depends upon the medium through which the floating matter in the air is strained.

Cousin Molly Belle's best friends thought and said that she chose judiciously in marrying the clean-lived, high-minded gentleman who had loved her before she was grown and whom she loved dearly in return. Her next best friends intimated that the most popular girl in the county might have done better for herself than to take Frank Morton, as fine a fellow as ever lived, but whose share of his father's estate was a small plantation with a tolerable house upon it, a dozen "hands" and, maybe, a thousand dollars or so in bonds and stocks. The girls she had out-belled, the girls' mothers, and sundry youths to whom Mrs. Frank Morton had given the mitten in her singlehood, said openly that she had quite thrown herself away in settling down to house-keeping, poultry-raising, and home-making in an out-of-the-way farmstead, with little society except that of a man ten years older, and thirty years soberer, than herself.

What a different story I could have told to those who doubted, and those who pitied! Nowhere in all our broad and bonny State did human lives flow on more smoothly and radiantly than in the white house nestled under the great oak that was a landmark for miles around. It had but five rooms, kitchen, store-room, smoke-house, and other domestic offices being in detached buildings, as was the custom of the region and times.

If there had been fifty they could not have held the happiness that streamed through the five as lavishly as the sunshine, and, like the sunshine, was newly made every day.

I was going on ten years old when my sweet mother gave a little sister to Bud and me. She had been with us but three days when Cousin Molly Belle drove over for me and the small hair trunk that meant a visit of several days when it went along. This time it signified four of the very _loveliest_ weeks of my life, and two Adventures.

The blessed grandchildren, at whose instance these tales of that all-so-long-ago are written with flying pen and br.i.m.m.i.n.g heart, and sometimes eyes so moist that the lines waver and swim upon the page, will have it--as their parents insisted before them--that "we never, never can have such good times and so many happenings as you had when you were new."

If I smile quietly in telling over to myself the simple elements and few, out of which the good times were made, and how tame the happenings would be to modern young folk, I cannot gainsay the truth that my daily life was full and rich, and that every hour had a peculiar interest.

For one thing, there was a baby at Oakholme, a bouncing boy, st.u.r.dy of limb and of lung, and so like both his parents in all the good qualities possible to a baby, as to leave nothing to be desired by the best friends aforesaid, and no room for criticism on the part of the malcontents. Out-of-doors were chickens, ducks, turkeys, guinea-fowls, pigs, calves, pigeons, and a couple of colts,--all, like the baby boy, the best of their kind. What time was left on our hands after each had had its meed of attention, was more than consumed by a library such as few young planters had collected in a county where choice literature was as much household plenishing as beds, tables, and candlesticks.

It was July, and the days were at their longest according to the Warrock's Almanac that hung over Cousin Frank's desk in a corner of the dining room. They were never so short to me before.

Adventure No. 1 befell us one forenoon, as Cousin Molly Belle and I were topping and tailing gooseberries for tarts, on the side porch. Baby Carter was on the mat at our feet, bulging his eyes and swelling his cheeks in futile efforts to extort a squeak from a chinquapin whistle his father had made for him. The kind that, as you may recollect, kept the whistle in them over night, and did not shrivel up.

"It's there, old fellow, if you really know how to get it out," Cousin Frank told his son and heir. "Everything depends upon yourself."

"Like other things that people fret for," moralized the mother.

Nevertheless, she reached down for the whistle, wiped the mouthpiece dry, and sent the baby into ecstasies by executing "Yankee Doodle"

flourishingly upon it. A chinquapin fife lends itself more readily to the patriotic, step-and-go-fetch-it melody than to any other in the national _repertoire_. Carter crowed, opened his mouth wide, and beat his fat pink palms together.

"Just as they applaud the clown at the circus!" said the performer. "He already recognizes his mother's talents."

"If he ever fails to do that, I'll flog him out of his boots!" retorted the father.

A wild commotion at "the quarters" cut his speech short. Women shrieked, children bellowed, men roared, and two words disentangled themselves from the turmoil.

"_Mad_ dog! _mad_ dog!" p.r.o.nounced, as the warning cry is spoken everywhere at the South, with a heavy accent on the first word.

Cousin Frank whipped up the baby; Cousin Molly thrust her hand under the collar of Hector, a fine pointer who lay on the floor, and, urging me before them, they hustled us all into the house in the half twinkle of an eye. In another, Cousin Frank was driving a load of buckshot into his gun faster than it was ever loaded before, even by him, and he was a hunting expert.

"Dear!" his wife caught the hand laid on the door-k.n.o.b; her eyes were wild and imploring.

"Yes, my darling!"

He was out and the door was shut.

We flew to the window. Right up the path leading by the quarters from the spring at the foot of the hill, trotted an enormous bull dog. Half a dozen men were pelting him with stones from a respectful distance. He paid no attention to stones or shouts. Keeping the straight path, his brute head wagging drunkenly, he was making directly for the open yard-gate, from which a gravel walk led to the porch where we had been sitting. Snap, his master's favorite hunter, and the petted darling of his mistress, was. .h.i.tched to the rack by the gate, ready-saddled for Cousin Frank's morning round of the plantation. At the noise behind him, the intelligent creature threw up his handsome head, glanced over his shoulder, and began to plunge and snort, as if aware of the danger. His master spoke soothingly as he planted his own body between him and the ugly beast.

"Steady, old boy! steady!"

In saying it he raised the gun to his shoulder. It was all done so quickly that I had hardly seen the livid horror in Cousin Molly Belle's face when the good gun spoke, the muzzle within ten yards of the dog's head, and he rolled over in the path.