Читать книгу When Men Grew Tall, or The Story Of Andrew Jackson - Lewis Alfred Henry - Страница 2

THE horse-faced Andy precedes the coming of his two friends to that supper by two hours. As he moves up the street toward the Rowan House, fair faces beam on him and fair hands wave him a salutation from certain Salisbury verandas. In return he doffs his hat with an exaggerated politeness, which becomes him as the acknowledged beau of the town. One cannot blame those beaming fair faces and those saluting hands. Slim, elegant, confident with a kind of polished cockyness that does not ill become his years, our horse-faced one possesses what the world calls “presence.” No one will look on him without being impressed; he is congenitally remarkable, and to see him once is to ever afterward expect to hear him. Besides, for all his foppishness, there is a scar on his sandy head, and a second on his hand, which were made by an English saber when he had no more than entered upon his teens. Also he has shed English blood to pay for those scars; and in a day which still heaves and tosses with the ground swells of the Revolution, such stark matters brevet one to the respect of men and the love of women.

The foppish, horse-faced Andy strides into the Rowan House. In the long-room he meets mine host Brown, who has fame as a publican, and none as a sinner, throughout North Carolina.

“Supper in my rooms, Mr. Brown,” commands our hero; “supper for three. Have it hot and ready at sharp seven. Also let us have plenty of whisky and tobacco.”

Mine host Brown says that all shall be as ordered.

The foppish Andy, with that grave manner of dignity which laughs at his boyish twenty years, explains to his landlord that he will call for his bill in the morning.

“Have my horse, Cherokee,” he says, “well groomed and saddled. To-morrow I leave Salisbury.”

“Going West?”

“West,” returns Andy.

“As to the bill,” ventures mine host Brown, “would you like to play a game of all-fours, and make it double or nothing?”

Andy the horse-faced hesitates.

“You have such vile luck,” he says, as though remonstrating with mine host Brown for a fault. “It seems shameful to play with you, since you never win.”

Mine host Brown looks sheepishly apologetic.

“For one as eager to play as I am,” he responds, “it does look as though I ought to know more about the game. However, since it’s your last night, we might as well preserve a record.”

Andy the horse-faced yields to the rabid anxiety of mine host Brown to gamble. The game shall be played presently; meanwhile, there is an errand which takes him to his rooms.

Andy goes to his rooms; mine host Brown, after preparing a table in the long-room for the promised game, saunters fatly – being rotund as a publican should be – into the kitchen, to leave directions concerning that triangular supper. There he encounters his wife, as rotund as himself, supervising the energies of a phalanx of black Amazons, who form the culinary forces of the Rowan House.

“Young Jackson leaves in the morning, mother,” observes mine host Brown to Mrs. Brown, whom he always addresses as “mother.”

“For good?” asks Mrs. Brown, who is singeing the pin feathers from a chicken of much fatness, and exceeding yellow as to leg.

“Oh, I knew he was going,” returns mine host Brown, rather irrelevantly. “Spruce Mc-Cay told me that he was about to advise him to emigrate to the western counties. Spruce says the Cumberland country is just the place for him.”

“And now I suppose,” remarks Mrs. Brown, “you’ll let him win a good-by game of cards, to square his bill.”

“Why not?” returns mine host Brown. “He’s got no money; never had any money. You yourself said, when he came here, to give him his board free, because you knew and loved his dead mother. Now the Christian thing is to let him win it. In that way his pride is saved; at the same time it gives me amusement.”

“Well, Marmaduke,” says Mrs. Brown, moving off with the yellow-legged fowl, “I’m sure I don’t care how you manage, only so you don’t take his money.”

“There never was a chance, mother. He never has any money, after his clothes are bought.”

The game of all-fours is played; and is won by Andy of the horse face, who thereby rounds off a run of card-luck that has continued unbroken for two years.

“It looks as though I’d never beat you!” exclaims mine host Brown, pretending sadness and imitating a sigh.

“You ought never to gamble,” advises the horse-faced Andy solemnly.

Mine host Brown produces his bill, wherein the charges for board, lodging, laundry, tobacco, and whisky in pints, quarts and gallons are set down on one side, to be balanced and acquitted by divers sums lost at all-fours, the same being noted opposite.

