The Bishop got leisurely out of his buggy, pulled down the shafts and tied up the girth before he spoke. Then he gave a puckering hitch to his underlip and deposited in the sand, with a puddling plunk, the half cup of tobacco juice that had closed his mouth.
He stepped back and said very sternly:
“Whoa, Ben Butler!”
“Why, he’un’s sleep a’ready,” grinned Bud.
The Bishop glanced at the bowed head, cocked hind foot and listless tail: “Sof’nin’ of the brain, Bud,” smiled the Bishop; “they say when old folks begin to take it they jus’ go to sleep while settin’ up talkin’. Now, a horse, Bud,” he said, striking an attitude for a discussion on his favorite topic, “a horse is like a man—he must have some meanness or he c’u’dn’t live, an’ some goodness or nobody else c’u’d live. But git in, Bud, and let’s go along to meetin’—’pears like it’s gettin’ late.”
This was what Bud had been listening for. This was the treat of the week for him—to ride to meetin’ with the Bishop. Bud, a slubber-slave—henpecked at home, browbeaten and cowed at the mill, timid, scared, “an’ powerful slow-mouthed,” as his spouse termed it, worshipped the old Bishop and had no greater pleasure in life, after his hard week’s work, than “to ride to meetin’ with the old man an’ jes’ hear him narrate.”
The Bishop’s great, sympathetic soul went out to the poor fellow, and though he had rather spend the next two miles of Ben Butler’s slow journey to church in thinking over his sermon, he never failed, as he termed it, “to pick up charity even on the road-side,” and it was pretty to see how the old man would turn loose his crude histrionic talent to amuse the slubber. He knew, too, that Bud was foolish about horses, and that Ben Butler was his model!
They got into the old buggy, and Ben Butler began to draw it slowly along the sandy road to the little church, two miles away up the mountain side.
Bud was now in the seventh heaven. He was riding behind Ben Butler, the greatest horse in the world, and talking to the Bishop, the only person who ever heard the sound of his voice, save in deprecatory and scary grunts.
It was touching to see how the old man humored the simple and imposed-upon creature at his side. It was beautiful to see how, forgetting himself and his sermon, he prepared to entertain, in his quaint way, this slave to the slubbing machine.