Part 4

“I am not engaged,” said Miss Jeanie. “The ring was given me by a gen’leman, but I do not care for him at all. I only promised to wear it a few weeks, because he bothered so. I’ll tell you what,” she said, “to show I don’t care for him and remind you to be sure and call, I’ll give it to you.”

I was in some surprise, you may suppose. “But I can’t take a gentleman’s ring----”

“It’s my ring, I tell you,” said Miss Jeanie. “And if you don’t take it, I shan’t believe you’re coming to see me, and I won’t give you my address--there!”

What could I do? I took the ring.

When I got that night to Knoxville, I wrote at once to Jerry Sullivan. If they had spent two winters in Knoxville, he might have met them, or, at least, known something about them.

“KNOXVILLE, June 30, 188-- “DEAR JERRY: Tell me all you know about Miss Jeanie Bruce. “Yours, “H. HIGGINBOTHAM.”

To which the answer came by telegram:

“H. HIGGINBOTHAM, Knoxville: “It would take too long. “SULLIVAN.”

3.

I HAD deferred my call upon Miss Bruce until I should receive Sullivan’s answer to my letter; but when his telegram came I was in a quandary. It struck me as ambiguous. And what could be the extreme haste that made a telegram advisable? Or, perhaps, was the whole thing only one of Jerry Sullivan’s jokes?

Meantime I was wearing Miss Jeanie Bruce’s ring. Once it struck me that if I did not mean to call upon her, I ought to send it back. But I did mean to call upon her. There never was any question about that, from the first. I did not in the least approve of her, but I meant to call upon her, if only to tell her so. Her conversation had revealed a certain indifference to human life, but she had very soft and gentle eyes. Like the face of the boy whom Cousin Kirk had shot, they “haunted me yet.”

Coe noticed my ring. Oddly enough, though a foreigner, he had got into the ways of the people quicker than I had; and I saw him looking at it one day, though he said nothing. That is, nothing of the ring; he did ask me whether I had been to see Miss Bruce. So I went; they boarded in a small frame house that belonged to a Mrs. Judge Pennoyer. I suspect it was this female justice who came to the door; it was a Monday afternoon and the house was odorous with soup; but Miss Jeanie was “very much engaged.” The Friday following she was out, and Wednesday I met her walking on the principal street of Knoxville with a tall young man.

“Try Saturday,” said Coe that evening. “I want you to ask those girls for my trip up over the line.” During the summer, Coe had got some rusty rails spiked upon his right of way; and now wished to invite the youths and ladies of Tennessee to run over them in a trial trip.

That day I found Miss Jeanie alone in the parlor, almost as if awaiting me. “I began to think you had forgotten us,” said she, softly. Dear me, how soft her eyes were! I said that I had called there many times.

“You could scarcely expect me to let you in when another gen’leman was here!” said she. “Especially when----” I saw her look at the ring; but she checked herself. My afternoon calls in Salem had not so exclusively monopolized the lady’s attention, and I looked at her, puzzled. Just then the front door-bell rang; and I was confident I heard Mrs. Judge Pennoyer tell someone that Miss Jeanie “was very much engaged.”

My conversation languished. I think that Miss Bruce was disappointed. “Shall I play to you?” I saw her hesitate between “The Shepherd Boy” and a romance of Brinley Richards; and I hastened to reply, “I would rather talk.”-- “But you don’t talk,” cried she. “But I look.”-- “You can look while I play.”-- “Not so well,” said I.-- “I have a new piece--one they sent me from the convent, the Sacré-Cœur, you know, where I was for some years. It is called the ‘Tears of Love.’ The musical instruction of the convent was very good. Sister Ignatia had studied in Italy. I suppose it was better than outside--don’t you?”

I had never studied in a convent, and I don’t think I made much answer, for she went on. “Of course, you know, it is pleasanter in other ways. One has so much more liberty. Yet the most Kentucky ladies are all educated in convents. But I felt that I wished to see more of society. At the Sacré-Cœur they do not allow you to receive your gen’lemen friends except in the presence of the mother superior.”

There was a freshness, a simplicity of method in this young lady’s playing with the boys that quite took my breath away, and to relieve the situation I deemed it best to submit to the “Tears of Love.” Of this piece of music I remember little, save that the composer was continually bringing the left hand over the right to execute unnecessary arpeggios in the treble notes. Jeanie’s girlish figure was so round, and swayed so easily, that I thought this part of the music very pretty.

