“He’s as straight as a shingle this morning, Captain,” put in Charlie Smith, a mulatto porter, who was rolling a pair of trucks across the room laden with a drummer’s enormous brass-bound trunk. “He was up before day asking if you got in durin’ the night.”
“Well, I’m glad he’s sobered up if he’s to take me out,” said the planter. “He’s about the biggest daredevil out our way. You know him, don’t you, Mayhew?”
“Know him? Humph! to the extent of over three hundred dollars. Floyd thinks the sun rises and sets in him and never will close down on him. They are great friends. Floyd will fight for him at the drop of a hat. He says Pole has more manhood in him to the square inch than any man in the county, white or black. He saw him in a knock-down-and-drag-out row in the public square last election. They say Pole whipped three bigger men than he is all in a bunch, and bare-handed at that. Nobody knows to this day how it started. Nelson doesn’t, but I heard it was some remark one of the fellows made about Nelson himself. You know my partner had a rather strange start in life—a poor boy with nobody to see to his bringing up, but that’s a subject that his best friends don’t mention to him.”
The Captain nodded understandingly. “They tell me Pole used to be a moonshiner,” he said, “and I have heard that he was the shrewdest one in the mountains. His wife got him to quit it. I understand he fairly worships the ground she walks on, and there never was a better father to his children.”
“He thinks well enough of them when he’s at himself,” said Mayhew, “but when he’s drinking he neglects them awfully. I’ve known the neighbors to feed them two weeks on a stretch. He’s got enemies out our way. When he quit moonshining he helped some of the government officers find some stills over there. That was funny. Pole held off from the job that was offered him for a month, during which time he sent word everywhere through the mountains that he would give all his old friends plenty of time to shut up and quit making whisky, but after his month was up he intended to do all he could against law-breakers. He had to testify against several, and they now certainly have it in for him. He’d have been shot long ago if his enemies weren’t afraid of him.”
“I see him coming now, Mr. Mayhew,” said the clerk. “Captain, he walks steady enough. I reckon he’ll take you through safe.”
The tall countryman, about thirty-five years of age, without a coat, his coarse cotton shirt open at the neck, a slouch hat on his massive head and his tattered trousers stuffed into the tops of his high boots, came in. He had a brown, sweeping mustache, and his eyebrows were unusually heavy. On the heel of his right foot he wore an old riding-spur, very loosely strapped.
“How are you, Captain Duncan?” he said to the planter as he extended his brawny hand. “You’ve come back to God’s country, eh?”
“Yes, Baker,” the planter returned with a genial smile; “I had to see what sort of chance you fellows stand for a crop this year. I understand Lawson sent you over for me and my baggage. I’m certainly glad he engaged a man about whom I have heard such good reports.”
“Well, I don’t know about that, Captain,” said Pole, his bushy brows meeting in a frown of displeasure and his dark eyes flashing. “I don’t know as I’m runnin’ a hack-line, or totin’ trunks about for the upper-ten set of humanity. I’m a farmer myself, in a sort of way—smaller’n you are, but a farmer. I was comin’ this way yesterday, and was about to take my own hoss out o’ the field, where he had plenty to do, when Lawson said, said he, ‘Baker, bein’ as you are goin’ to make the trip anyways, I’d feel under obligations ef you’d take my rig and fetch Captain Duncan back when you come.’ By gum, to tell you the truth, I’ve just come in to tell you, old hoss, if you are ready right now, we’ll ride out together, if not I’ll leave you an’ go out with Nathan Porter. Engaged, the devil! I’m not goin’ to get any money out o’ this job.”