“‘That’s what the owl said,’ answered the white man. This tickled me so that I grunted before I knew it. The white man laughed, too, and said he was the Teacher of the young people at the big house. Gooft! a Teacher! There was once a schoolhouse—they called it that, but it was nothing in the world but a log cabin—in the woods over yonder. Every day the Teacher would come and pound and pummel the boys, and every day the boys would go out and stone the cows and hogs. They killed a blood cousin of mine.
“So I said to myself, Gooft! if this Teacher is teaching the Little Master to do these things, I will keep out of the Little Master’s way.
A WILD CAT WAS WATCHING ME
“Humph! The Son of Ben Ali said to this Teacher: ‘You ought to know me. You saw me in the speculator’s train, and you saw me sold from the block.’
“The Teacher placed his hand on the Son of Ben Ali’s shoulder and replied: ‘I came from far away, and there the people are thinking about you and praying for you. Bear that in mind—thinking about you, and praying for you every day and every night. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands—all thinking about you and praying for you.’
“Gooft—ooft! This Teacher talked as the man talks in the little house on the creek road where the people go when the bell rings—the little house with the high wooden chimney, where the bell is.”
“It is a church,” said Buster John.
“Humph! It may be a church for all I know. I have stood in the woods and heard the man talk to the people, and the Teacher talked just like him. I don’t know what else the Teacher said to the Son of Ben Ali, nor what the Son of Ben Ali said to him, but that night, after the Son of Ben Ali had seen the Little Master, and when we were on our way back to the woods, we met the Teacher again. He had been to another plantation, and told the negroes there how the people in his country were thinking about them and praying for them.