Chapter IX The Coming of the Circuit Rider
Colonel Wheeler was the standard-bearer of the flag of independence in the Hissawachee bottom. He had been a Captain in the Revolution; but Revolutionary titles showed a marked tendency to grow during the quarter of a century that followed the close of the war. An ex-officer’s neighbors carried him forward with his advancing age; a sort of ideal promotion by brevet gauged the appreciation of military titles as the Revolution passed into history and heroes became scarcer. And emigration always advanced a man several degrees—new neighbors, in their uncertainty about his rank, being prone to give him the benefit of all doubts, and exalt as far as possible the lustre which the new-comer conferred upon the settlement. Thus Captain Wheeler in Maryland was Major Wheeler in Western Pennsylvania, and a full-blown Colonel by the time he had made his second move, into the settlement on Hissawachee Creek. And yet I may be wrong. Perhaps it was not the transplanting that did it. Even had he remained on the “Eastern Shore,” he might have passed through a process of canonization as he advanced in life that would have brought him to a colonelcy: other men did. For what is a Colonel but a Captain gone to seed?
“Gone to seed” may be considered a slang expression; and, as a conscientious writer, far be it from me to use slang. And I take great credit to myself for avoiding it just now, since nothing could more perfectly describe Wheeler. His hair was grizzling, his shoulders had a chronic shrug, his under lip protruded in an expression of perpetual resistance, and his prominent chin and brow seemed to have been jammed together; the space between was too small. He had an air of defense; his nature was always in a “guard-against-cavalry” attitude. He had entered into the spirit of colonial resistance from childhood; he was born in antagonism to kings and all that are in authority; it was a family tradition that he had been flogged in boyhood for shooting pop-gun wads into the face of a portrait of the reigning monarch.
When he settled in the Hissawachee bottom, he of course looked about for the power that was to be resisted, and was not long in finding it in his neighbor, Captain Lumsden. He was the one opponent whom Lumsden could not annoy into submission or departure. To Wheeler this fight against Lumsden was the one delightful element of life in the Bottoms. He had now the comfortable prospect of spending his declining years in a fertile valley where there was a powerful foe, whose encroachments on the rights and privileges of his neighbors would afford him an inexhaustible theme for denunciation, and a delightful incitement to the exercise of his powers of resistance. And thus for years he had eaten his dinners with better relish because of his contest with Lumsden. Mordecai could not have had half so much pleasure in staring stiffly at the wicked Haman as Isaiah Wheeler found in meeting Captain Lumsden on the road without so much as a nod of recognition. And Haman’s feelings were not more deeply wounded than Lumsden’s.
Colonel Wheeler was not very happily married; for at home he could find no encroachments to resist. The perfect temper of his wife disarmed even his opposition. He had begun his married life by fighting his wife’s Methodism; but when he came to the Hissawachee and found Methodism unpopular, he took up arms in its defense.
Such was the man whom Kike had selected as guardian—a man who, with all his disagreeableness, was possessed of honesty, a virtue not inconsistent with oppugnancy. But Kike’s chief motive in choosing him was that he knew that the choice would be a stab to his uncle’s pride. Moreover, Wheeler was the only man who would care to brave Lumsden’s anger by taking the trust.
Wheeler lived in a log house on the hillside, and to this house, on the day after the return of Morton and Kike, there rode a stranger. He was a broad-shouldered, stalwart, swarthy man, of thirty-five, with a serious but aggressive countenance, a broad-brim white hat, a coat made of country jeans, cut straight-breasted and buttoned to the chin, rawhide boots, and “linsey” leggings tied about his legs below the knees. He rode a stout horse, and carried an ample pair of saddlebags.
Reining his horse in front of the colonel’s double cabin, he shouted, after the Western fashion, “Hello! Hello the house!”
At this a quartette of dogs set up a vociferous barking, ranging in key all the way from the contemptible treble of an ill-natured “fice” to the deep baying of a huge bull-dog.
“Hello the house!” cried the stranger.
“Hello! hello!” answered back Isaiah Wheeler, opening the door, and shouting to the dogs, “You, Bull, come here! Git out, pup! Clear out, all of you!” And he accompanied this command by threateningly lifting a stick, at which two of the dogs scampered away, and a third sneakingly retreated; but the bull-dog turned with reluctance, and, without smoothing his bristles at all, slowly marched back toward the house, protesting with surly growls against this authoritative interruption.
