She said it in a very sweet voice, and she patted the child's arm and then she went back to "The Wooing O't." She was fond of reading novels herself, though she liked better to do macramé work and to paint porcelain placques.
The packet-boat glided on. It was almost the last packet-boat in the state and upon almost its last journey. Presently there would go away forever the long, musical winding of the packet-boat horn. It would never echo any more among the purple hills, but the locomotive would shriek here as it shrieked elsewhere. Beyond the willows and sycamores, across the river whose reaches were seen at intervals, gangs of convicts with keepers and guards and overseers were at work upon the railroad.
The boat passing through a lock, the dark little girl stared, fascinated, at one of these convicts, a "trusty," a young white man who was there at the lock-keeper's on some errand and who now stood speaking to the stout old man on the coping of masonry. As the water in the lock fell and the boat was steadily lowered and the stone walls on either hand grew higher and higher, the figure of the convict came to stand far above all on deck. Dressed hideously, in broad stripes of black and white, it stood against the calm evening sky, with a sense of something withdrawn and yet gigantic. The face was only once turned toward the boat with its freight of people who dressed as they pleased. It was not at all a bad face, and it was boyishly young. The boat slipped from the lock and went on down the canal, between green banks. The negro on the towpath was singing and his rich voice floated across—
"For everywhere I went ter pray,
I met all hell right on my way."
The country gentlemen were laughing again, wrapped in the blue and fragrant smoke. The captain of the packet-boat came up the companionway and passed from group to group like a benevolent patriarch. Down below, supper was cooking; one smelled the coffee. The sun was slipping lower, in the green bottoms the frogs were choiring. Standing in the prow of the boat a negro winded the long packet-boat horn. It echoed and echoed from the purple hills.
The dark little girl was still staring at the dwindling lock. The black-and-white figure, striped like a zebra, was there yet, though it had come down out of the sky and had now only the green of the country about and behind it. It grew smaller and smaller until it was no larger than a black-and-white woodpecker—it was gone.
She appealed again to Miss Serena. "Aunt Serena, what do you suppose he did?"
Miss Serena, who prided herself upon her patience, put down her book for the tenth time. "Of whom are you speaking, Hagar?"
"That man back there—the convict."
"I didn't notice him. But if he is a convict, he probably did something very wicked."