CHAPTER II
EXULTING at the way he had diddled the girls, Dick pranced along the Redville road. He did not meet any one, for it was a fair spring day and the country people were busy; but he saw men and boys he knew, plowing and grubbing, hallooing to their teams and to one another.
About two miles from The Village, Dick turned off on the Old Plank Road. Twenty years before, this had been a highway going through The Village, on its long way to Richmond. Then the railroad was built. It wanted to come through The Village, between court-house and church, but the people rose up in arms. They did not want shrieking, grinding trains, to scare horses and bring in outsiders, nor an iron track parting their homes from their graves in the churchyard. So the railroad went by Redville that was six miles from The Village in summer and three or four times as far in the winter season of ruts and red mud.
After the railway was built, however, the road by Redville station became the thoroughfare; the Old Plank Road was seldom traveled except by negroes who lived in clearings in the Big Woods that covered miles of the rocky, infertile ridge land.
Dick was near one of these clearings, a patch of stumpy land around a log cabin, when he heard a voice calling loudly, “Whoa! Gee! Whoa, I say!�
An old negro was coming up the hill, in a cart drawn by bony, long-horned oxen.
“Hey, Unc’ Isham!� said Dick. “What are you making such a racket for?�
Isham Baskerfield jumped nervously; but when he recognized the speaker, he grinned and said: “Howdy, little marster! howdy! I was jest talkin’ to my oxes. I tuk ’em down to de creek to gin ’em some water.�
“You sounded scared,� commented Dick. “And you looked scared, too.�
“Skeered? Course I aint skeered. Huccome I be skeered?� Isham replied loudly. Then he mumbled: “I aint nuver liked to go down dis road since dat old man—Whar you gwine, Marse Dick?� he interrupted himself. “Don’t you fool ’round dat lowermos’ cabin. Dat’s�—he breathed the name in a whisper—“Solomon Gabe’s house, dat is. An’ he can shore cunjer folks.