CHAPTER XV
At the dinner table Mrs. Ware’s eyes rested with loving anxiety upon her first-born. “She is surely growing thinner and paler,” was her motherly thought. “Poor child! If she would only give up to her love how much happier she would be! It’s just eating out her heart, I know it is! If Jeff would take hold of her as Amos did of me—” and she glanced across the table at her husband, who in the grave responsibility of his middle age seemed far enough removed from the impetuous and masterful lover of her girlhood.
Quickly trailing upon the thought came recollection of that ride of which she had told Rhoda and Jeff, and then a wave of memories of his ardent courtship swept over and softened her heart. The coldness and resentment of the last few months were buried, for the moment, underneath their warmth and color, and her eyes sought his face again with more of fondness in their expression than he had seen there in many a day. Then her mind went back to her daughter.
“But I reckon that wouldn’t answer with Rhoda, after all,” she told herself. “She’s so different. But I really believe she’s beginning to feel more like giving up. The way she looked when sheread his last letter to me and when we talked about him yesterday—yes, she’s surely finding out how much she really cares. If Jeff were to come up again now, perhaps—I’ll write to him and tell him to come!”
The persuasion that perhaps the matter would come out all right added to the good feeling toward her husband already induced by her memories, and when they rose from the table she moved to his side and looked up into his face with a little glow of tenderness and affection in her own. With quick response he rested a hand upon her shoulder.
“Which way are you going this afternoon, Amos?” she asked.
“First to the Winslows, after I keep my office hour. Harriet is sick.”
“Oh, poor little thing! I’ll go over with you. I must write a letter now, but if you’ll call me when you’re ready to go I’ll come down at once and we can drive past the post-office.”
It was the first time in many weeks that she had wished to drive with him and he stooped and kissed her, saying, “I’ll be glad to have you, Emily.”
With her letter in her pocket Rhoda hurried away, past the post-office, to the meeting of the sewing circle, at Mrs. Hardaker’s home. The members had planned to put in a particularly busy afternoon, for the coming of spring would be sure to bring with it an increase in the number of refugeesand they must have ready plenty of clothing suitable for warm weather.
Charlotte went back to her room and was soon absorbed in a composition that seemed to perplex her much. She wrote a few lines or words upon sheet after sheet, then frowned and shook her head and tore up and threw aside one after another until her table was littered with them. But at last, after much knitting of her brows and tapping with her gold pencil, she appeared satisfied with what she had done and copied it, in a few lines across the middle of the page, upon a sheet of the paper borrowed from Rhoda.
As she read it again, her eyes twinkled and her chin tilted to its most rebellious angle. “I reckon mother would put her foot down hard if she knew about it,” she said to herself, and then pursed her lips and whistled a few notes. “And Rhoda would think it a very shocking thing for me to do. But I don’t care, I’m going to. I reckon father wouldn’t mind—indeed, I’m sure he’d be pleased. Yes, father would be glad enough if Jeff should— So it’s all right.” She giggled softly and the look of amusement deepened on her face as she addressed the envelope.
“There!” she exclaimed as she sealed the letter, “now there’ll be some fun!” Springing to her feet she danced about the room, stopping in front of the mirror after a few steps to practise tiltingher hoopskirts, without seeming to do so, at a higher angle than she had ever dared before.
Mrs. Ware, starting downstairs, in bonnet and shawl, with her letter in her pocket, heard a shriek from Charlotte’s room. “What’s the matter, dearie?” she called in quick alarm, and opened the door.
Charlotte was standing on a chair in front of her closet door, her skirts drawn up to her knees, her two plump calves and slender ankles and trim little feet trembling with the agitation which shrilled in her voice: “Oh, mother, there’s a mouse in my closet!”
“Oh, is that all, honey! My heart was in my throat, for I thought you must have half-killed yourself. Get Bully Brooks and shut him up in your room. He’s getting to be a fine mouser. Dress yourself, honey, and look for him. I’d bring him up for you, but your father’s waiting for me and I must hurry. Good-by, dear. I’ll be back in two or three hours.”
