“Why, he meant to frighten the driver, of course.”
“You think he had a knife in his breast?”
“Of course he had, sir.”
“But you wouldn’t kill him for that, I suppose?”
“When a man threatens to kill me, you wouldn’t have me wait for him to do it, would you, sir?”
The roads continued very heavy; some one remarked, “There’s been a heap of rain lately,” and rain still kept falling. We passed a number of cotton waggons which had stopped in the road; the cattle had been turned out and had strayed off into the woods, and the drivers lay under the tilts asleep on straw.
The Colonel said this sight reminded him of his old camp-meeting days. “I used to be very fond of going to camp-meetings. I used to go first for fun, and, oh Lord! haint I had some fun at camp meetings? But after a while I got a conviction—needn’t laugh, gentlemen. I tell you it was sober business for me. I’ll never make fun of that. The truth just is, I am a melancholy case; I thought I was a pious man once, I did—I’m damn’d if I didn’t. Don’t laugh at what I say, now; I don’t want fun made of that; I give you my word I experienced religion, and I used to go to the meetings with as much sincerity and soberness as anybody could. That was the time I learned to sing—learned to pray too, I did; could pray right smart. I did think I was a converted man, but of course I ain’t, and I ’spose ’twarnt the right sort, and I don’t reckon I shall have another chance. A gentleman has a right to make the most of this life, when he can’t calculate on anything better than roasting in the next. Aint that so, Judge? I reckon so. You mustn’t think hard of me, if I do talk wicked some. Can’t help it.”
I was forced by the stage arrangements to travel night and day. The Colonel told me that I should be able to get a good supper at a house where the coach was to stop about midnight—“good honest fried bacon, and hot Christian corn-bread—nothing like it, to fill a man up and make him feel righteous. You get a heap better living up in this country than you can at the St. Charles, for all the fuss they make about it. It’s lucky you’ll have something better to travel on to-night than them French friterzeed Dutch flabbergasted hell-fixins: for you’ll have the——” (another most extraordinary series of imprecations on the road over which I was to travel).
Before dark all my companions left me, and in their place I had but one, a young gentleman with whom I soon became very intimately acquainted. He was seventeen years old, so he said; he looked older; and the son of a planter in the “Yazoo bottoms.” The last year he had “follered overseein’” on his father’s plantation, but he was bound for Tennessee, now, to go to an academy, where he could learn geography. There was a school near home at which he had studied reading and writing and ciphering, but he thought a gentleman ought to have some knowledge of geography. At ten o’clock the next morning the stage-coach having progressed at the rate of exactly two miles and a half an hour, for the previous sixteen hours, during which time we had been fasting, the supper-house, which we should have reached before midnight, was still ten miles ahead, the driver sulky and refusing to stop until we reached it. We had been pounded till we ached in every muscle. I had had no sleep since I left Memphis. We were passing over a hill country which sometimes appeared to be quite thickly inhabited, yet mainly still covered with a pine forest, through which the wind moaned lugubriously.
I had been induced to turn this way in my journey in no slight degree by reading the following description in a statistical article of De Bow’s Review: