“Go ’long! Aint I done tell you she ridin’ Injun Belle?” Mammy Jacks replied scornfully. “She tuck’n sond piccaninny fer you. You gwine ter go? Co’se,”—she turned away with great dignity—“ef you hev udder fish ter fry, it’s notin ter Mammy Jacks. She done tell you.”
“Stop!” I said, my mind a jumble of impossible conjectures, “Don’t be in such a hurry. I’ll go, of course, if I can be of use. But I don’t understand—”
“Dat’s needer yer nor dar,” Mammy Jacks answered. “Ef you ’er too bigitty ter go, Marse, dar’s an eend. Eh? You gwine? Clar to goodness den, sooner’n you skip de better! Ef you not fine Missie no’th aidge uv de Knob you ter wait an hour twel she come. Bimeby she trompin’ round. She sholy boun’ ter come.”
I followed the woman from the room, still marvelling, still questioning, my head in a whirl. She hurried me through the living-room to the door at the rear of the house which looked towards the negroes’ cabins—low huts of shingle, vine-clad, mushroom-like, dwarfed by the giant shade trees that rose above them. Beside the house-door stood a black boy with a single cloth about him, who still panted from the speed at which he had come. His face was strange to me, and I asked if he were coming with me.
“Look like you know de track widout him!” the woman rejoined. “Aint you bin ter de Knob de las’ week uz ever wuz? You better run ’long er Missie’ll be dar befo’ you! Den you’ll hear mo’ en you pleez’d ter like. Dat’s w’at I’m thinking, Marse Craven.”
I strode off without waiting for more, passed beside the cabins and skirted the negroes’ patches of corn and vegetables. Beyond these I plunged into the woods, following a fairly-marked track. The Knob was a rocky point, rising well over a hundred feet above the forest roof, some two miles southwest of the Bluff. I had visited it for the sake of the view which I was told its summit afforded; and I should have gone a second time if about the same distance northwest of the Knob, there had not risen above the trees another hill—King’s Mountain. Its slopes were greener, it was more pleasant to the eye. But I knew that on those slopes, above which vultures and crows hovered in the air, the bodies of my fellows lay unburied. And that thought had been too much for me. I had not gone again.
But to-day that and all kindred thoughts were far from my mind as I pushed my way along the narrow track, now thrusting aside the scented plants that form in Carolina so large a part of the undergrowth, and now traversing the gloom of a pinewood where the feet sank without a sound in the rotting leaves. Even the heat and flies, even the scurry of a doe and fawn across my path were little heeded. My mind was in a tumult of wonder and conjecture. I thought only of Constantia, of her summons, of her possible need. I strove to imagine what had happened, what had, or could have, happened, to lead her to send for me; above all, I wondered what she could want with me at Hickory Knob, a place distant and solitary—she who had never offered me her company abroad, never gone farther with me than to that sliprail?
Wondering, I sought the answer to these questions and sought it fruitlessly. I could find no answer that consorted with her character or was at one with her treatment of me. Had she met with an accident? She would not send for me. Had she fallen into hostile hands? I could do nothing, maimed and unarmed as I was. Was Marion with her? Then, why did he not come to the house? No conjecture that presented itself agreed with the facts, and I could only hasten my pace as much as my arm permitted, and look forward to seeing her.
Where should I find her? At the foot of the rock? Or at the summit? Or would she perhaps be waiting for me at a certain flat stone on a level with the tree-tops, which formed a convenient seat, and which a carpet of nutshells and broken corncobs pointed out as a favorite resort of the negroes? I could not tell. The tangle of forest vines about me was not more blind or more confused than were my thoughts.
I came at last, sweating at every pore, and fighting the swarms of flies that accompanied me to the foot of the little hill. She was not there; I could hear nothing. The stillness of afternoon lay heavy on the woods. Impatient of delay, I paused for a moment only, then I started to scale the hill and in less than a minute I stood beside the flat stone I have mentioned. She was not there, and I did not tarry, I climbed on, now slipping on the shale, and now clutching at branches of the myriad azaleas that earlier in the year clothed the bare hill with flame. At length I reached the summit which was no bigger than the floor of a barn.