With anxious haste and many apprehensive glances at the harboring closet, now closed and locked, Charlotte dressed herself and hurried down stairs. “Do you know where Bully Brooks is?” she asked of Lizzie in the kitchen.
“Dat good-fo’-nuthin’ cat?” teased Lizzie, with a broad grin at Charlotte’s pantomimic threats of displeasure and retaliation. “I done see him jess now streakin’ out to’d de bahn wif his tail inde air, like he was totin’ a flag at de head of a percession.”
Charlotte sped down the walk to the barn and looked all about and called softly, “Bully Brooks! Bully Brooks!” The door leading from the barn into the woodshed was open and she thought, “Maybe he’s gone in there.”
“My! What a lot of wood we’ve used this winter!” she said to herself. “The last time I was in here, last fall, the shed was nearly full. And now there’s only that pile in the middle.” She moved toward the back of the inclosure, her gaze searching the corners, then falling upon the irregularly piled sticks at the back of the neat cords.
“There he is!” she exclaimed softly, as she saw a gray tail sticking out from between the logs. Speedily she bore down upon him. “Here, ‘yo’ good-fo’-nuthin’ cat,’” she muttered, “come out here.” She made a grab for his tail, but he whisked it suddenly aside, and went on, threading his way between the chunks of wood, his head stretched out and nostrils working.
“Oh, you think you smell something, do you? Well, just come right along with me and see what you can smell in my room.” But she could not quite reach him, and she began tossing to one side the smaller sticks. In a moment her eyes fell upon the boarding of the hidden room. “What can that be?” she wondered, pausing in her work. With Charlotte, to have her curiosity aroused wasonly to fire her determination to have it assuaged. So now she eagerly threw out of the way the remaining pieces and saw plainly the tiny house. “There’s a door in it!” she whispered, and straight-way stepped up and peeped in.
There she saw the negro runaway asleep upon the straw pallet. On the bench were the remains of his dinner, with pans and plates and cups which she recognized as having come from their own cupboard.
For a moment she stared, bewildered. Then, as the boy stirred in his sleep, she picked up Bully Brooks, shut the door softly and hurried back to her room. Her thoughts darted at once to the heart of the mystery.
“They’re stealing niggers, that’s what they’re doing, father and Rhoda! My! It’s worse than stealing horses, or money!” Her face was hot with indignation and her eyes blazing. “They ought to be arrested, even if they are my father and sister. Why, it might be one of Jeff’s niggers they’re stealing. Just think of it! Nigger thieves! They ought to be punished—they deserve to go to prison—and they would, too, if it was known!”
She stopped in the midst of her fuming as an idea flashed across her mind. It took her breath away for a moment. Then she drew back from it with a little feeling of repugnance. But in a moment more her busy, resentful thought washovering around it, experimenting with it, considering it with more and more of favor.
“There’s no telling how many slaves they’ve hidden in there and sent on to Canada. Thousands of dollars worth, it’s likely. And their owners just raking the country and spending money trying to find them. Oh, it’s a shame the way these black abolitionists act! Father and Rhoda are just as bad as any of them. Nigger thieves! O, my! And that nigger out in the woodshed, he belongs to somebody just exactly the same as if he was a horse or a cow. He ought to be taken back. He’s somebody’s property, and it’s wrong and against the law to steal him, or to help anybody else to steal him. If I don’t tell somebody that he’s here, so he can be taken back to his owner, I’ll be a nigger-thief, just the same as they are.”
She tied her bonnet under her chin, adjusted her cape around her shoulders, took a last look in the glass, and turned toward the door. Her eyes chanced to fall upon the letter, lying on the table.