Then I bethought myself of the object of my visit; and I invited Miss Jeanie and Miss May, on Mr. Coe’s behalf, to make the railroad trip. A Salem instinct made me include Mrs. Judge Pennoyer; I then saw in Miss Bruce’s look that it had been unnecessary. Only when I got out the door did I remember that the ring had, after all, been my main object; to return it, I mean.

On the other side of the street, along by a low white-painted paling, lowered a heavy, hulking fellow in a rusty black frock-coat, a great deal of white shirt, and a black clerical tie. In this garb I recognized the Southern University man, and in the man I had a premonition I saw the redoubtable “Cousin Kirk.”

4.

COE was chartered by the sovereign States of Florida and Alabama to construct his line “from that part of the Atlantic Ocean called the Gulf of Mexico, in the former State,” to a point “at or near” the Tennessee River in the latter. And so “a point at or near the Tennessee River” was the first object of our journey, and this proved as definite a designation as we could give it; though it had public parks and corner lots and a name--on paper. Its name in reality was “Cat Island,” the only native settlement being on a beautifully wooded island thus called, midstream in the river.

“Wouldn’t do to call it that, you know,” said Coe, in a burst of frankness. “Famous place for chills and fever; everybody born on Cat Island, white or black, turns clay-color! So we thought of Bagdad--from its resemblance to the Euphrates.”

Mrs. Judge Pennoyer had come; but so had a strange young man whose name I found was Raoul. He devoted himself to Miss May with a simplicity of purpose amazing to a Northern mind. Hardly anyone knew of the expedition at Knoxville, but when we arrived at Bagdad, that spacious plain was peopled in a way to delight the speculator. “Who are they?” I asked of Coe, puzzled at his evident anxiety where I expected pride. “Who are they, O Caliph of Bagdad?”

“Who are they? The Mesopotamians. Dash it,” he added, “they’ve come, with their wives and children, for the trip.”

So, indeed, they had. Tim Healy met us as we alighted on the platform of the old railroad station--there was, indeed, a platform, but nothing more--and grasping Coe and me warmly by the hand, said rapidly, in the latter’s ear, “had to invite a few of them, you know--prominent gen’lemen of the neighborhood--valuable political influence”--and then, aloud, “General McBride, gen’lemen. Mrs. McBride. Judge Hankinson I think you know. Mr. Coe, I want you fo’ to know Senator Langworthy; one of our most prominent citizens, gen’lemen, an’ I had the grea-at-est difficulty in persuading the senator fo’ to come along. I told him, Mr. Coe, we could show him something of a railroad already----” Coe expressed his acknowledgments.

“Sir, it was a pleasure to study the developments of my country. It does not need to be a citizen of Bagdad to appreciate the advantages of your location,” and the senator waved his hand in the direction of a rusty line of track I then first perceived winding across the prairie from the Tennessee. “Let me introduce to you Mrs. Langworthy.” A pale lady, with bonnet-strings untied and a baby at the breast, was indicated by the second gesture; she looked worn and world-weary, but I lived to learn she had an endurance of hardship Stanley might have envied, and a relish for fried cakes and bacon in the small hours of night that I am sure only an optimist could feel. “My partner, Mr. Hanks. My wife’s sister, Miss McClung.”

By this time we were ready to start. A brand-new locomotive decorated with flowers had backed down awkwardly from the new-laid track to the junction; and we entered what Coe with some pride informed me was the directors’ car. It contained one long saloon, two staterooms, a minute kitchen, and a glass gallery behind.

It was amazing how we all got into it; and when we had, I counted three babies, seven old women, and a dog, besides some twenty men. All had brought their luncheon-baskets, and the babies (except that appertaining unto Mrs. Senator Langworthy) were consoled with bottles. After a prodigious deal of whistling, we were off, and Bagdad resumed its quietude--at least, we thought so; but even then a distant shouting was heard, and Colonel Wilkinson, his wife, and two urchin boys were descried, hastening down the track from the direction of the Bagdad Hotel. Judge Hankinson pulled the bell-cord and then thrust his head out of a window and roared to the engineer. “Stop, driver, it’s Colonel Wilkinson. How are you, colonel?” he added to that gentleman, who had arrived, and was mopping himself with a red silk handkerchief, his wife and offspring still some laps behind. “Almost thought you’d be left.”

