He had been down to the saw-mill, to get pay for a yoke of oxen his father had sold. “I started by sun-up, and got thar agin nine o’clock.” It was now afternoon, and he was hungry and cold. He therefore proposed to me to go home with him and get warm, before visiting the battle-field.
It was after two o’clock when we came to a hilly field covered with rotting clothes.
“Beauregard’s troops come plumb up this road, and slept hyere the night befo’e the battle. They left their blankets and knapsacks, and after they got brushed out by the Yankees, the second day, they didn’t wait to pick ’em up again.”
We entered the woods beyond, directing our course towards the western edge of the battle-field; and, after riding some distance, forded Owl Creek,—a narrow, but deep and muddy stream. Zeek’s home was in view from the farther bank; a log-house, with the usual great opening through the middle; situated on the edge of a pleasant oak-grove strewn with rustling leaves, and enclosed, with its yard and out-houses, by a Virginia rail-fence.
CHAPTER XLIII.
ZEEK’S FAMILY.
“Alight!” said Zeek, dismounting at the gate.
I remonstrated against leaving the animals uncovered in the cold, but he said it was the way people did in that country; and it was not until an hour later that he found it convenient to give them shelter and food.
We were met inside the gate by a sister of the young man’s, a girl of fifteen, in a native Bloomer dress that fell just below the knees. As I entered the space between the two divisions of the house, I noticed that doors on both sides were open, one leading to the kitchen, where there was a great fire, and the other to the sitting-room, where there was another great fire, in large old-fashioned fireplaces.
Zeek took me into the sitting-room, and introduced me to his mother. There were two beds in the back corners of the room. The uncovered floor was of oak; the naked walls were of plain hewn logs; the sleepers and rough boards of the chamber floor constituted the ceiling. There were clothes drying on a pole stretched across the room, and hanks of dyed cotton thread on a bayonet thrust into a chink of the chimney. Cold as the day was, the door by which we entered was never shut, and sometimes another door was open, letting the wintry wind sweep through the house.
Zeek’s mother went to see about getting us some dinner; and his father came in from the woods, where he had been chopping, and sat in the chimney-corner and talked with me: a lean, bent, good-humored, hard-working, sensible sort of man. He told me he had five hundred acres of land, but only thirty-six under cultivation. He and Zeek did the work; they had never owned negroes.