“O, my goodness, I’m about to forget that!” she exclaimed, seizing the missive. She giggled and tilted her chin and said aloud, “Yes, I shall, I shall do it!” Then she touched her lips to the superscription and airily waved the envelope toward the south. With another gay little laugh she tucked it into her pocket. And so it happened that when the mail-bag left the Hillside post-officethat afternoon it carried three letters for Jefferson Delavan.
As she came out of the post-office Charlotte found herself face to face with her admirer, Billy Saunders. “Is Susie at home?” she asked.
“Yes, and expecting you. Are you going there?” He turned and walked up the street at her side. Her cheeks still showed a heightened color and the fires of her indignation glowed in her eyes. “You’re looking mighty pretty this afternoon, Charlotte. What’s happened?”
“What’s happened, indeed!” Charlotte tossed her head. “Does there have to be a wedding, or a funeral, or a steamboat accident before I deserve a compliment?”
“No, indeed! You always deserve more compliments than I have sense enough to think of. But you look excited, as if something unusual had happened.”
Charlotte turned toward him, her heart swelling with excitement over the momentous secret she had discovered. At this final moment it was chiefly the childish need of sharing her knowledge that urged her to speech. “Say, Billy, can you keep a secret?”
“As well as you can, I reckon.”
“I’ve just got to tell somebody, or I’ll fly into a thousand pieces!”
“Don’t do that!” he begged in mock alarm. “Out with it, and save the pieces!”
“Well, then, there’s a nigger in our woodpile!”
A flash crossed his face. “What do you mean?” he ejaculated, stopping short.
“Just what I say. He’s hid among the wood in our woodshed. There’s a little house there.”
“Well—” he hesitated over his answer as they walked on. “I reckon it’s all right,” he hazarded. But he was thinking rapidly. Here, in all likelihood, was the proof for which the pro-slavery sympathizers had long been watching. Dr. Ware’s outspoken sentiments and his activity in the anti-slavery movement had caused them to suspect he was connected with Underground operations.
“Are you sure you weren’t dreaming?” he asked jocularly. “When did you see him and what was he doing?”
“Do I usually dream around in the daytime, Billy Saunders? I saw him about an hour ago and he was sound asleep. And if you think I don’t know a nigger when I see one you can go and look for yourself!”
They had reached the Saunders gate and he lifted his hat in farewell. “Remember you’re to keep that secret,” she called after him, in appeasement of a sudden compunction.
“Oh, I can keep a secret as well as you can,” he laughed back. Secretly a little troubled by his answer, but saying to herself defiantly, “Well, they deserve whatever happens, anyway!” she went intothe house. He quickened his steps to the office of the United States marshal.
At the home of Mrs. Hardaker the members of the anti-slavery sewing circle were busy over their needles when Rhoda, from her seat near a front window, saw Horace dash up the street in a buggy. Springing out, he came up the front walk almost on a run. He saw her face at the window and beckoned. She went out and met him at the front door.
“Is there any U. G. baggage at your house, Rhoda?” he asked at once in low, anxious tones.
“Yes. A young man came late last night and has been sleeping all day.”
“Then that’s it! I just now discovered that Marshal Hanscomb was on the track of something, and I was afraid it might be there! I’ve got a case in court that will be called in ten minutes, but I borrowed this buggy from my client and rushed over here. Is your father at home?”
“No. I’ve got to go and get him away.” She was hurrying into her bonnet and wrap.
“You’d better let me—”
“No, no. You can’t leave your case. That would be too suspicious. I’ll manage it.”
“Don’t walk home—take this buggy.” They were already rushing to the gate and he went on as he assisted her to the seat: “There’s not a minute to lose. Hanscomb’s getting ready now to start out with his men.”
She was soon in the cross street upon which backed their row of outbuildings. Here a wide door gave entrance to the woodshed. It was kept padlocked and she had to waste a few minutes finding Jim to unlock the door. The young negro, dazed by this sudden awakening to danger, was hustled into the buggy, a small, uncovered, box-seated vehicle. Rhoda made him double up in the little space at her feet and covered him with a carriage rug. Then over her own lap and down over him she spread an ample robe, which Jim hastily tucked in at the sides.
