Oldfield: A Kentucky Tale of the Last Century

by Nancy Huston Banks

He left her as soon as he could, offering his engagement with Dr. Alexander as a ready excuse. Passing out into the quiet, empty big road, he walked along under the old locust trees which lined one side of the way. The locusts were flowering, and the long clusters of pure white flowers, swinging among the dull gray-green of the feathery foliage, filled the fresh air of the May morning with wholesome sweetness. The shrubs in the yards, bordering the length of the big road with the vivid verdure of new leaves, were also in bloom. The young man smelled the honeysuckle blossoming thick over the sick man's window, but he did not look that way. He looked, naturally enough, in the opposite direction, where the silver poplars stood, since the interests and the sympathies of youth must always lie on the other side of life's big road, away from all affliction and pain.

He was not sorry to find that the doctor had gone into the country in answer to an urgent call, and that the visit to the invalid consequently must be postponed. He was sorry, however, to see the white curtain of the house behind the poplars hanging precisely as it had hung on the previous day; and, although he walked to the top of the hill beyond the house and, turning, strolled slowly back again in front of the window, he had no second glimpse of Doris. Thus idly strolling, he went along the big road, stopping now and then to lean over a fence to look at the hyacinths and tulips, which were at their sweetest and brightest in most of the front yards; or to linger beside the rosy clover fields to drink in the fragrance and to watch the vernal happiness of the birds. He paused occasionally to lift his hat smilingly to the friendly faces which smiled at him from the vine-wreathed windows and the wide-open doors; but, loiter as he might, he saw nothing more of the girl of whom he was thinking and hoping to meet, and although he delayed his return as long as he could, he was still back at his grandmother's house all too soon.

No one could walk through Oldfield a second time on the same morning without a visible or audible explanation to a public who had plenty of leisure to note the few passers-by, and to speculate upon their possible destination, and to discuss the most probable reasons for their going up or coming down the big road. Lynn had an instinctive perception of this, little as he knew of the life of the village. Accordingly he now paused uncertainly at his grandmother's gate and stood still, not knowing what to do with the perfect day, with the ideal Ides of May.

Looking idly toward the northern hilltops, he saw the figure of a horseman suddenly break the sky line and rush galloping downward into the village. Onward thundered the big black horse and his strange rider, sweeping by like a whirlwind, and speeding on and on, till they vanished over the southern hilltops. A light cloud of dust floated for a moment between the farthest green and the farthest blue, and then that too disappeared, and the coming and going of the wild apparition might well have been some trick of a fantastic imagination. And yet Lynn had received a curiously distinct impression of the man's appearance in this space of time, brief almost as a lightning flash. He had seen the foreign dress, the great boots so long that they were slit to the knee; the blood-red handkerchief tied loosely around the neck, and, most distinctly of all, the sinister expression of the dark, deeply lined face and the wildness of the black eyes under the wide, flapping, soft brim of the large sombrero hat. Altogether it was so strange, so unreal an interruption of the peace of this pastoral spot, that the young man could only stand silent gazing after it in bewildered surprise.

"That's Alvarado! You've seen one of the sights of the country," his grandmother called out to him from her place by the window.

"Who is Alvarado?" he asked, when he had entered the room.

"That is a question which a good many people have been asking for a good many years, and nobody has ever had a satisfactory answer," old lady Gordon replied.

Smiling her sardonic smile, she deliberately turned down the leaf of the novel which she had been reading as usual, and laid it on her lap. She was always amused by these histrionic appearances of Alvarado which so terrified most of the Oldfield people. It had indeed long been known all over the Pennyroyal Region that, while other folks always drove hastily into the nearest fence corner whenever they saw Alvarado coming, old lady Gordon invariably kept straight along in the middle of the big road—never turning one hair's breadth to the right or the left—and that Alvarado was always the one who had to turn out. She said nothing of this, however, and thought nothing of it; but she told her grandson all that she knew or that any one knew of Alvarado.

He was a Spaniard who had suddenly appeared in the vicinity of Oldfield, some twenty-five years before. No one had any knowledge of him previous to that time, and no one had ever known where he came from. Yet, for some reason never clearly understood, his coming had, nevertheless, been associated from the first with the scattering of the Gulf pirates which had followed the deposing of their last king. It is true that Lafitte was long since gone to render his awful account of the terrible deeds done in the body—with perhaps his desperate service at the battle of New Orleans as the largest item on the other side of the blotted ledger. But the death of Lafitte in 1826 did not immediately free the Gulf from its fearful scourge. The passing of piracy was gradual, very gradual indeed, and even long drawn out, as the traders of the Pennyroyal Region knew only too well, through their close and continual connection with New Orleans by route of the flatboat. There was, therefore, to the minds of the Oldfield people, nothing improbable in the continued existence of numbers of Lafitte's followers, who were younger than himself and consequently not yet really old men. Still, while there was no impossibility or even any improbability in Alvarado's being a comrade of Lafitte, there appeared no actual proof that he ever had been. According to old lady Gordon's account, the principal grounds of suspicion were these: his appearance, which was otherwise unaccounted for, just at the time that the pirates were being driven from the Gulf and out of the Gulf states; his frequent, long, and mysterious absences at sea after his coming to live in the vicinity of Oldfield; the fabulous sums of gold and silver fetched home by him from these voyages, when he was known not to have any visible means of making money; the many curious weapons of marine warfare scattered through his strange house, which was half a fort, half a farmhouse, and wholly barbaric in its rough richness of furnishing; the generally credited rumor that he habitually wore a coat of mail; the well-known fact—open for every passer-by to see—that he kept a horse standing continually at his gate, day and night, for years, saddled and bridled, with pistols in the holsters, apparently ready for instant flight.

Many of these things old lady Gordon had seen with her own eyes. Most of them she knew to be true, but she had never gone to his house, although he had at one time received a measure of social recognition, when—according to old lady Gordon—there had been something like real society in Oldfield. He was rather a handsome man after a sinister, foreign fashion, although he had been past youth when he first came to Oldfield, and he had a dashing way with him which fascinated the unobservant. It was in this manner that he was thrown with Alice Fielding, the colonel's prettiest and youngest daughter, so old lady Gordon said.