CHAPTER XLII.ZEEK.
“Didn’t I see your horse tied to Old Lee’s gate?” said Zeek. And that led to a discussion of the old hero’s character.
“Is he a Union man?”
“I kain’t say; but that’s the story they tell on him. One of the men he killed was one of our neighbors; a man we used to consider right respectable; but he tuke to thieving during the wa’, and got to be of no account. That was the way with a many I know. You may stop at a house now whur they’ll steal your horse, and like as not rob and murder ye.”
Zeek told me he lived on the edge of the battle-field; and I engaged him to guide me to it. He thought I must be going to search for the body of some friend who fell there. When I told him I was from the North, and that my object was simply to visit the battle-field, he looked at me with amazement.
“I should think you’d be afraid to be riding alone in this country! If ’t was known you was a Yankee, and had money about you, I allow you’d get a shot from behind some bush.”
“I think the men who would serve me such a trick are very few.”
“Thar was right smart of ’em befo’e the wa’ closed. They’d just go about robbing,—hang an old gray-haired man right up, till he’d tell whur his money was. They called themselves Confederates, but they was just robbers. They’ve got killed off, or have gone off, or run out, till, as you say, there an’t but few left.”
With these exceptions, Zeek praised highly the middling class of people who inhabited that region.
“Some countries, a pore man ain’t respected no mo’e ’n a dog. ‘Tan’t so hyere. Man may be plumb pore, but if he’s honest, he’s thought as much of as anybody. Mo’e ’n two thirds of ’em can read and write.” Before the war, they used to have what they called “neighborhood schools.” The teacher was supported by the pupils, receiving two dollars a month for each: he taught only in winter, and was fortunate if he could secure forty pupils.
Flocks of sparrows flew up from the bushes or hopped along the ground. There were bluebirds also; and I noticed one or two robins. “We never see robins hyere only in winter,” said Zeek.
Green bunches of mistletoe grew on the leafless brown trees,—a striking feature of Southern woods in winter. “It’s a curiosity, the way it grows,” said Zeek. “It just grows on the tops of trees, without no rute, nor nothing. It’s a rare chance you find it on the hills; it grows mostly on the bottoms whur thar’s mo’e moisture in the air.” It was a beautiful sight to me, riding under its verdant tufts, sometimes so low on the boughs that, by rising in the stirrups, I could pluck sprigs of it, with their translucent pearly berries, as I passed. But Zeek was wrong in saying it had no root. It is supposed to be propagated by birds wiping their bills upon the limbs of trees, after eating the berries. A stray seed thus deposited germinates, and the penetrating root feeds upon the juices that flow between the bark and the wood of the tree.
We passed but few farm-houses, and those were mostly built of logs. We crossed heavy lines of Beauregard’s breastworks; and could have traced the route of the great armies by the bones of horses, horned cattle, and mules we saw whitening in the woods and by the roadside. A crest of hilly fields showed us a magnificent sweep of level wooded country on the west and south, like a brown wavy sea, with tossed tree-tops for breakers.
“Mighty pore soil along hyere,” observed Zeek. When Itold him that it was as good as much of the soil of New England, which farmers never thought of cultivating without using manures, he said, “When our land gits as pore as that, we just turn it right out, and cle’r again. We don’t allow we can afford to manure. But No’th Car’linians come in hyere, and take up the land turned out so, and go to manuring it, and raise right smart truck on it.”
As I was inclined to ride faster than Zeek, he looked critically at my horse, and remarked, “I don’t reckon you give less ’n a dollar a day for that beast.” I said I gave more than that. “I ride my beasts hard enough,” he replied, “but I reckon if I paid a dollar a day for one, I’d ride him a heap harder!”
He had been down to the saw-mill, to get pay for a yoke of oxen his father had sold. “I started by sun-up, and got thar agin nine o’clock.” It was now afternoon, and he was hungry and cold. He therefore proposed to me to go home with him and get warm, before visiting the battle-field.
It was after two o’clock when we came to a hilly field covered with rotting clothes.
“Beauregard’s troops come plumb up this road, and slept hyere the night befo’e the battle. They left their blankets and knapsacks, and after they got brushed out by the Yankees, the second day, they didn’t wait to pick ’em up again.”
We entered the woods beyond, directing our course towards the western edge of the battle-field; and, after riding some distance, forded Owl Creek,—a narrow, but deep and muddy stream. Zeek’s home was in view from the farther bank; a log-house, with the usual great opening through the middle; situated on the edge of a pleasant oak-grove strewn with rustling leaves, and enclosed, with its yard and out-houses, by a Virginia rail-fence.