“I’ll try to reach Gilbertson’s with him,” she said to the faithful black man as the horse sprang forward at her whip’s touch. She made a détour around several blocks and struck into the street leading to the country in the first valley beyond the house. This lost several minutes at the start, but she reflected that if the marshal should arrive in time to see her driving straight away from the house he might be suspicious enough to make chase at once. As it was, one of his men, on guard at their gate, saw her buggy as it turned from a cross street into the country road, but, at the moment, thought nothing of it. Looking back, she saw the men ride up to their gate and knew that they would search the house.
“They’ll have their trouble for their pains,” she thought. “But wasn’t it a narrow chance! You poor boy, I’m going to save you, anyway!”
She wondered what hint had come to the marshal’s ears, and decided it must have been suspicion rather than actual knowledge that had brought him to search their house at this particular time. Most likely the fugitive had been seen on his way to their house by some of the many eyes ever on the alert for such as he, and her father’s reputation as a strong anti-slavery man and abolitionist had given Marshal Hanscomb a pretext.
“But he’ll never think of looking in the woodpile,” she told herself with a smile of satisfaction. “That secret is perfectly safe, for nobody knows it but us and Horace. Our little hiding place will be as safe as ever, even if they do search the house!”
She looked back anxiously from the top of the high hill, whence the road entered a sparsely wooded belt of country, and saw that the horses were still hitched at their side gate. “I’m getting a good start, even if they do follow me,” she reflected, “and I guess I can make Gilbertson’s.”
But the horse was a slow traveler and, although she urged him constantly with voice and whip, to Rhoda’s anxious eyes they seemed to cover the ground at but a snail’s pace. She thought they must have been on the road nearly an hour when, from the top of a long, sloping hill, she glanced backward and saw a party of four mounted men crossing the rise she had just left behind. She recognized it at once as Marshal Hanscomb andhis aids. They were riding at a much faster pace than her horse could equal and she knew that in a few minutes they would surely overtake her and, in all probability, stop her and search the buggy.
For one brief flash the thought crossed her mind what that would mean—arrest, trial, and afterward imprisonment. But that fleeting picture was instantly gone and in its place came the vision of the lad at her feet being carried back to scourging and slavery. As she urged the horse down the hill at a reckless pace she remembered that he was about to be sold “down south”—that land of fears and terrors which to the negroes of the border states was a doom almost as awful as was the fiery gulf which threatened the impenitent sinner. It occurred to her that the hill was the same one where she had met the slave, Andrew, on that momentous day of the previous summer.
“If I can make the bottom, and get him safe on that path to the cave before they see him— O, God, help me!” She thought of the boy’s old slave mother, waiting and trusting for his promised help to rescue her from bondage, and lashed her horse again. With a firm hand she held the lines, her eyes on the road ahead and her touch guiding the horse along the safest track. With a jerk they stopped short at the bottom of the hill and she pulled away the coverings.
“Get up, quick!” she warned. “They’ve followed us, and you must hide. Climb that fence—doyou see that path over there? Run down that—it will bring you to a thicket of hazel bushes. Behind them, in the hill, there is a cave. You’ll be safe there, until I or some one comes for you. But don’t stir out of it until you hear the word, ‘Canada,’ three times. They’re right behind us—run fast!”
He needed no more warning, but was over the fence and speeding like a deer along the faint pathway. There was no foliage now to screen his figure and he would have to get beyond the bend in the hill, where the path dropped downward again, before he would be safe from sight. Rhoda gave one quick backward glance—they had not yet come into view. The fleeing mulatto reached the big rock, turned it, and disappeared. With a little catch in her breath she gathered up her lines, straightened the carriage robes and urged her horse forward again. There was no need of haste now, and the sooner the interview with the marshal was over the sooner he would go back and leave her free to bring the boy from his hiding place and go on her way. So she let the horse slowly climb the rise, while she heard the pursuing party clattering down the other slope. Presently they were beside her.