“There you are! All square!” says mine host Brown.

“But the charges for to-night’s supper?”

“Mother” – meaning Mrs. Brown – “says the supper is to be with her compliments.”

Steaming hot, the supper comes promptly at seven. It is followed, steaming hot, by unlimited whisky punch. Pipes are lighted, and, with glasses at easy hand, the three boys draw about the fire. The punch, the pipes, and the crackling log fire are very comfortable adjuncts on an October night.

“And now,” cries Crawford, who is full of life and interest, “now for the news and the proposition!”

McNairy nods owlish assent to the words of his volatile friend. He intends one day to be a judge, and, while quite as lively as Crawford, seizes on occasions such as this to practice his features in a formidable woolsack gravity.

“First,” observes Andy, soberly sipping his punch, “let me put a question: What is my standing in Rowan County?”

“You are the recognized authority,” cries Crawford, “on dog fighting, cockfighting, and horse racing.”

McNairy nods.

“Humph!” says Andy. Then, on the heels of a pause: “And what should you say were my chief accomplishments?”

Again Crawford takes it upon himself to reply.

“You ride, shoot, run, jump, wrestle, dance and make love beyond expression.”

McNairy the judicial nods.

“Humph!” says Andy.

The trio puff and sip in silence.

“You say nothing for my knowledge of law?” This from the disgruntled Andy, with a rising inflection that is like finding fault.

“No!” cry the others in hearty concert.

“You wouldn’t believe us if we did,” adds McNairy of the future woolsack.

“Neither would the Judge,” returns Andy cynically. “The Judge” is the title by which the three designate their master, Spruce Mc-Cay. Andy goes on: “The news I promised is this. To-morrow I leave Salisbury. The Judge has recommended my admission to the bar, and I shall take the oath and get my license before I start. I shall transfer myself to the region along the Cumberland, where I am told a barrister of my singular lack of ability should find plenty of practice.”

“Why do you leave old Rowan?” asks woolsack McNairy, beginning to take an interest.

“Because I have no education, less law, and still less money. It seems that these are conditions precedent to staying in Rowan with credit.”

“Well,” cries McNairy the judicial, grasping Andy’s long bony hand, “you have as much education, as much law, and as much money as I. Under the circumstances I shall go with you.”

“And I,” breaks in the lively Crawford, “since I have none of those ignorant and poverty-eaten qualifications you name, but on the contrary am rich, wise and learned – I shall remain here. When the wilderness casts you fellows out, come back and I shall welcome you. Pending which – as Parson Hicks would say – receive my blessing.”

The evening wears on amid clouds of tobacco smoke and rivers of punch. At the close the three take hold of hands, and sing a farewell song very badly. Then, since they look on the evening as a sacred one, they wind up by breaking the pipes they have smoked and the glasses they have drunk from, to save them in the hereafter from profane and vulgar uses. At last, rather deviously, they make their various ways to bed.

The next day, young Andrew Jackson, barrister and counselor at law, with all his belongings – save the rifle he carries, and the pistols in his saddle holsters – crowded into a pair of saddlebags, rides out of Salisbury on his bay horse Cherokee. He will stop at Martinsville for a space, awaiting the judicial McNairy.

Then the pair are to set their willing, hopeful faces for the Cumberland.

As Andy the horse-faced rides away that October afternoon, Henry Clay is a fatherless boy of nine, living with his mother at the Virginia Slashes; Daniel Webster, a sickly child of six, is toddling about his father’s New Hampshire farm; John C. Calhoun is a baby four years old in a South Carolina farmhouse; John Quincy Adams, nineteen and just home from a polishing trip to France, is a Harvard student; Martin Van Buren, aged four, is playing about the tap room of his Dutch father’s tavern at Kinder-hook; while Aaron Burr, fortunate, foremost and full of promise, has already won high station at the New York bar. None of these has ever heard of Andy the horse-faced, nor he of them; yet one and all they are fated to grow well acquainted with one another in the years to come, and before the curtain is rung finally down on that tragedy-comedy-farce which, played to benches ever full and ever empty, men call Existence.