Читать книгу Brother Against Brother; or, The Tompkins Mystery - John R. Musick - Страница 7

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Sixteen years, with all their joys and sorrows, all their pleasures and pains, have been numbered with the dead past. Boys have grown to be men, men in the full vigor of their prime have grown old, and creep about with bent forms and heads whitening, while men who were old before now slumber with the dead. Girls are women, and women have grown gray, yet father Time has touched gently some of his children.

Abner and Oleah Tompkins are no longer boys. Only the memory is left them of their childhood joys, when they played in the dark, cool woods, or by the brook in the wide, smooth lawn. Happy childhood days, when neither care nor anxiety weighed on their young hearts, or shadowed their bright faces.

Abner is twenty-five—a tall, powerful man, with dark-blue, fearless eyes, light-haired, broad-chested and muscular.

Oleah, two years younger, and not quite so tall, is yet in physical strength his brother's equal. He has the dark hair and large, dark, lustrous eyes of his Southern mother.

The brothers were alike and yet dissimilar. They had shared equally the same advantages; they had played together and studied together. Playmates in their childhood, friends as well as brothers in their young manhood, no one could question a doubt of their brotherly love. Where one had been, the other had always been at his side. No slightest difference had ever yet ruffled the smooth surface of their existence. Yet they were dissimilar in temperament. Abner was slow and cool, but perhaps more determined than his brother, and his reason predominated over his prejudice. Oleah was rash, impetuous and bold, and more liable to be moved by prejudice or passion than by reason. Abner was the exact counterpart of his Northern father, Oleah of his Southern mother.

Their political sympathies were different as their dispositions. Although of the same family, they had actually been taught opposite political creeds—one parent in a half-playful way, unconsciously advocating one idea; the other as firmly and unconsciously upholding another, and it was quite natural that the children should follow them. But this difference of opinion had bred no discord.

Sixteen years have wrought a wonderful change in Irene, the foundling. Her parentage is still a mystery, and she bears the name of her foster parents. She is just budding into womanhood, and a beautiful woman she promises to make—slender and graceful, her small, shapely head crowned with dark brown hair, her cheeks dimpling with smiles, mouth and chin firm and clear-cut and large, dark-gray eyes beneath arching brows and long silken lashes filled with a world of tenderness.

Irene could not have been loved more tenderly by the planter and his wife had she been their own child. They lavished care and affection upon her and filled her life with everything that could minister to her comfort and delight, and every one knew that they would make generous provision for the little waif who had gained so sure a place in their hearts.

Sixteen years had made some change in the planter. His hair had grown whiter, his brow more furrowed with care, and he went about with a heavy cane; yet he was vigorous and energetic. He had grown more corpulent, and his movements were less brisk than of yore. Father Time had dealt leniently with his wife. Her soft, dark hair was scarcely touched with silver; her cheeks were smooth and her eyes were still bright and lustrous. Her voice had lost none of its silver ring, her manner none of its queenly grace.

No ray of light had pierced the darkened mind of Crazy Joe. All these long, weary years he had been waiting, waiting, waiting, for his father Jacob to come down into Egypt, but he came not. He still talked as if it was but yesterday that he had been cast into the pit by his brethren, and then taken out and sold into Egypt. He spent his time in turns at the planter's and Uncle Dan's cabin. He was well known throughout the neighborhood, and pitied and kindly treated by all. His strange hallucination, although causing pain and perplexity to his shattered mind, worked no change in his gentle disposition; his sad eyes never flashed with anger; no emotion varied the melancholy monotone of his voice. When at the home of the planter, Joe divided his time between the stables, the garden and the library. He would have been a constant reader of the Bible, Josephus, Socrates, Milton's "Paradise Lost," had it not been discovered by Mrs. Tompkins that these books only tended to increase the darkness in which his mind was shrouded, and she had them kept from him. At Uncle Dan's mountain home he passed his time in hunting and trapping, becoming expert in both.

Sixteen years had wrought a great change in Uncle Dan, bowing his tall and sinewy form. His face, which he had always kept smooth shaven, had grown sharper and thinner, and his long hair hanging about his shoulders, had turned from black to gray; yet his eye was as true and his hand as steady as when, in his youthful days, he carried away the prize at the shooting match. His visits to the plantation became more frequent and his stays longer, for the old man grew lonesome in his hut, and he was ever a welcome guest at the Tompkins mansion.

Sixteen years had made a wonderful transformation in the politics of the country. The Whig party had been swallowed up by the Republican or Abolition organization. The seeds of freedom, sown by Clarkson, Brown and others, had taken root, and, in the Fall of 1860, bade fare to ripen into a bounteous harvest. The Southern feeling against the North had grown more and more bitter, and the low, rumbling thunders of a mighty storm might have been heard—a storm not far distant, and whose fury naught but the blood of countless thousands could assuage.

"In the beginning, God created Heaven and the earth, and all that was in them, in six days, and rested on the seventh."

The speaker was Crazy Joe, the time, midsummer of 1860, the place the banks of a creek at the foot of the mountains, not more than two or three hundred feet from Uncle Dan's cabin.

"Then the book says God made man out of clay. Josephus says he called the first man Adam, because Adam means red, and He made him out of red clay. Now, if man could once be made out of clay, why not now? Maybe God will let me make a man, too."

Filling his hands with mud, he set vigorously to work. No sculptor could have been more in earnest than was Crazy Joe. He rolled and patted the mud into shape, first the feet, then the legs, then the body. Occasionally the body would tumble down, but he patiently set to work again, persevering until he had body, arm and head all completed. His mud man was a little over five feet in height, and greatly admired by his maker and owner.