“Miss Ware, by authority of the law, I shall have to search your buggy,” said the marshal’s voice, at the wheel. One of his men rode to the horse’s head and seized the bridle.
“What for?” she asked, with well-simulated surprise.
“You are under suspicion of concealing in it a fugitive slave. I know that he was hidden in your woodshed”—Rhoda’s heart sank and she felt her eyelids quiver—“as late as this afternoon. But you got him out before we reached there, and came out on this road by a roundabout way. We’ve had our eyes on your father for a long time. And now I reckon we’ve caught him, and you too!”
Rhoda looked at him and was able to command a smile. “Excuse me,” she said politely, “but how many did you say you thought I had concealed in this buggy?”
“Only one,” the marshal answered curtly. “You can get out if you want to while we examine it.”
She jumped to the ground and stood by, smiling, while they took out the rugs and looked under the seat.
Disappointed glances passed from one to another. Evidently, they had felt sure they would find the missing slave in her buggy. Rhoda took off her wrap and shook it ostentatiously. “You see, I haven’t got him concealed about my clothing. You can search my pocket too, if you like,” she added innocently.
“You’ve beat us this time, young lady,” he responded angrily, “but we know what your father is up to, and you with him, and we’ll get you yet.”
She turned upon him with dignity. “May Iask, Mr. Hanscomb, that you will finish your examination of this little buggy where there is scarcely room for one, as soon as possible, so that I can go on. I am on an errand for my father, and I would like to finish it and get home before dark. Perhaps you would like to look under the horse’s collar and split open the whip-stock.”
The marshal flushed with annoyance. “All right. You can go on now. But you’d better be careful about taking in any more niggers.”
She drove slowly on up the hill and they brought their horses’ heads together for a conference. She was trembling with anxiety lest it might occur to them to search the woodland on the west of the road, and she wanted to know what they were going to do before she would have to pass out of sight down the other side of the hill. To gain time she dropped her whip, and jumped out to get it. Then she adjusted a buckle in the harness and examined a thill strap. A stolen glance let her see that they were starting back toward the town.
But now a new anxiety filled her. Did they know of the cave? Would they think of it as a possible hiding place? The cave was such a little one,—it was of no interest to any one but children—perhaps they had never heard of it, or had forgotten it if they had. She longed to look around and see if they stopped, but she feared to show interest in their movements, lest she mightrenew their suspicions. Had the boy left footprints as he ran from the buggy to the fence? She tried to remember whether the ground there was hard or muddy, but could recall nothing. In an agony of apprehension she reached the top of the hill and started down the descent.
“I must know, whatever happens,” she presently said to herself. Stopping the horse she sprang out and ran back a little way, to where her eyes could command the opposite hill. The horsemen were disappearing over its crest. Her knees were shaking as she hurried back to the buggy, but she pulled herself together and considered what would be the best plan to get the fugitive out of the cave and on to the next station. For she feared to go back openly now, lest some member of the marshal’s party might return. A little farther on, she remembered, was a cross way and striking off from this, a short distance to the westward, an old wood road which ended near the cave. “It used to be there,” she thought anxiously, “but I haven’t been down it since—oh, I don’t know when! I’ll have to take chances on its being there yet.”
But on the cross road she met farmer Gilbertson, in a big, deep-bedded wagon filled with a load of loose hay. She told him of her narrow escape.
“You better drive in and get him in your little buggy,” he advised, “and I’ll wait out here and take him home with me, under the hay. It’ll be safe enough—this road ain’t traveled much.”
It was not long until Rhoda was driving homeward again, deep joy in her heart that the fugitive had escaped such imminent danger, but wondering much how the marshal had discovered the secret of their woodshed.