“Great heavens, I wish he was!” groaned Coe in my ear.

“Never mind, the judge hasn’t brought Miss Julia,” said Tim Healy; and this time we were really off.

I have neither time nor memory to describe that day; though it was very funny while it lasted, perhaps all the funnier that there was no one to share the humor of it. Everybody was great on the development of the country, and everybody made speeches. We stopped at least twenty times in the first fifteen miles to look at a seam of coal, or a field of iron, or a marble quarry (suitable for the Alhambra Palace or the new State Capitol, sir), or, at least, one of the most wonderful mineral springs of the world--only waiting the completion of Colonel Coe’s line of railroad to become another Saratoga. At all these places we got off the train, and went in a long, straggling, irregular file to inspect, Mrs. Senator Langworthy ruthlessly interrupting the repast of her youngest-born at such moments, and leaving him upon a car-seat in charge of the fireman. At the quarry or mineral spring the proprietor would take his turn in making a little stump speech, standing on the edge and gesticulating into the pool, while the rest of us stood grouped around the margin. Meantime Miss May Bruce and Raoul would go to walk in the woods; and we would hear the engine whistling wildly for us to return. It was a novel interruption to a flirtation, that railway-whistle; but everybody looked upon us amiably as we hurried down to the track; live and let live, and take your time for happiness; no schedule time, as at Salem.

By the hot noon we were above the river valley and winding up the folds of fir-forest that clothed the shaggy shoulders of the mountain. Engine No. 100 puffed and strained, and reeled up before us like a drunken man. We had had our dinner; the sexes began to separate, and even the Langworthy baby went to sleep. Raoul and May were riding on the engine. I left Miss Jeanie Bruce and joined the gentlemen, who were sitting cross-legged and contented in the smoking end of the car, from the glass-housed platform of which we looked already back upon the great central plain from the rising Appalachians.

“Oh, it’s a glorious country,” said “Colonel” Coe; and, I think, winked at me.

“Why, senator,” said the judge, “I have seen a corner-lot sold at Bagdad six times in one day, ’n a thousan’ dollars higher every time.”

“General,” said the senator, “do you know what the original purchase of the Bagdad Land and Investment Company aggregated--for the whole eighteen hundred acres?”

There was a silence. Everybody looked at me. It dawned upon me that I was the “general,” and I wondered why I ranked poor Coe.

“I’ve no idea,” I hastened to add; fearing the senator had followed Coe’s wink.

“Thirty thousand dollars,” answered General McBride, as if it were a game of “School-teacher.” “And they sold three hundred acres for----”

“Fifteen hundred thousand dollars,” resumed Judge Hankinson, with intense solemnity.

“Paper?” said Tim Healy.

“Cash, Captain Healy,” said the judge, fiercely, “cash.”

“I want to know!--Was that the lot you bought of Widow Enraghty, judge?”

A roar of laughter greeted Tim’s answer. People tipped back their chairs, slapping their thighs; the Langworthy baby woke up and cried, and even the judge screwed up his whiskey-softened old face in vain.

“Tell us about it, judge,” said Raoul, who had come back from the engine and was peering over our shoulders. “I’m a young lawyer, and I want to know these tricks.”

“Young man,” said the judge, “I’ll _tell_ you, and let it be a warning to you when you’re married, to be honest and say so” (Raoul blushed violently). “The fact was, I had been acquainted with the widow Enraghty more than fifty years--her husband had got killed in the forties, an’ she was sixty-five if she was a day, and she owned that valuable corner lot opposite the new Court-house and by the building of the Board of Trade.” (“Not built yet,” whispered Coe to me.) “I’d been dickering with her for weeks; but I stood at four thousand, and she wanted five. Now I rode up that morning (it was a fine day; warm and spring-like, and I felt rather sanguine) and I said, ‘What’s your price, Mrs. Enraghty, to-day?’ ‘Six thousand,’ said she. This raise made me kind o’ nervous, an’ I got rash. ‘I’ll give you three thousand,’ said I, ‘cash.’ ‘Here’s your deed,’ says Widow Enraghty. And I declare she had it all ready. I looked at it carefully; it seemed all right, and I paid her the money. I kinder noticed there was a young fellow sittin’ in the room. Well, sir!”

“Well, judge?” The judge’s manner grew impressive.

