“Why don’t you go on, Larry, and tell him all about it? I have always been taught by my pastors and masters, and most other people I have ever known, that it is exceedingly bad manners to talk in enigmas before guests. Besides, there’s no secret about this. Everybody in South Carolina who ever heard the name Rutledge knows all about Quasi. Go on and tell the fellows, lest they think our family has a skeleton in some one or other of its closets, and is cherishing some dark, mysterious secret.”
“Why don’t you tell it yourself, Cal? You know the story as well as I do.”
“Because, oh my brother, it was your remark that aroused the curiosity which it is our hospitable duty to satisfy. I do not wish to trespass upon your privileges or take your obligations upon myself. Go on! There is harkening all about you. You have your audience and your theme. We hang upon your lips.”
“Oh, it isn’t much of a story, but I may as well tell it,” said Larry, smiling at his brother’s ponderous speech.
“Quasi is a very large plantation occupying the end of a peninsula. Except on the mainland side a dozen miles of salt water, mud banks and marsh islands, separate it from the nearest land. On the mainland side there is a marsh two or three miles wide and a thousand miles deep, I think. At any rate, it is utterly impassable—a mere mass of semi-liquid mud, though it looks solid enough with its growth of tall salt marsh grass covering its ugliness and hiding its treachery. The point might as well be an island, so far as possibilities of approach to it are concerned, and in effect it is an island, or quasi an island. I suppose some humorous old owner of it had that in mind when he named it Quasi.
“It is sea island cotton land of the very finest and richest kind, and when it was cultivated it was better worth working than a gold mine. There are large tracts of original timber on it, and as it has been abandoned and running wild for more than twenty years, even the young tree growths are large and fine now.
“That is where the story begins. Quasi belonged to our grandfather Rutledge. He didn’t live there, but he had the place under thorough cultivation. When the war broke out my grandfather was one of the few men in the South who doubted our side’s ability to win, and as no man could foresee what financial disturbances might occur, he decided to secure his two daughters—our father’s sisters, who were then young girls—against all possibility of poverty, by giving Quasi to them in their own right. ‘Then,’ he thought, ‘they will be comfortably well off, no matter what happens.’ So he deeded Quasi to them.
“When the Federals succeeded, early in the war, in seizing upon the sea island defences, establishing themselves at Beaufort, Hilton Head, and other places, it was necessary for my grandfather to remove all the negroes from Quasi, lest they be carried off by the enemy. The place was therefore abandoned, but my grandfather said that, at any rate, nobody could carry off the land, and that that would make my aunts easy in their finances, whenever peace should come again. As he was a hard-fighting officer, noted for his dare-devil recklessness of danger, he did not think it likely that he would live to see the end. But he believed he had made his daughters secure against poverty, and as for my father, he thought him man enough to take care of himself.”
“The which he abundantly proved himself to be when the time came,” interrupted Cal, with a note of pride in his tone.
“Oh, that was a matter of course,” answered Larry. “It’s a way the Rutledges have always had. But that is no part of the story I’m telling. During the last year of the war, when everything was going against the South, grandfather saw clearly what the result must be, and he understood the effect it would have upon his fortunes. He was a well-to-do man—I may even say a wealthy one—but he foresaw that with the negroes set free and the industries of the South paralyzed for the time, his estate would be hopelessly insolvent. But like the brave man that he was, he did not let these things trouble him. Believing that his daughters were amply provided for, and that my father—who at the age of twenty-five had fought his way from private to major—could look out for himself, the grim old warrior went on with his soldierly work and bothered not at all as to results.