“Is it yours, gran’daddy?”
“It’s mine by rule o’ law, Grover Cleveland, but I don’t know as it’s mine by that ar golden rule that you and Preacher Carr let on to know so much about.”
His doting grandparent considered the child a prodigy of ethical understanding, or “jedgment,” as he would have expressed it, and, although he was continually plying him with information and advice on all sorts of subjects, it was no uncommon thing for him to consult the little fellow even in matters of moment. It was as if he stored his maxims and admonitions into the laboratory of the child’s mind and then requisitioned it for them in convenient form for practical use.
“What’s your opinion, Grover Cleveland?’”
The child hesitated, his bright face raised earnestly to the grizzled one:
“Me and you, gran’daddy, me and you, we don’t want anything that ain’t sure ’nough ours; do we?”
“No-o sir-ee! That settles it, Carliny; Grover Cleveland and me we want a golden rule title to every thing we claim.”
So Colonel Ledbetter got his ink bottle and pen off the shelf, a sheet and a half of writing-paper out of the front of the Bible, and three envelopes out of the back, and laboriously indited the letters to the veneering mills, while out in the shadow of the prize pumpkin his grandson cracked butternuts for the tame gray squirrels. But all the while new ideas were whirling through the little boy’s head, and they concentred in that curly walnut.
That night “when there was naught but starre light” a little human figure, bareheaded, barefooted, and clad in a single, loosely hanging garment came out of the Ledbetter house. It proceeded noiselessly, though without stealth, for it kept in the open, taking the middle of the road with a free and fearless tread. Though the eyes were partly shut and the night was dark, it made no false or stumbling step; some intuition or spiritual sight or maybe an angelic presence was guiding it. Dixie came yawning and stretching to the edge of the porch, settled meditatively upon his haunches, watched it to the first bend in the road, then followed boundingly until he came abreast when, demurely dropping head and tail, he fell behind but kept so close that the little wind-blown shirt fluttered in his face.
When half a mile had been travelled a branching wagon track, scarcely discernible even in the daytime, led up to some bars in the worm-fence that outlined the road. The little dreamer climbed over and took the rough road beyond without a sign of doubt or hesitation. It zigzagged through the woods but steadily upward to where those walnut trees, with a goodly company of peers, oak, chestnut, and whitewood had crowned a summit. He had followed it a few times before, but wide-awake beside his grandfather in the ox wagon, with Butterfly and Bonaparte for motive power. It was overgrown with grass and weeds that shed their dew upon his little feet and perfumed them with pennyroyal and dittany, while overhead interweaving branches hid even the stars from sight.