"It's all owin' to you, all owin' to you, Silury."
'ZEKI'L.
He lived alone in a weather-beaten log-cabin built on the roadside at the edge of a rocky, sterile field, with a few stunted peach-trees growing around it, and a wild grape-vine half covering the one slender oak shading the front yard. The house consisted of only one room, with a wide, deep fireplace in the north end, and a wide window to the south. The logs had shrunk apart, leaving airy cracks in the walls, and the front door creaked on one hinge, the other having rusted away.
But 'Zeki'l Morgan's ambition seemed satisfied when he came into possession of the house, the unproductive clearing around it, and the narrow strip of woodland bounding the richer farm beyond. From the cabin door could be seen the broken, picturesque hills marking the course of the Etowah River, with the Blue Ridge Mountains far beyond, and the Long Swamp range rising in the foreground.
Very little of 'Zeki'l's past history was known in Zion Hill settlement. He had walked into Mr. Davy Tanner's store one spring day, a dusty, penniless tramp, his clothes hanging loosely from his stooping shoulders, a small bundle in one hand, a rough walking-stick in the other. Mr. Davy Tanner was a soft-hearted old man, and the forlorn, friendless stranger appealed strangely to his sympathy, in spite of his candid statement that he had just finished a five-years' term in the penitentiary for horse-stealing.
"I tell you this, not because I think it's anything to boast of, but because I don't want to 'pear like I'm deceivin' folks," he said in a dejected, melancholy tone, his face twitching, his eyes cast down. It was a haggard face, bleached to a dull pallor by prison life, every feature worn into deep lines. Evidently he had suffered beyond the punishment of the law, though how far it had eaten into his soul no man would ever learn, for after that simple statement of his crime and his servitude as a convict, he did not again, even remotely, touch upon his past, nor the inner history of his life. No palliative explanations were offered, no attempts made to soften the bare, disgraceful truth.
Mr. Davy Tanner was postmaster as well as merchant, and his store was the general rendezvous for the settlement. The women came to buy snuff, and thread, and such cheap, simple materials as they needed for Sunday clothes; the men to get newspapers and the occasional letters coming for them, besides buying sugar and coffee, and talking over the affairs of the county and of Zion Hill church.
They looked on 'Zeki'l Morgan with distrust and contempt, and held coldly aloof from him. But at last a farmer, sorely in need of help, ventured to hire him, after talking it over with Mr. Davy Tanner.
"I tell you there ain't a mite o' harm in him."
"S'pose he runs away with my horse, Mr. Tanner?"