The Master of Warlock: A Virginia War Story

Illustrated by C. D. WILLIAMS
LOTHROP PUBLISHING COMPANY BOSTON
COPYRIGHT, 1903,
By LOTHROP PUBLISHING COMPANY.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ENTERED AT STATIONERS' HALL
Published, January, 1903
TO DOROTHY SOUTH, THE DEAR LITTLE WOMAN WHO HAS BEEN WIFE TO ME FOR THIRTY-FOUR YEARS, WHO HAS UNCONSCIOUSLY INSPIRED ALL MY WORK, AND WHOSE PERSONALITY, IN ITS SEVERAL PHASES, IT HAS BEEN MY LOVING ENDEAVOUR TO PORTRAY IN ALL THE STORIES I HAVE WRITTEN, I DEDICATE THIS BOOK WITH REVERENCE AND SOUL-FELT THANKS. GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON. Culross, October 18, 1902.

The road was a winding, twisting track as it threaded its way through a stretch of old field pines. The land was nearly level at that point, and quite unobstructed, so that there was not the slightest reason that ordinary intelligence could discover for the roadway's devious wanderings. It might just as well have run straight through the pine lands.
But in Virginia people were never in a hurry. They had all of leisure that well-settled and perfectly self-satisfied ways of life could bring to a people whose chief concern it was to live uprightly and happily in that state of existence into which it had pleased God to call them. What difference could it make to a people so minded, whether the journey to the Court-house—the centre and seat of county activities of all kinds—were a mile or two longer or shorter by reason of meaningless curves in the road, or by reason of a lack of them? Why should they bother to straighten out road windings that had the authority of long use for their being? And why should the well-fed negro drivers of family carriages shake themselves out of their customary and comfortable naps in order to drive more directly across the pine land, when the horses, if left to themselves, would placidly follow the traditional track?
The crookedness of the road was a fact, and Virginians of that time always accepted and respected facts to which they had been long accustomed. For that sufficient reason Baillie Pegram, the young master of Warlock, was not thinking of the road at all, but accepting it as he did the greenery of the trees and the bursting of the buds, as he jogged along at a dog-trot on that fine April morning in the year of our Lord 1861.