CHAPTER XIV.
AN OLD MAN PREACHED.
Several days passed and Peters was seen no more about the Starbuck place, but the old man knew that the scoundrel had not surrendered his scheme, but merely was lying low, waiting for his appointment as deputy marshall. Such an office was not hard to get. The danger attending it often made material scarce, for higher among the hills where the rebellious spirit of man had never failed to gaze with defiant contempt into the eye of the law, the distiller's blood smeared the rock and the deputy, if not taken away by friends, was left to the buzzard. So, whether or not trouble was on the road to meet old Jasper, depended upon a piece of paper, to be written and stamped in the capital of the State. But something else soon arose to claim the sympathetic attention of the household.
One morning Lou came running into the house almost breathless, with the excited words that old mammy was dying in her cabin. They all of them hastened to her bedside, and when she saw the old man kneeling upon the floor, she put forth her mummied hand and left it rest upon his head.
"I's gwine tell de Lawd erbout de folks down yere," were her last words, and from the woods they brought wild flowers and among them she slept, black sentiment of a hallowed past—a past of slavery, but of love. More than treasured heirlooms, of rusty swords which, once bright, had flashed in gallant hands; more than tress of hair, tipped with gold and ribbon-bound; more than old love-letters, books or fading picture of serenest face—more than all else does the old black mother bind us to the sunny days of yore. Beneath a tree, where at evening when the sun was low often had she sat watching the cows as home they came from the cane-breaks in the bottoms, they dug her grave; and from all about, from fern-fringed coves and knobs where the scrub oak grew, the people came, old men and women to pay their respects to this bit of another age, going home—and the children, came wonderingly, curious, with pictures of witches in their fertile minds. The sermon was preached by an old negro nearing ninety. At the head of the grave he stood and cast his whitish eyes about, but nothing was there for him to see, for during many years he had groped about in darkness. Once the property and playmate of a favored child, he had been taught to read, and as the years passed on, stubborn learning yielded to him, and along the hill-sides he walked with the old prophets, with their poetic words burning in his mind.
"Friends, close to me but somewhere off in the darkness," he said, "we have come here to put this poor old piece of human clay in the cradle that won't be rocked until the last day. In the years gone by, many a time have we seen her, at the break of day, coming home from a bedside where she had watched and nursed all night. When our spirits were low for want of hope, she has sung us back into faith. When our blood leaped to throw aside lowly ways and take up with the ways of sin, she told us that she was going home to tell the Lord. No letter in the great Book fastened itself on her poor mind, but in her soul the spirit of that Book always had a home. My friends, here was a poor old creature who never in all her long life had anything to hope for except a word of gratitude for a kindness done. Many a time I read the Bible to her, and though I made it the study of my long life, yet from what might seem the darkness of her mind, there would sometimes flash a new light and fall with bright explanation upon its pages." The old negro halted to wipe his brow and Jim whispered to Jasper: "Is that learning or ignorance inspired? I never heard many white men talk that way."
"I don't know what it is," Jasper replied. "But that old man, I have hearn tell, went through a great school along with his young marster."
"It should not be in sorrow that we place her here," the preacher continued. "With the simple minded and therefore the virtuous, she accepted the gospel as a reality and not as a theory, and a gleaner in the harvest field of promise, she takes to the Master her old hands full of the wheat of faith, and her soul will enter upon its glorious reward. Let us pray."
As they were returning from the grave a negro came up to Jasper and said that he wished for a moment to speak to him. "Doan you reccernize me?" he inquired, and Starbuck replied that he did not.