“Here are the store-room keys. Go and open the door, and I will be there directly.”
It was a lively crowd that gathered around the wide door of the store-room. For each of the older ones there was a stiff dram apiece, and for all, both old and young, there was a present of some kind. The presents were of a substantial character, too. Those who had made crops of their own found a profitable market right at their master’s door. Some of them had made as much as two bales of cotton on the land they were permitted to cultivate, while others had made good crops of corn—all of which was bought by their master.
Then the big six-mule wagon was brought into service, and into this was packed the horse-collars, made of shucks and wahoo-bark, the baskets, the foot-mats, the brooms, the walking-canes, and the axe-helves, that were to find a market in the town nine miles away.
In spite of the war, it was a happy time, and Joe Maxwell was as happy as any of the rest.
CHAPTER IX—DESERTERS AND RUNAWAYS
All was peace on the plantation, but war has long arms, and it dropped its gifts of poverty and privation in many a humble home with which Joe Maxwell was familiar. War has its bill of fare, too, and much of it was not to Joe’s taste. For coffee there were various substitutes: sweet potatoes, chipped and dried, parched meal, parched rye, parched okra-seeds, and sassafras tea. Joe’s beverage was water sweetened with sorghum-sirup, and he found it a very refreshing and wholesome drink. Some of the dishes that were popular in the old colonial days were revived. There was persimmon bread; what could be more toothsome than that? Yet a little of it went a long way, as Mr. Wall used to say. And there was potato pone—sweet potatoes boiled, kneaded, cut into pones, and baked. And then there was callalou—a mixture of collards, poke salad, and turnip greens boiled for dinner and fried over for supper. This was the invention of Jimsy, an old negro brought over from the West Indies, whose real name was Zimzi, and who always ran away when anybody scolded him.