“Next week that young fellow--Bill Pepper he was, an’ he was just twenty-one--he brought an ejectment against me. _She had married him that morning._ So Bill Pepper kep’ the land, and Mrs. Pepper kep’ the money.”

In the laughter that followed I became conscious of Raoul pinching my arm mysteriously. “I want a word with you in private,” said he. “Would you mind coming out upon the cow-catcher? It’s been railed off on purpose for observation,” he added, answering my look of amazement, “and it’s a first-rate place to see the cobweb trestle from. It’s something about the young ladies,” he added, seeing that I still hesitated, “and there’s really no other place.”

I looked through the car, but perceived the ladies were sitting in earnest conclave. On the front platform Mrs. Langworthy and the baby were taking the air. In the cab of the engine were the two girls. I suppose I made a gesture of assent, for Raoul nodded to the engineer, who slowed to a halt that almost threw the Langworthy’s domestic group into the bed of a brawling mountain stream some three hundred feet below.

“These gen’lemen want to ride on the pilot,” shouted the engineer in explanation; and we took our way to that exalted perch, where, sitting cross-legged and with hands nervously gripping the rail, I listened to Raoul’s story.

The Misses Bruce, he said, were wild not to go back that day with the railroad party, but to drive to the end of the location through the woods.

“Great Heavens!” said I, “but only Coe and I are going, with Captain Healy. There is nothing but tents----”

“The ladies are used to camping out.”

“But it will be so rough--there are two thousand niggers in camp!”

“The ladies are not afraid.”

I certainly was; for just then, with a preliminary corkscrew-like lurch, the engine began climbing the famous cobweb trestle; the earth suddenly vanished beneath us and we looked down through a lath-like tracery of wooden girders to the foaming stream, now four hundred feet below. I heard a cry behind, and looking timidly around, I saw the pale face of Jeanie at one engine-window and of May Bruce at the other.

“But--but there is no chaperone,” I gasped.

“Mrs. Judge Pennoyer has agreed to come,” answered Mr. Raoul, sweetly.

5.

THE end of our journey lay upon the very summit of the mountain ridge; twenty leagues of forest all around. Here, with the sweep of his gesture to the westering sun, Judge Hankinson made the great speech of the day. I remember little about it save that he likened Coe to Icarus, referred to me (General Higginbotham) as one of the merchant princes of the Orient, and to Tim Healy as some mighty magician “spinning his iron spell o’er mountain and o’er sea.” The rusty iron rails stopped abruptly in a field of stumps; beyond and below us stretched “the right of way.” Only a broad swath cut through the forest, the trees heaped where they fell, like jack-straws. At the edge of the clearing stood a three-seated wagon and a pair of mules.

Everyone took very simply to the proposition that we were not returning; and after all the speech-making was over and all the whiskey drunk, the train, with prolonged and reiterated tooting, began backing slowly down the mountain toward civilization again.

“Isn’t this delightful?” said Miss Jeanie. Tim Healy sniffed.

I had made it all right with Coe; but Healy still looked at the proceeding askance.

“Last time I rode through this yer wood I had the pay-chest with me; and two bullets went through my hat. And last week they killed the United States mail and Jim, the storekeeper of Section Fourteen.”

I considered this to be a story for tender-feet, so I mildly hinted that “they” would not attack so large a party.

“Won’t they, though? The only double mule team as ever goes through yer is the month’s pay, an’ hit’s jest due this Saturday.”

“Who is ‘they’?” said I.

“Moonshiners. But they’re all on ’em up to it. Hope you’ve got your shooters?”

By this time we had started, and were driving through the twilight of the forest over a trail hardly perceptible where the wood grew scantier.

“Not I,” said I, “I never carry them.”

“Nor I,” said Coe, “I left ’em on the bureau at home.”

“All right,” said Tim, gloomily. “But most fellers like a shot of their own afore they turn their toes up.”

Miss Jeanie produced a small, pearl-handled, silver-mounted revolver, and begged me to borrow it. Miss May handed the mate of it to Coe; and young Raoul displayed a formidable pair of Smith & Wesson’s, where he was sitting with her on the back seat.

“All right,” said Tim, somewhat mollified. “But the wood’s chock full of chickers all the same.”

At this the ladies appeared really so terrified that I asked what “chickers” were, and discovered them to be a kind of insect.

