It was late in a drizzly afternoon that a traveller alighted at the door of a small country hotel, in the village of N-, in Kentucky. In the bar-room he found assembled quite a miscellaneous company, whom stress of weather had driven to harbor, and the place presented the usual scenery of such reunions. Great, tall, raw-boned Kentuckians, attired in hunting-shirts, and trailing their loose joints over a vast extent of territory, with the easy lounge peculiar to the race, – rifles stacked away in the corner, shot-pouches, game-bags, hunting-dogs, and little negroes, all rolled together in the corners, – were the characteristic features in the picture. At each end of the fireplace sat a long-legged gentleman, with his chair tipped back, his hat on his head, and the heels of his muddy boots reposing sublimely on the mantel-piece, – a position, we will inform our readers, decidedly favorable to the turn of reflection incident to western taverns, where travellers exhibit a decided preference for this particular mode of elevating their understandings.
Mine host, who stood behind the bar, like most of his countrymen, was great of stature, good-natured, and loose-jointed, with an enormous shock of hair on his head, and a great tall hat on the top of that.
In fact, everybody in the room bore on his head this characteristic emblem of man’s sovereignty; whether it were felt hat, palm-leaf, greasy beaver, or fine new chapeau, there it reposed with true republican independence. In truth, it appeared to be the characteristic mark of every individual. Some wore them tipped rakishly to one side – these were your men of humor, jolly, free-and-easy dogs; some had them jammed independently down over their noses – these were your hard characters, thorough men, who, when they wore their hats, wanted to wear them, and to wear them just as they had a mind to; there were those who had them set far over back – wide-awake men, who wanted a clear prospect; while careless men, who did not know, or care, how their hats sat, had them shaking about in all directions. The various hats, in fact, were quite a Shakspearean study.
Divers negroes, in very free-and-easy pantaloons, and with no redundancy in the shirt line, were scuttling about, hither and thither, without bringing to pass any very particular results, except expressing a generic willingness to turn over everything in creation generally for the benefit of Mas’r and his guests. Add to this picture a jolly, crackling, rollicking fire, going rejoicingly up a great wide chimney, – the outer door and every window being set wide open, and the calico windowcurtain flopping and snapping in a good stiff breeze of damp raw air, – and you have an idea of the jollities of a Kentucky tavern.
Your Kentuckian of the present day is a good illustration of the doctrine of transmitted instincts and peculiarities. His fathers were mighty hunters, – men who lived in the woods, and slept under the free, open heavens, with the stars to hold their candles; and their descendant to this day always acts as if the house were his camp, – wears his hat at all hours, tumbles himself about, and puts his heels on the tops of chairs or mantel-pieces, just as his father rolled on the green sward, and put his upon trees and logs, – keeps all the windows and doors open, winter and summer, that he may get air enough for his great lungs, – calls everybody ‘stranger,’ with nonchalant bonhommie, and is altogether the frankest, easiest, most jovial creature living.
Into such an assembly of the free and easy our traveller entered. He was a short, thick-set man, carefully dressed, with a round, good-natured countenance, and something rather fussy and particular in his appearance. He was very careful of his valise and umbrella, bringing them in with his own hands, and resisting, pertinaciously, all offers from the various servants to relieve him of them. He looked round the bar-room with rather an anxious air, and, retreating with his valuables to the warmest corner, disposed them under his chair, sat down, and looked rather apprehensively up at the worthy whose heels illustrated the end of the mantel-piece, who was spitting from right to left, with a courage and energy rather alarming to gentlemen of weak nerves and particular habits.
“I say, stranger, how are ye?” said the aforesaid gentleman, firing an honorary salute of tobacco-juice in the direction of the new arrival.
“Well, I reckon,” was the reply of the other, as he dodged, with some alarm, the threatening honor.
“Any news?” said the respondent, taking out a strip of tobacco and a large hunting-knife from his pocket.
“Not that I know of,” said the man.
“Chaw?” said the first speaker, handing the old gentleman a bit of his tobacco, with a decidedly brotherly air.
“No, thank ye – it don’t agree with me,” said the little man, edging off.
“Don’t, eh?” said the other, easily, and stowing away the morsel in his own mouth, in order to keep up the supply of tobacco-juice, for the general benefit of society.
The old gentleman uniformly gave a little start whenever his long-sided brother fired in his direction; and this being observed by his companion, he very good-naturedly turned his artillery to another quarter, and proceeded to storm one of the fire-irons with a degree of military talent fully sufficient to take a city.
“What ’s that?” said the old gentleman, observing some of the company formed in a group around a large handbill.
“Nigger advertised!” said one of the company, briefly.
Mr. Wilson, for that was the old gentleman’s name, rose up, and, after carefully adjusting his valise and umbrella, proceeded deliberately to take out his spectacles and fix them on his nose; and, this operation being performed, read as follows:
“Ran away from the subscriber, my mulatto boy, George. Said George six feet in height, a very light mulatto, brown curly hair; is very intelligent, speaks handsomely, can read and write; will probably try to pass for a white man; is deeply scarred on his back and shoulders; has been branded in his right hand with the letter H.
I will give four hundred dollars for him alive, and the same sum for satisfactory proof that he has been killed.”
