“En den ag’in,” Jesse went on, “one er de ole fambly done come back ’long wid his daughter. Marse Briscoe Bascom en Miss Mildred dey done come back, en dey ain’t got nobody fer ter he’p um out no way; en my ole ’oman she say dat ef I got any fambly feelin’ I better go dar whar Marse Briscoe is.”
For some time Major Jimmy Bass sat silent. He was shocked and stunned. Finally Jesse picked up his hat and cane and started to go. As he brushed his hat with his coat-sleeve his old master saw that he was rigged out in his Sunday clothes. As he moved away the major called him:—
“Oh, Jess!”
“Suh?”
“I allers knowed you was a durned fool, Jess, but I never did know before that you was the durndest fool in the universal world.”
Jesse made no reply, and the major went into the house. When he told his wife about Jesse’s departure, that active-minded and sharp-tongued lady was very angry.
“Indeed, and I’m glad of it,” she exclaimed as she poured out the major’s coffee; “I’m truly glad of it. For twenty-five years that nigger has been laying around here doing nothing, and we a-paying him. But for pity’s sake I’d ’a’ drove him off the lot long ago. You mayn’t believe it, but that nigger is ready and willing to eat his own weight in vittles every week the Lord sends. I ain’t sorry he’s gone, but I’m sorry I didn’t have a chance to give him a piece of my mind. Now, don’t you go to blabbing it around, like you do everything else, that Jesse has gone and left us to go with old Briscoe Bascom.”
Major Bass said he wouldn’t, and he didn’t, and that is the reason he expressed surprise when Joe-Bob Grissom informed him that Jesse was waiting on the old Judge and his daughter. Major Jimmy was talkative and fond of gossip, but he had too much respect for his wife’s judgment and discretion to refuse to toe the mark, even when it was an imaginary one.
The Bascom family had no claim whatever on Jesse, but he had often heard his mother and other negroes boasting over that they had once belonged to the Bascoms, and fondness for the family was the result of both tradition and instinct. He had that undefined and undefinable respect for people of quality that is one of the virtues, or possibly one of the failings, of human nature. The nearest approach to people of quality, so far as his experience went, was to be found in the Bascom family, and he had never forgotten that he had belonged to an important branch of it. He held it as a sort of distinction. Feeling thus, it is no wonder that he was ready to leave a comfortable home at Major Jimmy Bass’s for the privilege of attaching himself and his fortunes to those of the Judge and his daughter. Jesse made up his mind to take this step as soon as the Bascoms returned to Hillsborough, and he made no delay in carrying out his intentions.
Early one morning, not long after Judge Bascom and his daughter had settled themselves in the modest little house which they had selected because the rent was low, Mildred heard some one cutting wood in the yard. Opening her window blinds a little, she saw that the axe was wielded by a stalwart negro a little past middle age. Her father was walking up and down the sidewalk on the outside with his hands behind him, and seemed to be talking to himself.