"And you see that this is your duty."
"Yes, sah."
"To-morrow morning, before daybreak, in the road beyond your church, we will separate, and you will not see me any more."
Beside Daddy Joe's bowed-down humility and belief Gard had a sensation that in a measure was new—a sense of ignobleness and triviality. In some strange way there seemed to rise out of Daddy Joe a certain spiritual stature and significance. One seemed to discern that nowhere in his soul did he play a part, or play at anything, or remember himself. He took Gard to be perhaps, a half-divine evangelist. In Daddy Joe's primitive faith, Gard fancied, heavenly incarnated messengers came as easily among men as his ancestral gods had come in the jungle; spirits, evil or good, still rode the night wind; a magical influence of benefit or harm was a quality of things, like their color and touch.
It was out of these conditions that the historic faiths had come, with their deep simplicities. The torch-bearers, with fresh fire, men who travailed with the secrets of the future, had so sat in doorways, taught such as Daddy Joe the master words, and forgot the times filled with wars and policies, while the sunlight was on the grainfields, some brown creek quiet in its bed, and the hearth smoke hanging in the air. But he had not any such message for Daddy Joe, and felt trivial in his mask. Wars and policies, too, were trivial, shadows drifting across the cornfields, ripples on the slow mass of the creek. It was what occurred to men in doorways and by roadsides that was of importance, that lit the torches and determined the massed current.
In the dark of the dawn they separated at the highway. Daddy Joe rode downward on Gard's horse with the white forefoot. A few hundred feet and he pulled up, turned in his saddle, and looked back. The horse and man going up under the pine avenue seemed to loom large and vague in the gloom.
"Fo' God," he whispered, "ain' gwine see him no mo'."
In the broad daylight on top of the gap Gard examined his clothes, rubbed the smoothness of his shaven face, and observed that the horse he rode was an iron-gray. The clothes were a gray felt hat, a long, black coat, thread-bare and lined with silk, a white vest, dotted necktie and unstarched linen, black trousers, and his own shoes. He thought he might resemble a seedy Southern gentleman in possession of a whiskey flask and an eccentric plan for the capture of the city of Washington. He might imagine a resemblance in spirit to Jack Mavering. It would furnish a basis and a sequence.
He came to the burned bridge on the Shenandoah. Three or four horsemen were on the other side who met and greeted him when he had crossed.
"Howdy."