“Hello, stranger, howdy?” said Colonel Wheeler, advancing with caution, but without much cordiality. He would not commit himself to a welcome too rashly; strangers needed inspection. “‘Light, won’t you?” he said, presently; and the stranger proceeded to dismount, while the Colonel ordered one of his sons who came out at that moment to “put up the stranger’s horse, and give him some fodder and corn.” Then turning to the new-comer, he scanned him a moment, and said: “A preacher, I reckon, sir?”
“Yes, sir, I’m a Methodist preacher, and I heard that your wife was a member of the Methodist Church, and that you were very friendly; so I came round this way to see if you wouldn’t open your doors for preaching. I have one or two vacant days on my round, and thought maybe I might as well take Hissawachee Bottom into the circuit, if I didn’t find anything to prevent.”
By this time the colonel and his guest had reached the door, and the former only said, “Well, sir, let’s go in, and see what the old woman says. I don’t agree with you Methodists about everything, but I do think that you are doing good, and so I don’t allow anybody to say anything against circuit riders without taking it up.”
Mrs. Wheeler, a dignified woman, with a placidly religious face—a countenance in which scruples are balanced by evenness of temperament—was at the moment engaged in dipping yarn into a blue dye that stood in a great iron kettle by the fire. She made haste to wash and dry her hands, that she might have a “good, old-fashioned Methodist shake-hands” with Brother Magruder, “the first Methodist preacher she had seen since she left Pittsburg.”
Colonel Wheeler readily assented that Mr. Magruder should preach in his house. Methodists had just the same rights in a free country that other people had. He “reckoned the Hissawachee settlement didn’t belong to one man, and he had fit aginst the King of England in his time, and was jist as ready to fight aginst the King of Hissawachee Bottom.” The Colonel almost relaxed his stubborn lips into a smile when he said this. Besides, he proceeded, his wife was a Methodist; and she had a right to be, if she chose. He was friendly to religion himself, though he wasn’t a professor. If his wife didn’t want to wear rings or artificials, it was money in his pocket, and nobody had a right to object. Colonel Wheeler plumed himself before the new preacher upon his general friendliness toward religion, and really thought it might be set down on the credit side of that account in which he imagined some angelic book-keeper entered all his transactions. He felt in his own mind “middlin’ certain,” as he would have told you, that “betwixt the prayin’ for he got from such a wife as his, and his own gineral friendliness to the preachers and the Methodis’ meetings, he would be saved at the last, somehow or nother.” It was not in the man to reflect that his “gineral friendliness” for the preacher had its origin in a gineral spitefulness toward Captain Lumsden.
Colonel Wheeler’s son was dispatched through the settlement to inform everybody that there would be preaching in his house that evening. The news was told at the Forks, where there was always a crowd of loafers; and each individual loafer, in riding home that afternoon, called a “Hello!” at every house he passed; and when the salutation from within was answered, remarked that he “thought liker’n not they had’n heern tell of the preacher’s comin’ to Colonel Wheeler’s.” And then the eager listener, generally the woman of the house, would cry out, “Laws-a-massy! You don’t say! A Methodis’? One of the shoutin’ kind, that knocks folks down when he preaches! What will the Captin’ do? They do say he does hate the Methodis’ worse nor copperhead snakes, now. Some old quarrel, liker’n not. Well, I’m agoin’, jist to see how redikl’us them Methodis’ does do!”
The news was sent to Brady’s school, which had “tuck up” for the winter, and from this centre also it soon spread throughout the neighborhood. It reached Lumsden’s very early in the forenoon.
“Well!” said Lumsden, excitedly, but still with his little crowing chuckle; “so Wheeler’s took the Methodists in! We’ll have to see about that. A man that brings such people to the settlement ought to be lynched. But I’ll match the Methodists. Where’s Patty? Patty! O, Patty! Bob, run and find Miss Patty.”
And the little negro ran out, calling, “Miss Patty! O’ Miss Patty! Whah is ye?”
He looked into the smoke-house, and then ran down toward the barn, shouting, “Miss Patty! O! Miss Patty!”
Where was Patty?