"Why I guess maybe—I reckon—I mout assist yu'uns, leastwise I haint a going to stand in yu'unsway." The regulator looked down as by accident into the cradle: there was the sleeping babe, the pledge of a love that had been hedged in all these days by privations, and his heart went out toward his wife with the old time affection.
"Naw Sally Ann" he exclaimed with a husky voice, "Weuns kaint part when there is no one to come betwixt us; weuns kaint say good-bye twell yuuns is on yon side of the river."
The roses had faded out of the cheek of his wife, but there was the old-fashioned sparkle in her eye; there was the old time love in her heart, crossed sometimes by the perverse nature of her lord and master.
"Haint you made your will Jake?" asked Sally-Ann half seriously.
"Naw is you skeert honey?"
"Andy has done and made hissen and fetched it over here to read last Sunday when you wus gone to the mash and hit read like scriptur."
Jake had been envious of Andy Vose for some time. When the need of the country for men good and true had been most urgent, Vose had deserted to the ranks of the enemy, and now he counted his flocks and herds by the score. Jake was also jealous of the attentions the scalawag was from time to time showing his young wife; these visits occurred most frequently in the absence of the regulator, and these intrusions as he felt they were, gave him alarm. After reflection, Jake concealing his suspicions remarked with apparent unconcern, "Read like scriptur, I'll be dorg gone!" "I haint got no call to make a will like Andy, honey. De nigger officer levelled on old Nance and the biddies, and the live stock has run plum out epsepting the babe and it is yourn any way honey."
This man was a terror to the freedmen. They had a tradition among themselves that the very last seen of the regulator until after the war was over was his ascension in a cloud of fire and smoke into "de elements" holding fast to a dead negro. Jake said that this was "pintedly" true, but that he came down again as his captain was going up who told him when he had fairly lit to "charge bagonets." In the language of the plains this Jake Flowers was an "eye opener." His personal attractions he said had been spoilt by the blamed war. I am not sure that the name of Jake Flowers appears upon the bloody roster of battles lost and won; but for his doings at the Crater fight, so Jake has observed, historians would have reversed the incidents of that bloody day.
He claimed always to be the "Survival of the Fittest" and with the blind faith of the Moslem he believed that there was a "Providence that shapes our ends, rough hew them as we may."
His favorite posture whenever animated was as follows; he would sit with his right leg crossed over his left, gently swaying his foot, with his bearded chin resting reposefully in the palm of his hand, with the fore and middle finger forming the letter V and pressed to his lips; through which he would now and then expectorate; the man was also spavined in the right knee joint that caused him to walk like a sailor on his "sea legs." Like other men he had his delusions and whether good or evil, they were the rule of action of his life. Jake was the reinforcement vehemently demanded in this conjuncture. "With the regulator armed and equipped, the enemy will flee without taking order as to its line of march," thought the old man.