“I’ve got my pennyr’yle,” said Mrs. Judge Pennoyer, who was a woman of resource.

What a drive it was! We lost our way; and the girls sang. Tim swore, Mrs. Judge Pennoyer laughed, and May and Jeanie sang all the sweeter. Tim Healy thought he saw twenty moonshiners and emptied his revolver at one of them; a charred stump it proved to be. We passed one hut in a clearing, and were refreshed by veritable whiskey; _i.e._, “pine-top” whiskey, milky-white in color, and said to be made out of the cones of pines. We found the trail once more and the stars came out, and the nightingales sang, and May Bruce and young Raoul became more silent. At last we saw, upon a hillside in the forest, the burning pitch-pine torches of the great construction “camp.” Hundreds of black forms surrounded these ruddy fires; from some of the groups came sounds of banjos and negroes singing; and I looked suddenly up and saw the starlight reflected in Miss Jeanie’s eyes.

There was only one tent in the camp with “sides” to it--_i.e._, perpendicular flaps making walls below the roof, and that, of course, was sacred to the ladies. We lay beneath a mere =V=-shaped canvas roof, which was stretched downward so as to end some three feet from the ground, our heads in a heap of pillows, and our legs all radiating outward, like a starfish, to terminate in thirty booted feet. Under the canvas back I could see the starlight, and there I lay awake some time regarding it, which now seemed to bear some reflection of Miss Jeanie’s eyes. Next thing came the sun and opened mine by shining into them; then closed them up again, and I rolled into the canvas-shade, and up, and out of doors, and followed Coe and Healy to the “branch” below. Big Bear Creek it was, of a rich red-chocolate color, fit, perhaps, to wash a Chinaman who could not see. Yet Coe took a plunge, and looked up, white enough.

“Come in,” he shouted to us, who were hesitating, “it doesn’t come off.”

The negroes had been sleeping all over the place, tentless; and now they were pulling themselves together, in groups, and starting for the railroad, or rather where the railroad was to be. On the way they stopped at the commissaries’ to get their breakfast, standing in long rows before the counter, waiting their turn. The commissaries’ stores were the only wooden buildings in camp; well walled and bolted, too, as they had to be, said Tim Healy, to withstand the attacks of a riotous Saturday night. Four men, he said, were always in them armed; and on Saturday nights, pay-night, they would often empty a revolver or two into the crowd and perhaps “drop” a nigger, before it ceased to besiege their doors for fruit or whiskey.

Then we all went to breakfast, the Misses Bruce both fresh as dewy wood-flowers, and Mrs. Judge Pennoyer radiating amiability. Only the head commissary and the section contractor were thought of sufficient social importance to breakfast with us, and the former from his stores brought many delicacies in cans and bottles. Then after breakfast we went to walk--the ladies with sunshades and gloves--upon the location; a broad swath cut through the rolling forest and undulating far as the eye could reach in either direction, dotted with men and mules. Ahead, they were still blowing out stumps with gunpowder and dragging them away; where we stood was being built an embankment of gravel; and they were dragging out gravel from the “cut” ahead and heaping it upon the long mound. I gave my hand to Miss Jeanie and helped her up. Each black negro worked with a splendid mule; seventeen or eighteen hands high perhaps, dragging a curious sort of drag-spade, which the mule knew how to catch in the gravel, turn out full, drag the load evenly along, and then tip it out adroitly at the precise spot, a foot in front of the last dump; the negro hardly doing more than standing by to see the mule kept working; not, of course, working himself. Thus each man-laborer became an overseer, if only to a mule.

“The mule’s the finer animal of the two,” said Coe, “and much the more moral.”

“But he’s got no vote,” grunted Jim. “Ef we didn’t keep them black Mississippi niggers up here off’m the farms, they’d swamp us all.”

“Are they allowed to bring their wives to camp with them?” queried Miss Jeanie, softly; and, following her glance, we saw several coal-black damsels sitting in the warm sand-bank at the side of the cut, their finery about them, and evidently established there for the morning, basking in the sun.

“Oh, yes, they bring up their wives,” said Healy, reluctantly. “If we didn’t, they’d run away every two or three days. Nothing a contractor dislikes so much as irregular labor.”

“But it shows they have some good in them to be so devoted,” said Miss Jeanie.

“We don’t all of us have emotions stronger than money-getting,” added I.