CHAPTER IV. Johnny Florer's Axle Grease.
It was the afternoon—cool and beautiful. I had been nursing my indolence with a cigar and one of the large arm-chairs which the veranda of the great hotel afforded. Now and then I considered within myself as to the whereabouts of my Old Cattleman, and was in a half humor to hunt him up. Just as my thoughts were hardening into decision in that behalf, a high, wavering note, evidently meant for song, came floating around the corner of the house, from the veranda on the end. The singer was out of range of eye, but I knew him for my aged friend. Thus he gave forth:
"Dogville, Dogville!
A tavern an' a still,
That's all thar is in all Dog-ville."
"How do you feel to-day?" I asked as I took a chair near the venerable musician. "Happy and healthy, I trust?"
"Never feels better in my life," responded the Old Cattleman. "If I was to feel any better, I'd shorely go an' see a doctor."
"You are a singer, I observe."
"I'm melodious nacheral, but I'm gettin' so I sort o' stumbles in my
notes. Shoutin' an' singin' 'round a passel of cattle to keep 'em
from stampedin' on bad nights has sp'iled my voice, that a-way.
Thar's nothin' so weakenin', vocal, as them efforts in the open air
an' in the midst of the storms an' the elements. What for a song is
that I'm renderin'? Son, I learns that ballad long ago, back when
I'm a boy in old Tennessee. It's writ, word and music, by little
Mollie Hines, who lives with her pap, old Homer Hines, over on the
'Possum Trot. Mollie Hines is shore a poet, an' has a mighty sight
of fame, local. She's what you-all might call a jo-darter of a poet,
Mollie is; an' let anythin' touchin' or romantic happen anywhere
along the 'Possum Trot, so as to give her a subjeck, an' Mollie
would be down on it, instanter, like a fallin' star. She shorely is
a verse maker, an' is known in the Cumberland country as 'The
Nightingale of Big Bone Lick.' I remembers when a Shylock over to
the Dudleytown bank forecloses a mortgage on old Homer Hines, an'
offers his settlements at public vandue that a-way, how Mollie
prances out an' pours a poem into the miscreant. Thar's a hundred
an' 'levcn verses into it, an' each one like a bullet outen a
Winchester. It goes like this: "Thar's a word to be uttered to the
rich man in his pride.
(Which a gent is frequent richest when it's jest before he died!)
Thar's a word to be uttered to the hawg a-eatin' truck.
(Which a hawg is frequent fattest when it's jest before he's
stuck!)
"Mighty sperited epick, that! You recalls that English preacher sharp that comes squanderin' 'round the tavern yere for his health about a month ago? Shore! I knows you couldn't have overlooked no bet like that divine. Well, that night in them parlors, when he reads some rhymes in a book,—whatever is that piece he reads? Locksley Hall; right you be, son! As I was sayin', when he's through renderin' said Locksley Hall, he comes buttin' into a talk with me where I'm camped in a corner all cosy as a toad onder a cabbage leaf, reecoverin' myse'f with licker from them recitals of his, an' he says to me, this parson party does:
"'Which it's shorely a set-back America has no poets,' says he.