When Men Grew Tall, or The Story Of Andrew Jackson. Lewis Alfred Henry

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      “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.

      CHAPTER III – THE BLOOMING RACHEL

      NASHVILLE is the merest scrambling huddle of log houses. The most imposing edifice is a blockhouse, built of logs squared by the broadaxe. It is the home of the widow Donelson; and, since it is all her husband left her when the Indians shot him down at the plow-stilts, and because she must live, the widow Donelson has turned the blockhouse into a boarding house.

      With the widow Donelson dwells her daughter Rachel, a beautiful brunette of twenty, and the belle of the Cumberland. Rachel is vivacious and bright; and, while there is much confusion among her nouns, pronouns, verbs and adverbs in the matters of case, number, and tense, she shines forth an indomitable conversationist. With frontier freedom she laughs with everybody, jests with everybody, delights in everybody’s admiration; and this does not please her husband, Lewis Robards, who is ignorant, suspicious, narrow, lazy, shiftless, jealous, and generally drunk. One time and another he has accused Rachel of a tenderness for every man in the settlement, and their quarrels have been frequent and fierce.

      It is evening; the widow Donelson is preparing supper for the half dozen boarders, assisted by the blooming Rachel. The moody Robards, half soaked in corn whisky, sits by the open door, ear on the conversation, eye on the not-over-distant woods. If the worthless Robards will not work, at least he may maintain a halfbright lookout for murderous Indians; and he does.

      The widow Donelson glances across from the corn bread she is mixing.

      “The runner who came on ahead,” she says, addressing the blooming Rachel, “reports the party as being due to-morrow. Mr. Jackson, the new State’s Attorney, who will come with it, is to board and lodge with us.”

      The blooming Rachel looks brightly up. The drunken Robards likewise looks up; but his face is gloomy with incipient jealousy.

      “A Mr. Jackson, eh?” he sneers. Then, to the blooming Rachel: “It’s mighty likely you’ll find in him a new lover to try your wiles on.”

      The blooming Rachel colors and her black eyes snap, but she holds her tongue. The widow Donelson is also silent. The mother and daughter have found wordlessness the best return to those insults, which it is the habit of the jealous drunkard to hurl at his pretty wife.

      The runner made true report, and the party in which travels the horse-faced Andy makes its appearance next day. Tall, slender, elegant, self-possessed, and with a manner which marks him above the common, he is disliked by the drunken Robards on sight. When he declines to drink with that sot, the dislike crystallizes into hatred. The outrageous jealousy of Robards has found a new reason for its green-eyed existence, and he already goes drunkenly pondering the slaughter of the horse-faced Andy. Since he will never advance beyond the pondering stage, for certain reasons called “craven” among men of clean courage, his homicidal lucubrations are the less important.

      Andy the horse-faced does not notice Robards. He does, however, notice with a thrill of pleasure the beautiful Rachel, and is glad to find his lines are down in such pleasant places.

      He is vastly taken with the boarding house of the widow Donelson, and incautiously says as much. He praises her corn pone and fried squirrel, and vehemently avers that her hog and hominy are the best he ever ate.

      Rachel the blooming does not allow her husband’s jealousy to interrupt hospitality, and piles high the young State’s Attorney’s plate with these delicacies. She even brings out a store of wild honey and cream – dainties sparse and few and far between in these rude regions. She calls this “hospitality”; her jealous drunkard of a husband calls it “making advances.” He says that in the course of a long, and he might have added misspent, life, he has observed that a coquette, with designs on a man’s heart, never fails to begin by making an ally of his stomach.

      “Hence,” says the drunken deductionist, “that honey and cream.”

      That night, after Rachel the blooming and her drunken husband retire, a bitter quarrel breaks out between them. It rages with such fury that the bicker arouses one Overton, who occupies the adjoining chamber. Mr. Overton is a severe character, firm and clear as to his rights. He objects to having his rest disturbed, alleging that he has troubles of his own. Taking final offense at the language of the brute Robards, which is more emphatic than nice, he gets his pistols. Rapping on the intervening wall to invoke attention, he informs that vituperative drunkard of his intention to instantly put him (Robards) to death, should he so much as raise his voice above a whisper for the balance of the night.

      Rachel seeks her mother, and the jealous drunkard quiets down. He is not unacquainted with Mr. Overton, who is reputed to possess as restless a brace of hair triggers as ever owned flint and pan. Altogether he is precisely the one whose word would carry weight with such as Robards, and, on the back of his interference in the domestic affairs of that inebriate, a great peace settles upon the blockhouse of the widow Donelson which abides throughout the night.

      As for the horse-faced State’s Attorney, he knows nothing of the differences between Rachel and the jealous Robards. He does not sleep in the blockhouse, having been appointed to a blanket couch in the “Bunk House,” a separate dormitory structure which stands at a little distance.

      During breakfast, the blooming Rachel again freights daintily deep the plate of the young State’s Attorney. Thereupon the СКАЧАТЬ