"Now I have accomplished almost as much as God did," soliloquized Joe. "I have made a man of clay; it only remains for him to speak and move, and he will be equal to any of us."

He went to the cabin and acquainted Uncle Dan with the wonderful work he had performed, and asked him to come and see it. The next day he went to view the object of poor Joe's two days' labor, greatly to Joe's delight. Uncle Dan then returned to his cabin for his gun, and Joe went to Snagtown, which was between Mr. Tompkins' plantation and the hunter's cabin.

Joe there informed the storekeeper, the village postmaster, and a few others, of his remarkable piece of handiwork, and asked them to come and see it. They promised to go the next day, if Joe would stay all night in the village.

Joe stayed, and that night there came a heavy rain. The creek overflowed and Joe's mud man was washed away. He conducted a party of hunters to the spot next morning, but the man of clay had vanished.

"He must have walked away," said Joe shaking his head in a puzzled manner. "He has gone off, though I cautioned him to wait until I came back."

The hunting party explained to Joe that his mud man had become tired of waiting, and left, and went off themselves, leaving the mortified Joe searching about the soft soil for tracks of the missing mud man. His search for the trail took him to Snagtown.

Patrick Henry Diggs, whom we met in his boyhood as the youthful orator at Mr. Tompkins' was, in 1860, a lawyer. His parents were dead, leaving him a limited education, a superficial knowledge of law, and a very small property. The paternal homestead was mortgaged, but Mr. Diggs still kept old Mose, for the sake of being a slaveholder and maintaining aristocratic appearance. Mr. Diggs had but little practice, and found it a difficult thing to make his own living. He was about twenty-eight years old, short and plump like his father. The most peculiar portion of his anatomy was his head. The forehead was low, and the small round head more nearly resembled a cocoanut painted white, with hair on its top, than anything else to which we can compare it. The hair was very thick and cut very short. The eyebrows were heavy and close together, the eyes dark gray and restless, the nose small and straight. The most admirable portion of his physiognomy, Mr. Diggs thought, were his side-whiskers, which were short and dark, growing half-way down his small, red cheeks and coalescing with his short mustache. Mr. Diggs was exceedingly aristocratic, and wore gold-rimmed spectacles on his short nose. These glasses, which gave him a ridiculous appearance, were removed when he wanted to read or exercise his unobstructed vision. His friends tried to persuade him to give them up, but in vain. And with his glasses on his nose, his head thrown back in order to see persons of ordinary height, and his fat little hands in his pockets, he strutted about the streets of Snagtown.

Mr. Diggs, like his father, was a politician. In the campaign of 1860 he was a candidate for the district attorneyship of his county. His dingy little office, with its scant furniture and exceedingly small library, was deserted, and he spent most of his time on the streets, discussing the political issues. On the day that Crazy Joe was in search of his mud man, Mr. Diggs, as usual was strutting about the streets, his hands in his pockets, his glasses mounted on his nose, wherefrom a very evident string extended to his neck.

"I tell you," said Mr. Diggs, closing his little fat right hand and striking therewith the palm of his little fat left hand, "I tell you, sir, I—I do not favor outlawry, but I do believe one would be doing our country a service by hanging every man who votes or attempts to vote the Abolition ticket."

"Oh, no, Mr. Diggs," said Abner Tompkins, who chanced that day to be in Snagtown, and overheard the remark; "the ballot is a constitutional privilege, and no man should be deprived of his right."

"Yes—ahem—ahem! but you see, when there is a man on the track who, if elected, will set all our niggers free, we should object. You know—no, you don't know, but we lawyers all know—that private property can not be taken for public use without a just compensation, and still the Abolition candidate will violate this portion of our constitutional law."

"You don't know yet; Mr. Lincoln has not yet declared what he will do," replied Abner.

"Has not? Hem, hem, hem!" Mr. Diggs stumped about furiously, his head inclined backward in order to see his companion's face through his ornamental glasses, while he cleared his throat for a fresh burst of thunder. "Has not, hey? Hem, hem! He might as well. We all know what he will do if elected. And I'll tell you something more," he added, walking back and forth, his hands plunged in his pockets, while seeming to grow more and more furious, "if Lincoln is elected there will be war!" (Great emphasis on the last word.)

At this moment Crazy Joe, who had reached the village in search of his mud man, came up to the excited Diggs, and, laying his hand on his arm, in a very serious voice said:

"Say, why didn't you stay where I put you until I showed you?"

"What do you mean?" demanded Mr. Diggs, pausing in his agitated walk, and gazing furiously into the lunatic's face, for he suspected some one of attempting to play a joke on him.

"What made you go away before I showed you?" said Joe, earnestly, gazing down upon the furious little fellow.

"I—I don't understand what you mean," said the puzzled Mr. Diggs, drawing himself up to his full height, which was hardly imposing.

"When I make a man of mud, and go off and leave him, to get people to come and look at him, I don't want him to go off, as you did, before I come back."

Abner Tompkins, and several others, who had heard the story of Joe's mud man, were now almost bursting with suppressed merriment.

"I can't tell what the deuce you mean?" said the angry Mr. Diggs.

"I made you out of mud and clay, and left you standing by the big tree at the creek while I went to get some people to show you to, that I might convince them that man was made out of clay, but before I got back you walked off. Now, why didn't you stay until I showed you?"

The men gathered about Mr. Diggs could no longer restrain themselves, and burst into peals of laughter, which made Mr. Diggs furious.

"This is some trick you are playing," he cried, and, turning upon his heel, he strutted away to his office, where he shut himself up for the next two hours.

The joke spread rapidly, and in two hours every one in the village knew that Crazy Joe claimed Mr. Diggs as his mud man; while poor Joe, satisfied that he had found the object of his creation, consented to go home with Abner.