Mollie vigorously nodded her shawl-covered head. “It’s grand!” she declared; and then, coming very close to Berry, she whispered, “I’ve got a secret! Maybe I can tell it to you to-morrow!” and before Berry had time to question her, Mollie had taken the basket that held the precious birthday cake and started to cross the brook, making her way carefully from stone to stone. She did not leap from the broad stone to the opposite bank, as Berry delighted in doing, but followed the stepping-stones until the stream was safely crossed. Then she turned and called to Berry, who had stood waiting to be sure that Mollie crossed the stream in safety.
“I’m all right, Berry,” she called. “I think it’s fine to be eleven.”
“What’s the secret, Mollie?” Berry called back; but Mollie had turned and was hurrying off toward home. Berry looked after the little figure in the trailing shawl until it vanished in the forest path, and then turned and ran lightly up the ridge. A cold wind crept among the branches of the tall oaks as Berry ran; a rabbit leaped out from the underbrush and sped along before her for a short distance, and then vanished. Squirrels scolded noisily from the oak trees, and from the deep woods Berry could hear the distant call of some winter-loving bird. But the little girl hardly noticed these familiar sounds of the forest.
“I wonder what Mollie’s secret can be?” she thought, and resolved to start out and meet Mollie the next morning. “Then she can tell me before lesson-time,” she decided.
Berry had just reached this conclusion when her quick eye caught the movement of a dark object behind the underbrush that bordered the path. “A fox, maybe!” she thought, stopping to look more closely at the dark form. As she looked the figure raised itself from behind the underbrush and Berry gave a startled exclamation; for it was not a fox or any woodland animal that confronted her, but a young negro girl, evidently more frightened than Berry, and it was Berry who spoke first.
“What are you hiding there for?” Berry demanded. “Come out in the path where I can see you.”
There were few negroes near Shiloh, and since coming to live in the mountain cabin the little Yankee girl had seldom encountered them. But she knew that Tennessee was a state where negroes were considered as the property of white masters; that negroes possessed no rights in regard to protection from cruelty and injustice. If they were fortunate in belonging to a kind master, and there were many such throughout the slaveholding states, they were well treated; but if owned by cruel, ignorant men, the negroes were abused; and it was from such unfair treatment that they frequently endeavored to escape by fleeing North. But, unless they could reach Canada, there was no safety for them in the Northern States, as the law of the Union, then, gave their masters the right to pursue them and force them to return. To end this injustice was one of the chief reasons for the Civil War.
As Berry looked at the frightened black face that peered at her above the underbrush she instantly realized that this was a runaway slave, and she again called:
“Come out in the path where I can see you,” and now the negro girl crept out from her hiding-place and stood facing Berry.
“Oh, young Massa, don’ mek me go back,” she faltered. “I’se hongry an’ col’, an’ I dunno ’zackly whar I be; but I reckons, if yo’ jes’ go on, young Massa, I kin git off so’s I won’t be kotched,” and she fixed her big eyes pleadingly on Berry’s face, her thin form, clad in a ragged garment made of coarse bagging material, shivering in the cold.