In the three zones

by Frederic Jesup Stimson

What a drive it was! We lost our way; and the girls sang. Tim swore, Mrs. Judge Pennoyer laughed, and May and Jeanie sang all the sweeter. Tim Healy thought he saw twenty moonshiners and emptied his revolver at one of them; a charred stump it proved to be. We passed one hut in a clearing, and were refreshed by veritable whiskey; i.e., “pine-top” whiskey, milky-white in color, and said to be made out of the cones of pines. We found the trail once more and the stars came out, and the nightingales sang, and May Bruce and young Raoul became more silent. At last we saw, upon a hillside in the forest, the burning pitch-pine torches of the great construction “camp.” Hundreds of black forms surrounded these ruddy fires; from some of the groups came sounds of banjos and negroes singing; and I looked suddenly up and saw the starlight reflected in Miss Jeanie’s eyes.

There was only one tent in the camp with “sides” to it—i.e., perpendicular flaps making walls below the roof, and that, of course, was sacred to the ladies. We lay beneath a mere V-shaped canvas roof, which was stretched downward so as to end some three feet from the ground, our heads in a heap of pillows, and our legs all radiating outward, like a starfish, to terminate in thirty booted feet. Under the canvas back I could see the starlight, and there I lay awake some time regarding it, which now seemed to bear some reflection of Miss Jeanie’s eyes. Next thing came the sun and opened mine by shining into them; then closed them up again, and I rolled into the canvas-shade, and up, and out of doors, and followed Coe and Healy to the “branch” below. Big Bear Creek it was, of a rich red-chocolate color, fit, perhaps, to wash a Chinaman who could not see. Yet Coe took a plunge, and looked up, white enough.

“Come in,” he shouted to us, who were hesitating, “it doesn’t come off.”

The negroes had been sleeping all over the place, tentless; and now they were pulling themselves together, in groups, and starting for the railroad, or rather where the railroad was to be. On the way they stopped at the commissaries’ to get their breakfast, standing in long rows before the counter, waiting their turn. The commissaries’ stores were the only wooden buildings in camp; well walled and bolted, too, as they had to be, said Tim Healy, to withstand the attacks of a riotous Saturday night. Four men, he said, were always in them armed; and on Saturday nights, pay-night, they would often empty a revolver or two into the crowd and perhaps “drop” a nigger, before it ceased to besiege their doors for fruit or whiskey.

Then we all went to breakfast, the Misses Bruce both fresh as dewy wood-flowers, and Mrs. Judge Pennoyer radiating amiability. Only the head commissary and the section contractor were thought of sufficient social importance to breakfast with us, and the former from his stores brought many delicacies in cans and bottles. Then after breakfast we went to walk—the ladies with sunshades and gloves—upon the location; a broad swath cut through the rolling forest and undulating far as the eye could reach in either direction, dotted with men and mules. Ahead, they were still blowing out stumps with gunpowder and dragging them away; where we stood was being built an embankment of gravel; and they were dragging out gravel from the “cut” ahead and heaping it upon the long mound. I gave my hand to Miss Jeanie and helped her up. Each black negro worked with a splendid mule; seventeen or eighteen hands high perhaps, dragging a curious sort of drag-spade, which the mule knew how to catch in the gravel, turn out full, drag the load evenly along, and then tip it out adroitly at the precise spot, a foot in front of the last dump; the negro hardly doing more than standing by to see the mule kept working; not, of course, working himself. Thus each man-laborer became an overseer, if only to a mule.

“The mule’s the finer animal of the two,” said Coe, “and much the more moral.”

“But he’s got no vote,” grunted Jim. “Ef we didn’t keep them black Mississippi niggers up here off’m the farms, they’d swamp us all.”

“Are they allowed to bring their wives to camp with them?” queried Miss Jeanie, softly; and, following her glance, we saw several coal-black damsels sitting in the warm sand-bank at the side of the cut, their finery about them, and evidently established there for the morning, basking in the sun.

“Oh, yes, they bring up their wives,” said Healy, reluctantly. “If we didn’t, they’d run away every two or three days. Nothing a contractor dislikes so much as irregular labor.”

“But it shows they have some good in them to be so devoted,” said Miss Jeanie.