"Oh! a long way yet," was the discouraging reply. "At least forty miles. We can not reach it to-night. We must sleep in Columbia."
"Beyond Columbia it is?"
"A long way beyond. There's no cotton land on this side worth cultivating. It lies too far north, and the frost, as I've told you, often kills the young plants. Father's plantation is a good ways from the road, on one of the creeks that run into Duck river. It's capital soil for cotton, only that we have a long way to haul it to a steamboat landing. This year we intend sending the crop to New Orleans on a flat. Father's got an idea it will pay, and the boat's being built. You see, the creek runs right through our plantation, and it's wide enough to get a flat through to the Duck. Once there, it's only to float down to the Tennessee and into the Ohio—then on to the Mississippi. We never did it before, but some of our neighbors have tried it, and they say it pays. Of course you know, after the crop's gathered the niggers haven't much to do, and half a dozen of them, with one or two of the regular river boatmen, can navigate a flat without much expense. By steamboat there's heavy freight charges just now; besides the hauling before you can get it aboard. There's no landing nearer our plantation than twenty miles, and with bad roads at that. We make a hundred and fifty bales every year, and as a team can only take four at a time, you can tell what a tedious affair it is. With a flat we can load right on our own land, close to the cotton-press."
I had become so interested in these details of cotton planting that I had almost ceased to think of that other attraction which I expected to find upon the plantation.
It was something so original, so American-like, a crop raised in the very heart of a continent—amid forest-clad slopes apparently inaccessible—to be thus transported from the spot on which it was grown to a market more than a thousand miles distant, not by ship or steam, or the intervention of any kind of carrier to share the profits of transportation, but transported by the agriculturist who had grown it—going, as it were, direct from the producer to the consumer!
Absorbed in the contemplation of this curious problem in political economy—important as curious—I had for the time forgotten the traveling companion who had suggested it.
I was aroused from my reverie by hearing him exchange a salutation with some one who had met us on the road. On looking up I saw it was a horseman going in the opposite direction. He, too, had the appearance of a traveler, his horse dimmed with dust and dry sweat, with a pair of swollen saddle-bags protruding behind his thighs.
He was a young man—apparently twenty-five—though with a countenance whose expression told of an experience far beyond his age—a circumstance by no means rare in the region of the South-west.
By his dress he would also have been taken for a planter; although it was unlike that worn by young Woodley. Like him, he had a Panama hat; but instead of white linen, his coat was a blouse of sky-blue cottonade, plaited and close-buttoned over the breast, while his trowsers were of the same stuff and color. It was, in fact, the dress of the Louisianian creole, adopted by many Americans who have migrated to lands on the lower Mississippi.
"Well, Walt! Been to Nashville?" was the speech he had addressed to my companion, as they reined up their horses in the middle of the road.