Part 12

"Peachey!" called the Man, retreating instantly. "Come on over here; thar's goin' to be trouble. Git behind me, Little Peachey!"

In the landing place there was driven a heavy stake. He drew this forth, then advanced, saying earnestly:

"Gentlemen both, you size me up wrong. Now, I ain't lookin' for trouble, but don't you bank too strong on takin' me anywhar with you to-night."

Hemsley's right hand drew backward, then came the level glitter of a long revolver barrel. "Drop that!" he began.

But suddenly something flashed before his face, and the keen edge of a boat-paddle bit numbingly into his extended hand; then the girl darted forward to where the revolver lay glistening among the pine needles.

"Well struck, Little Peachey," cried the Man; and he stepped protectingly in front of her, with upraised stake. But she stood from behind him and leveled the revolver full at Hemsley.

"I don't want your help," she said. The words came torn from her in sobbing whispers. "Git! Don't you come back no more. Don't you send no one lookin' for this man. I kin take care o' myself, I guess."

And the look in her eyes warned them to go. Now the Man and the Woman were alone in the black hush of the pine woods.

"I saved you," she said at length; "now go away from here. Yes, go!" And as her face lifted defiantly to his, her voice slid upward like the lonely, untamed wail of some wild creature. "Go back from whar you come! Don't you never let me see your face again, nor hear you speak; don't you never touch me no more, you Man! 'Cause I'm scairt o' you, I am; 'cause you're big an' strong, an' you'd forgit a gal like me. 'Cause I hate you, an' I hate myself!"

For an instant the man gazed at her, perplexed, irresolute; then he took her right hand and guided it until the revolver muzzle touched his forehead.

"Peachey," he whispered tenderly, "you hate me--but could you kill me; Little Peachey?" And he smiled his great, full-hearted smile.

Then her hand fell, her head sunk upon his breast, and a strong shuddering filled all her young body.

"Oh, Man, Man!" she breathed, as his arms closed about her.

***************************************************************** Vol. XXIII No.1 JULY 1910 {pages 74-83}

By Alice MacGowan and Grace MacGowan Cooke

Authors of "Return, A Story of the Sea Islands," etc.

"Is Ellen worse to-day?" The opening and closing of the front door brought in a swirl of red and yellow leaves from the porch outside. There came, too, a breath of sharp, sweet October air to tired little Mrs. Kendrick where she paused, foot on stair, the tray steadied in her hand, looking back at her husband.

"No. It's just that I got Mary Louise Jackson to come over and play with her. I can't ask Aunt Dicey to wait on a negro child like Ma'Lou is, and she's got to eat with Ellen; so I'm----"

"So you're waiting on her yourself," supplied Kendrick, hanging up a shabby overcoat on the hall rack.

"I'd do more than that to keep her here," his wife returned almost fiercely. "I tell you nobody knows till they've tried it what it is to have a child like Ellen, always lonesome and pining for company, and quarreling with every girl that comes about her. Sometimes I think it would be better if we moved away from Watauga. Everybody pities her--they all notice that she's backward in her studies--how can she help it, poor dear, with that hip joint the way it is?"

Kendrick came closer; he laid a kind arm along the frail, bent shoulders of his wife, and her senses were aware of the fresh outdoor air as he put his cool cheek to hers. "Don't you grieve, Fanny," he said. "Ma'Lou's a good companion for Ellen. The kid's better trained and better educated than half the white girls of her age in Watauga. If things go well, in a year or two we'll send Nellie to Baltimore and see what the big man there can do for her. You shall have a daughter that can dance like you used to, honey," and he patted her shoulder gently.

She turned with a little, gasping sigh to put up her tired face for his kiss. "You're good, Scott," she murmured, then went more cheerfully upstairs and to Ellen's room, glancing as she entered at the two girls, who were playing happily with paper dolls.

"Here's your feast," she called to them in the gay tone we use with sick children. "Come, Ellen. I'll go down and give your father his dinner, and you two can play any kind of party you want to with this."

The little girl with skin like white cotton cloth rolled her big, gray eves toward the tray and asked listlessly, "What you got for dinner, ma?" The brown-skinned one, tidily dressed from her carefully combed head with its crisp, black mass that was scarcely hair, held in place by spick-and-span hair ribbons, to the toes of her stout, handsome shoes, got up quickly and came forward to arrange the meal.

"They's molasses pie, Nell," Ma'Lou said joyously. "Oh, I'm going to bring it over there and fix it by the side of the lounge. We'll play you' a sick lady, and I'm you' trained nurse. Just wait till I fix my handkerchief into a cap like they wear."

Mrs. Kendrick turned away and left the children at their play. Mary Louise Jackson had been kept at home from school that she might come over and spend the day with Ellen. For when Ellen Kendrick was ill, her cry always was, "Oh, send for the doctor--and Mary Louise."

The old Kendrick place sat back in its grassy yard and concealed behind voluminous chinaberry trees such shabbiness as time had brought it; but on the corner, the home of Ezra Jackson perched proudly above its stone wall and added a considerable touch of elegance to the street.

It was in the early eighties, and the Queen Anne style of architecture was just coming into great popularity in the South. Jackson, who could well afford it, had let an architect have full sway in producing for him a dwelling in the new mode. Ezra Jackson, a full-blooded negro born a slave, had been a teamster on his master's Georgia plantation, and after the war that master, who still maintained friendly relations with his ex-slaves, gave him a start in life with a mule and a dray. From this the honest, industrious, and enterprising man had built up a transfer business which was the best of its sort in town. There were many teams and drivers now, and Ezra could walk in the garb of other men of means about him; yet he still wrote his name in the manner of the kings of old--he produced it as a sort of landscape effect without any idea of what the separate characters meant. He was a good citizen, a dignified man; and, except for his black skin, he would have been an acceptable neighbor to the Kendricks, and a desirable resident in their quarter of town. The young wife whom he had married rather late in life, and to whose taste the Queen Anne house catered, had a good grammar-school education, gained from those first devoted teachers that the Freedman's Bureau sent to the Southern negroes in the years immediately following the war. At first she had kept his books and made out his bills; and she always insisted on the best of schooling for their children.