The old gentleman read this advertisement from end to end, in a low voice, as if he were studying it.
The long-legged veteran, who had been besieging the fire-iron, as before related, now took down his cumbrous length, and rearing aloft his tall form, walked up to the advertisement, and very deliberately spit a full discharge of tobacco-juice on it.
“There ’s my mind upon that!” said he, briefly, and sat down again.
“Why, now, stranger, what ’s that for?” said mine host.
“I ’d do it all the same to the writer of that ar paper, if he was here,” said the long man, coolly resuming his old employment of cutting tobacco. “Any man that owns a boy like that, and can’t find any better way o’ treating on him, deserves to lose him. Such papers as these is a shame to Kentucky; that ’s my mind right out, if anybody wants to know!”
“Well, now, that ’s a fact,” said mine host, as he made an entry in his book.
“I ’ve got a gang of boys, sir,” said the long man, resuming his attack on the fire-irons, “and I jest tells ’em – ‘Boys,’ says I, – ‘run now! dig! put! jest when ye want to!
I never shall come to look after you!’ That ’s the way I keep mine. Let ’em know they are free to run any time, and it jest breaks up their wanting to. More ’n all, I’ve got free papers for ’em all recorded, in case I gets keeled up[42] any o’ these times, and they knows it; and I tell ye, stranger, there an’t a fellow in our parts gets more out of his niggers than I do. Why, my boys have been to Cincinnati, with five hundred dollars’ worth of colts, and brought me back the money, all straight, time and agin. It stands to reason they should. Treat ’em like dogs, and you ’ll have dogs’ works and dogs’ actions. Treat ’em like men, and you ’ll have men’s works.” And the honest drover, in his warmth, endorsed this moral sentiment by firing a perfect feu de joie[43]at the fireplace.
“I think you ’re altogether right, friend,” said Mr. Wilson; “and this boy described here is a fine fellow – no mistake about that. He worked for me some half-dozen years in my bagging factory, and he was my best hand, sir. He is an ingenious fellow, too: he invented a machine for the cleaning of hemp – a really valuable affair; it ’s gone into use in several factories. His master holds the patent of it.”
“I ’ll warrant ye,” said the drover, “holds it and makes money out of it, and then turns round and brands the boy in his right hand. If I had a fair chance, I’d mark him, I reckon, so that he ’d carry it one while.”
“These yer knowin’ boys is allers aggravatin’ and sarcy,” said a coarse-looking fellow, from the other side of the room; “that ’s why they gets cut up and marked so. If they behaved themselves, they would n’t.”
“That is to say, the Lord made ’em men, and it ’s a hard squeeze getting ’em down into beasts,” said the drover, dryly.
“Bright niggers is n’t no kind of ’vantage to their masters,” continued the other, well intrenched, in a coarse, unconscious obtuseness, from the contempt of his opponent; “what ’s the use o’ talents and them things, if you can’t get the use on ’em yourself? Why, all the use they make on ’t is to get round you. I’ve had one or two of these fellers, and I jest sold ’em down river. I knew I’d got to lose ’em, first or last, if I did n’t.”
“Better send orders up to the Lord, to make you a set, and leave out their souls entirely,” said the drover.
Here the conversation was interrupted by the approach of a small one-horse buggy to the inn. It had a genteel appearance, and a well-dressed, gentlemanly man sat on the seat, with a colored servant driving.
The whole party examined the new comer with the interest with which a set of loafers in a rainy day usually examine every new comer. He was very tall, with a dark, Spanish complexion, fine, expressive black eyes, and close-curling hair, also of a glossy blackness. His well-formed aquiline nose, straight thin lips, and the admirable contour of his finely-formed limbs, impressed the whole company instantly with the idea of something uncommon. He walked easily in among the company, and with a nod indicated to his waiter where to place his trunk, bowed to the company, and, with his hat in his hand, walked up leisurely to the bar, and gave in his name as Henry Butler, Oaklands, Shelby County. Turning, with an indifferent air, he sauntered up to the advertisement, and read it over.
“Jim,” he said to his man, “seems to me we met a boy something like this, up at Bernan’s, did n’t we?”
“Yes, Mas’r,” said Jim, “only I an’t sure about the hand.”
“Well, I did n’t look, of course,” said the stranger, with a careless yawn. Then, walking up to the landlord, he desired him to furnish him with a private apartment, as he had some writing to do immediately.
The landlord was all obsequious, and a relay of about seven negroes, old and young, male and female, little and big, were soon whizzing about, like a covey of partridges, bustling, hurrying, treading on each other’s toes, and tumbling over each other, in their zeal to get Mas’r’s room ready, while he seated himself easily on a chair in the middle of the room, and entered into conversation with the man who sat next to him.
The manufacturer, Mr. Wilson, from the time of the entrance of the stranger, had regarded him with an air of disturbed and uneasy curiosity. He seemed to himself to have met and been acquainted with him somewhere, but he could not recollect. Every few moments, when the man spoke, or moved, or smiled, he would start and fix his eyes on him, and then suddenly withdraw them, as the bright, dark eyes met his with such unconcerned coolness. At last, a sudden recollection seemed to flash upon him, for he stared at the stranger with such an air of blank amazement and alarm, that he walked up to him.
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