“You can’t do that again.”
“I don’t believe I can,” laughed Hugh.
“Will you learn me some more?” asked the boy eagerly.
“I surely will.”
A little later Barbara and her cousin were trotting smartly along a sandy road through the fields with the colonel and Hugh loping in front of them. Firefly was a black mettlesome gelding. He had reared and plunged when Hugh mounted, and even now he was champing his bit and leaping playfully at times, but the lad sat him with an unconcern of his capers that held the Kentucky boy’s eyes.
“Gosh,” he said, “but Hugh can ride! I wonder if he could stay on him bareback.”
“I suppose so,” Barbara said; “Hugh can do anything.”
The summer fields of corn and grain waved away on each side under the wind, innumerable negroes were at work and song on either side, great barns and whitewashed cabins dotted the rich landscape which beyond the plantation broke against woods of sombre pines. For an hour they drove, the boy’s bewildered eye missing few details and understanding few, so foreign to him were all the changes wrought by the hand, and he could hardly have believed that this country was once as wild as his own—that this was to be impoverished and his own become even a richer land. Many questions the little girl asked—and some of his answers made her shudder.
“Papa said last night that several of our kinsfolk spoke of going to your country in a party, and Harry and Hugh are crazy to go with them. Papa said people would be swarming over the Cumberland Mountains before long.”
“I wish you’d come along.”