"Red-head for luck! That coon with a high voice needs a left hind foot, or I miss my guess."
"Why?"
"Watch and see," was the puzzling answer.
So Doby slept on top of his rabbit to save it. But in the morning it was gone.
He spied around.
About a freshly built knob of kinks on the tenor's head, the taint of over-warm rabbit fur was climbing above all other odors, as the tuneful one hummed, "Dar am a b'ar," with flagrant unconsciousness.
As an article of diet, Doby lost his interest in rabbit, but as a charm it might prove exciting, so he decided to keep still and "watch and see."
It is one of the results of slavery that the superstitions of the "quarters" creep into the "big house" where the master lives.
Thus it happened that when they came to Ashland, one of those splendid estates which slave labor made possible, in the neighborhood of Lexington, the lucky boy, Doby, who looked red-headed but was not, became one of the important persons invited with the Virginia "gentlemen," the scout "officers," and the Quaker "preachers," by the statesman, Henry Clay, to be his guest at dinner and to view his model house and grounds.
Some of the Virginians had known Henry Clay when, as the barefooted "mill boy" of the "Slashes"—a newly cleared region—he had ridden back and forth in the Old Dominion with grist for his widowed mother, and they now rejoiced in his self-made prosperity. Several of the scouts had worked with him in political changes and they were proud of his positions of trust. Many of the preachers of the "Society of Friends," as the Quakers called themselves, had discussed with the great leader the evils and injustice of slavery; no one knew better than they how hard Henry Clay worked to influence the laws which were intended to help the blacks' condition and which tended toward final emancipation for them.