"My friend, I have nearly three hundred mouths to feed. I depend on the sale of my crop to give them food. If our ports are closed, I cannot do it—they will starve, and I be ruined. But sooner than submit to the domination of the cursed Yankees, I will see my negroes starving, and my child a beggar!"
At this point in the conversation we arrived at the negro shanty where the sick child was. Dismounting, the Colonel and I entered.
The cabin was almost a counterpart of the "Mills House," described in the previous chapter, but it had a plank flooring, and was scrupulously neat and clean. The logs were stripped of bark, and whitewashed. A bright, cheerful fire was blazing on the hearth, and an air of rude comfort pervaded the whole interior. On a low bed in the farther corner of the room lay the sick child. He was a boy of about twelve years, and evidently in the last stages of consumption. By his side, bending over him as if to catch his almost inaudible words, sat a tidy, youthful-looking colored woman, his mother, and the wife of the negro we had met at the "still." Playing on the floor, was a younger child, perhaps five years old, but while the faces of the mother and the sick lad were of the hue of charcoal, his skin by a process well understood at the South, had been bleached to a bright yellow.
The woman took no notice of our entrance, but the little fellow ran to the Colonel and caught hold of the skirts of his coat in a free-and-easy way, saying, "Ole massa, you got suffin' for Dicky?"
"No, you little nig," replied the Colonel, patting his woolly head as I might have done a white child's, "Dicky isn't a good boy."
"Yas, I is," said the little darky; "you'se ugly ole massa to gib nuffin' to Dick."
Aroused by the Colonel's voice, the woman turned toward us. Her eyes were swollen, and her face bore traces of deep emotion.
"Oh massa!" she said, "de chile am dyin'! It'm all along ob his workin' in de swamp—no man orter work dar, let alone a chile like dis."
"Do you think he is dying, Rosy?" asked the Colonel, approaching the bed-side.
"Shore, massa, he'm gwine fass. Look at 'im."