"Better go on quick, for Jimmy can wash in a piece of a minute if he wants to," warned Charlotte, and in a second the parson had sent the gray car flying out toward Old Harpeth, though I saw him glance back with a trace of distress in his eyes at the fading vision of a small boy running, howling, to the front gate of the Morgan residence.
"Now mother'll whip him for crying if she does as she says she would, but she won't," observed the tender big sister, as she rose to her feet and waved a maddening farewell to the distressed urchin being left behind.
"Is she totally depraved?" I asked of the young Charlotte's spiritual adviser at my side.
"No; perfectly honest," he answered me with a glint in his eyes that was a laughing challenge.
"There is something awful about honesty," I answered, without appearing to notice the glint.
"There wouldn't be if it were a universal custom," was the answer I got as we whirled by a farmer's wood lot and began to climb the first foothill of Old Harpeth.
All my life I have been going out to Old Harpeth on excursions, but never had I spent a day like the one I had begun with the Jaguar in his native fastnesses. The whole old mountain was beginning to bud and I could almost see it draping on a regal Persian garment of rose and green threaded with purple and blue woven against the old brown and gray of the earth color. The wine-colored trillium with its huge spotted leaves, the slender white dog-tooth violets, the rose-pink arbutus, the blue star myrtle and the crimson oak buds, were matted into a vast robe that was gorgeously oriental, while a perfume that was surely more delicious than any ever wafted from the gardens of Arabia floated past us in gusts through which the gray car sped without the slightest shortness of breath. I seemed a million miles away from the great fetid city in which I had been living—and fast going farther. As we wound up and up into the great forest which is the crown of Old Harpeth, we could look down through occasional vistas and see the Harpeth River curling and bending through pastures in which the chocolate plowed fields were laid off in huge checks with the green meadows, while the farmhouses and barns dotted the valley like the crude figures on a hand-woven chintz.
There are very few men who know enough not to talk to a woman when she has no desire for their conversation, but the Reverend Jaguar seemed to be one of the variety who comprehend the value of silences, and neither of us spoke for at least ten miles, though, of course, it was his duty to make hay while the sun of my nature shone upon him and delicately to inquire into my spiritual condition. He didn't. He just let the wind blow into my empty spaces and kept his eyes and thoughts on the road ahead of him. Charlotte's chatter with father was blown back from me and I was happy in a kind of aloneness I had never felt before.
"We are in Hastings County now and in a few minutes we shall be in Hicks Center, the county seat," were the first words that broke in on my self-communion as we began to speed past rough board and log cabins, each surrounded by a picket fence which in no way seemed to fend the doorsteps from razor-back pigs, chickens and a few young mules and calves. "It must be court day, for I don't see a single inhabitant sitting chewing under his own vine and fig tree."
"Yes; it's the first Monday," answered father, as the gray machine pulled gallantly through a few hundred feet of thick, black mud and turned from the wilderness into the public square of the metropolis of Hicks Center.