Dicey Langston
1787
There was a pleasant mellow glow in the great low-ceiled kitchen, and the absolute quiet was unbroken save for an occasional crackling of the sticks which made a bright fire on the hearth. Yet, if the room was still, it was but because Dicey chose it so, and as she stood beside the huge wheel which a few moments before had been whirling merrily, she looked with thoughtful eyes at the fire.
Now, to tell the truth, Dicey did not like to be alone, nor was it usual for her to be silent. The every-day Dicey was singing if she was not talking, or spinning if she was not busy about the house, or flying here and there on errands for her father, or hunting up the brothers to do this or that,—to play or ride, or come to meals or something,—for Dicey was quite a little queen, as a girl with five big brothers has a right to be.
A father and five big brothers, but no mother, poor little girl! and she had grown to be sixteen years old, the pet of her brothers and the darling of her father’s heart, and, as you may guess, somewhat spoiled and self-willed. Yet I would not have you think for a moment that she was selfish, for she was not so; but she had grown to depend very much on herself, and to decide for herself many questions which other girls who had mothers to turn to would have left to them.
Dicey’s father was no longer a young man. Indeed, he was almost past middle life when, ten years before, he had left his home near Charleston, shattered in spirit by the death of his wife, and gone to the “Up Country,” as the northern part of the State of South Carolina was called, and started life anew. Dicey hardly remembered the old home at all. Her thoughts and her affections were all centred about the comfortable home in whose kitchen she now stood, and over whose comfort she reigned.
She stood for many minutes as we saw her first, quite motionless, and then, as the evening air brought to her ear a sound so slight that you or I might not have noticed it, she ran to the window and looked out.
The house stood in the centre of a clearing on the top of a gentle ridge, and flowing out on either hand were dales and hills still covered with the forests through which the hunters and cow-drivers had wandered years before. Through this country the Catawbas and the Cherokees roamed, and but a short distance from the little settlement of which Solomon Langston’s house was a part, lay that well-known Indian trail called the “Cherokee Path,” which led from the Cherokee country on the west to the lands of the Catawbas on the east.
On the flat lands below the hills stretched wide plains destitute of trees and rich in fine grass and gay with flowers. Here roamed the buffalo, elk, and deer. Here also were wild horses in many a herd, and it was from one of these wandering bands of horses that Dicey’s own little pony had been captured by brother Tom, before he married and went to live at “Elder Settlement” across the Tyger River, a deep and boisterous stream, between which and the Enoree lay the plantation where Dicey’s father had made his home.
All this time she has been standing at the window, looking out over a landscape which lay clear and white before her in the moonlight. The slight sound which had caught her ear was getting louder every moment, and at last two figures came into view, her father and one of her brothers, who had ridden early that morning to the settlement “Ninety-six” to hear the latest tidings about the War, and to gain some news regarding the revolutionary movement which hitherto had been largely confined to the southern portion of the State.