CHAPTER VIII.
A Messenger That Hesitates.
Mrs. Crump sat in her room, her elbows propped up on her knees and her cheeks resting on her hands. The death of Henry, her only boy, was indeed a severe blow to her, but at this particular moment she was bearing up well under it, reserving her strength by a supreme effort of her will to the end that she might comfort her husband when he became aware of the tragedy.
Foresta had gone for her father with the understanding that she was not to tell him what had occurred, but was to allow her mother to break the news to him upon his arrival home.
Every step that Foresta took on her sorrowful journey was accompanied by a rain of tears. As she drew near the place where her father was at work, she stopped and tried to remove all traces of sorrow. She wiped and wiped her eyes, but the tears persisted in flowing. Her father was at work in a quarry as a rock breaker.
The city was using small stones as a sort of pavement for the streets, and aged Negro men were given the work of breaking rocks into fragments to be used in that way. The occupation was not an ideal one, as employment was of a fluctuating character, and the sitting on the ground, often damp, was not conducive to health. The amount earned in proportion to the labor performed was very small. But aged men unable to move about very much found this to be about all that they could do. So, the rock pile grew to be the accepted goal of all the Negro men who wore themselves out in other service without laying aside a competence or establishing themselves permanently in the good graces of their employees.
There were many who did thus establish themselves, and Ford Crump would have been such a one but for the following chain of circumstances, to which account you may give heed while waiting on Foresta to feel self-possessed enough to approach her father.
Soon after the Civil War Mr. Arthur Daleman came to Almaville and entered business. Ford Crump, Foresta's father, then a young man, was his first Negro employee. The business grew until Mr. Daleman was rightly classed as a very rich man.