The Purchase Price; Or, The Cause of Compromise

by Emerson Hough

In regard to these matters, the site could not better have been selected. The valley, some three or four miles across, lay like a deep saucer pressed down into the crest of the last rise of the Ozarks. The sides of the depression were as regular as though created by the hands of man. Into its upper extremity there ran a little stream of clear and unfailing water, which made its entrance at an angle, so that the rim of the hills seemed scarcely nicked by its ingress. This stream crossed the floor of the valley, serving to water the farms, and, making its way out of the lower end by a similar curious angle, broke off sharply and hid itself among the rocks on its way out and down from the mountains—last trace of a giant geology which once dealt in continental terms, rivers once seas, valleys a thousand miles in length. Thus, at first sight, one set down in the valley might have felt that it had neither inlet nor outlet, but had been created, panoplied and peopled by some Titanic power, and owned by those who neither knew nor desired any other world. As a matter of fact, the road up through the lower Ozarks from the great Mississippi, which entered along the bed of the little stream, ended at Tallwoods farm. Beyond it, along the little river which led back into the remote hills, it was no more than a horse path, and used rarely except by negroes or whites in hunting expeditions back into the mountains, where the deer, the wild turkey, the bear and the panther still roamed in considerable numbers at no great distance from the home plantation.

Tallwoods itself needed no other fence than the vast wall of hills, and had none save where here and there the native stone had been heaped up roughly into walls, along some orchard side. The fruits of the apple, the pear and the peach grew here handsomely, and the original owner had planted such trees in abundance. The soil, though at first it might have been, called inhospitable, showed itself productive. The corn stood tall and strong, and here and there the brown stalks of the cotton plant itself might have been seen; proof of the wish of the average Southerner to cultivate that plant, even in an environment not wholly suitable. All about, upon the mountain sides, stood a heavy growth of deciduous trees, at this time of the year lining the slopes in flaming reds and golds. Beyond the valley's rim, tier on tier, stately and slow, the mountains rose back for yet a way—mountains rich in their means of frontier independence, later to be discovered rich also in minerals, in woods, in all the things required by an advancing civilization.

Corn, swine and cotton,—these made the wealth of the owner of Tallwoods' plantation and of the richer lands in the river bottoms below. These products brought the owner all the wealth he needed. Here, like a feudal lord, master of all about him, he had lived all his life and had, as do all created beings, taken on the color and the savor of the environment about him. Rich, he was generous; strong, he was merciful; independent, he was arrogant; used to his own way, he was fierce and cruel when crossed in that way. Not much difference, then, lay between this master of Tallwoods and the owner of yonder castle along the embattled Rhine, or the towered stronghold of some old lord located along an easy, wandering, English stream; with this to be said in favor of this solitary lord of the wilderness, that his was a place removed and little known. It had been passed by in some manner through its lack of appeal to those seeking cotton lands or hunting grounds, so that it lay wholly out of the ken and the understanding of most folk of the older states.

If in Tallwoods the owner might do as he liked, certainly he had elected first of all to live somewhat as a gentleman. The mansion house was modeled after the somewhat stereotyped pattern of the great country places of the South. Originally planned to consist of the one large central edifice of brick, with a wing on each side of somewhat lesser height, it had never been entirely completed, one wing only having been fully erected. The main portion of the house was of two stories, its immediate front occupied by the inevitable facade with its four white pillars, which rose from the level of the ground to the edge of the roof, shading the front entrance to the middle rooms. Under this tall gallery roof, whose front showed high, white and striking all across the valley, lay four windows, and at each side of the great double doors lay yet other two windows. On either side of the pillars and in each story, yet other two admitted light to the great rooms; and in the completed wing which lay at one side of the main building, deep embrasures came down almost to the level of the ground, well hidden by the grouped shrubbery which grew close to the walls. The visitor approaching up the straight gravel walk might not have noticed the heavy iron bars which covered these, giving the place something the look of a jail or a fortress. The shrubs, carelessly, and for that reason more attractively planted, also stood here and there over the wide and smooth bluegrass lawn.

The house was built in the edge of a growth of great oaks and elms, which threw their arms out over even the lofty gables as though in protection. Tradition had it that the reason the building had never been completed was that the old master would have been obliged to cut down a favorite elm in order to make room for it; and he had declared that since his wife had died and all his children but one had followed her, the house was large enough as it was. So it stood as he had left it, with its two tall chimneys, one at each end of the mid-body of the house, marking the two great fireplaces, yet another chimney at the other end of the lesser wing.

Straight through the mid-body of the house ran a wide hall, usually left open to all the airs of heaven; and through this one could see far out over the approach, entirely through the house itself, and note the framed picture beyond of woods glowing with foliage, and masses of shrubbery, and lesser trees among which lay the white huts of the negroes. Still to the left, beyond the existing wing, lay the fenced vegetable gardens where grew rankly all manner of provender intended for the bounteous table, whose boast it was that, save for sugar and coffee, nothing was used at Tallwoods which was not grown upon its grounds.

So lived one, and thus indeed lived more than one, baron on American soil not so long ago, when this country was more American than it is to-day—more like the old world in many ways, more like a young world in many others. Here, for thirty years of his life, had lived the present owner of Tallwoods, sole male of the family surviving in these parts.

It might have been called matter of course that Warville Dunwody should be chosen to the state legislature. So chosen, he had, through sheer force of his commanding nature, easily become a leader among men not without strength and individuality. Far up in the northern comer, where the capital of the state lay, men spoke of this place hid somewhere down among the hills of the lower country. Those who in the easier acres of the northwestern prairie lands reared their own corn and swine and cotton, often wondered at the half-wild man from St. Francois, who came riding into the capital on a blooded horse, who was followed by negroes also on blooded horses, a self-contained man who never lacked money, who never lacked wit, whose hand was heavy, whose tongue was keen, whose mind was strong and whose purse was ever open.

The state which had produced a Benton was now building up a rival to Benton. That giant, then rounding out a history of thirty years' continuous service in the Senate of the United States, unlike the men of this weaker day, reserved the right to his own honest and personal political belief. He steadily refused to countenance the extending of slavery, although himself a holder of slaves; and, although he admitted the legality and constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act, he deplored that act as much as any. To the eventual day of his defeat he stood, careless of his fate, firm in his own principles, going down in defeat at last because he would not permit his own state legislature—headed then by men such as Warville Dunwody and his friends—to dictate to him the workings of his own conscience. Stronger than Daniel Webster, he was one of those who would not obey the dictates of that leader, and he did set up his "conscience above the law." These two men, Benton and Dunwody, therefore, were at the time of which we write two gladiators upon the scenes of a wild western region, as yet little known in the eastern states, though then swiftly coming forward into more specific notice.

Perhaps thirty or forty slaves were employed about Tallwoods home farm, as it was called. They did their work much as they liked, in a way not grudging for the main part. Idle and shiftless, relying on the frequent absence of the master and the ease of gaining a living, they worked no more than was necessary to keep up a semblance of routine. In some way the acres got plowed and reaped, in some way the meats were cured, in some way the animals were fed and the table was served and the rooms kept in a semi-tidiness, none too scrupulous. Always in Tallwoods there was something at hand ready to eat, and there was fuel whereby fires might be made. Such as it was, the hospitality of the place was ready. It was a rich, loose way of life, and went on lazily and loosely, like the fashion of some roomy old vehicle, not quite run down, but advancing now and then with a groan or a creak at tasks imposed.