“The answer was: ‘I’ll not be far away.’
“I had nothing else to do but go, but I knew there was trouble at the end of the road. I had seen negroes lashed for selling their masters’ things, and I had seen white men sent to jail for trading with negroes between two suns. I found out long afterward that Mr. Gossett’s neighbor had some land that he refused to sell. He was not very well off, but he held to his land and made poor crops. If he bought the cotton from me, Mr. Gossett could buy his land or put him in jail. But this was all dark to me then.
“I mounted the wagon—But wait! Rambler, the track dog, is here. He knows what happened. I will call him.”
Aaron went to the door of his cabin, put his right hand to his mouth, and gave a musical halloo. The dogs were barking in another part of the lot, but they ceased instantly, as if listening. Then Watch, the catch dog, barked three times:—
“Who is it?”
Again Aaron gave the halloo, and this time it was answered by the quavering cry of a hound. Before the children learned the language of the animals, they would have said a dog was howling somewhere on the plantation, but now they knew that Rambler was saying:—
“I am c-o-m-i-n-g!”
In a few minutes he came running into the cabin, his hair damp with the dew. He looked rather sheepish, as the saying is, and crouched near Aaron, as if he expected to be scolded. Once upon a time Rambler had been a black-and-tan, but he was now old, and the gray hairs had well-nigh obliterated the tan, and were encroaching on the black. His muzzle was very gray, and his dew-claws had grown until they were nearly an inch and a half long. One of his long ears was split a little at the end, the result of a skirmish with old Mr. Raccoon. He kept his eyes averted from Aaron and the children and seemed to be both humble and uneasy. He was better satisfied when Aaron told him what was wanted. Indeed, he became very lively and went about the room picking up the scraps of bread the children had dropped on the floor. Aaron went to his little pine cupboard and got out a pone of corn bread that he had saved from the day before. Rambler took the bread in his mouth and then placed it gently on the floor. Gently wagging his tail, he looked up in Aaron’s face.
“Son of Ben Ali,” he said, “I am getting old, and, what with gnawing bones and killing cats and fighting coons, my teeth are bad. This bread is hard.”