Part 33

A girl in a gauzy black gown and a drooping black hat came out on the front porch of the house and waved to the passing people.

"We'll be along! Yes, we are coming! Yes, we'll hurry!" There were bright tears in the girl's eyes. A man came out of the house and stood behind her, his arm on the door post, his face smiling. She turned to him, the tears in her eyes, the smile on her lips.

"Aren't they pretty splendid?" she cried, a fine enthusiasm on her face as she watched the people, "Look at them! There's something in them! There's the best of all America in them! And they will have their chance now."

For answer the man put his arm about her. "Greatest State in the Union, this Missouri," he said with tremendous conviction. "Where's Uncle Bernique?"

"Gone an hour ago."

"Well then, can't we start, too?"

The same tingle of impatience seemed to reach both at once. They ran back into the house.

The cavalcade wound on up Ridge Road toward the Tigmores. At its far-away end now trotted the Kentucky blacks, drawing a light trap. The man on the box-seat was a big, deep-chested man, long and powerful of forearm. He held the exuberant, snorting blacks easily with one hand. The woman beside him was a good mate for him, firmly knit, strong in her movements. Under her black hat the burnish of her hair and skin made her look gold-dusted.

They were high up Razor Ridge. Below the Ridge, Big Wheat Valley and We-all Prairie stretched away from the Tigmore foot-hills in broad strips of harvest gold. The sky was brilliantly blue; even Choke Gulch's glooms were flecked with light. The scrub-oak, the dog-wood, the chinca-pin, the walnut, the hickory, sumach and sassafras trailed over the Tigmores like a giant green veil. On beyond the Tigmores the pale wide Di ran slowly, goldenly, a molten river.

As the procession went on up the hill the people called from one waggon to another, their tongues set going by the passing of Madeira Place and the advent of the Kentucky blacks into the procession.

"They say Miss Sally, Miz Steerin', that is, feels mighty broke up because her paw didn' live to see all that's a-goin' on this day."

"Yass, reckin's haow that's true."

"Howdy, Miz Dade, haow you come on?"

"Huccome you to come, Asa?"

"They say the Steerin's air goin' away to-night. Goin' back East on a visit."

"Yass, that's true. The tramp-boy is goin' along. D'you know that? Yass, goin' to N'York, on his way to Italy. The Steerin's air sendin' him."

"Well, they cand all go whur they please, I wouldn' leave Mizzourah these days, not me. Wy, ev' farm in the Tigmores is liable to turn into a zinc mine any night. Say, do you know air the Steerin's to be long gone?"

"Nope, not so long. Unc' Bernique's to run things while they away."

"Oh, well, then."

The cavalcade's forerunners had now reached the top of the Tigmore Uplift. They began to deploy into the woods overhanging Choke Gulch. A trail had been cut, the trees were down until it was possible to get through with the vehicles, though it was rough going. At the end of the newly made road a great clearing opened up to the on-coming people. The teams were driven over to a thicket and the people spilled out of the vehicles and swarmed over the clearing. One by one, then two by two, in their hurry, the teams came in, until everybody had arrived. The Kentucky blacks came last. Then there was a waiting, a restraint, the people looked at one another. Finally their uneasiness and unspoken question were answered by an edict from the mouth of a small upright Frenchman, who mounted a stump and declaimed with a great flourish of graceful pomposity:

"'Tis the wish of Mistaire and Meez Steering that none go to the mill until that the bar-r-becue shall be end." He was generously applauded and his fine shoulders stiffened responsively. This was the sort of thing that Francois Placide DeLassus Bernique liked.

The people contented themselves within the clearing the little time that remained of the morning. At one side of the clearing, fenced off by ropes, was a long trench, across which stretched poles of tough green hickory. On top of these poles lay great quarters of beeves, whole hogs, slit through the belly and spread wide till the dressed flesh wrinkled into the back-bone in thick layers, sheep, tongues, venison, an army's rations. Down in the trench glowed the red-hot coals of a vast Vulcan fire, set going the night before and fed and beaten all night into its present perfect equability. Up and down the sides of the trench walked men in great aprons, long-handled brushes, like white-wash brushes, in their hands. These brushes they dipped into buckets of salt and pepper, strung along the trench at regular intervals, and smeared the sizzling meat, a sort of Titanic seasoning process.

Rough pine boards, supported on tree stumps, formed long lines of tables on which loaves of bread were piled two feet high. Beside the bread were great buckets of pickles, preserves, jams, whole churns of butter, cheeses, cakes, pies, hundreds and hundreds of them, as though the whole world had become one enormous maw with an enormous clamour for food. The rich aroma of the sizzling meat and the slow sweet scorch of the green hickory poles drifted up into the trees and hung there, a visible odour, tantalising, insistent. The men who had got into their wives' aprons and had begun to cut sandwiches at the long tables were invited to hurry up. The men who were varnishing the meat with salt and pepper were told that they were too slow. The boys who had begun cracking ice were applauded. The girls who had begun to squeeze lemons were offered help. The women who had begun to set out knives and forks and plates were interrupted and set back by hoots of encouragement. Children were stepped on and soothed, a continuous performance. The committee-on-cooking got in the way of the committee-on-washing-the-dishes; the committee-on-waiting-on-the-table almost came to blows with the committee-on-slicing-the-bread. Toward noon the scramble for places began. Then the people began to gorge. There was a constant reaching and grabbing. The clearing resounded with phrases of intricate politeness:

"Thank you to trouble you fer one them pickles, Si."

"Please'm gi' me a little your tongue, Miz Dade."

"Reach me some more bread, if you don't care whut you do, Quin."

Beyond the long tables little private parties sat here and there, ranged around red table-cloths, flat on the ground, stuffing, greasy-fingered, hospitable, happy.

Beyond these little parties, off in the young trees, in the buggies and buck-boards, were still smaller parties, the red-necktie young men and the girls with bright flowers in their hats, two and two, two and two, all through the thicket, each duet very happy, drinking out of one tin cup, the red-necktie young man assiduously putting his lips to the cup on the spot where the girl's lips had touched it.