Wilbarger began to wonder after a while when that Rhode Island capitalist would begin work in his cotton-fields; they are wondering still. In course of time, and through the roundabout way he had chosen, Bro received the deeds of sale; he made his will, and left them to Marion. Once Mrs. Manning asked him about the screw.
"I have heard nothing of it for some time," he replied; and she said no more, thinking it had also, like the valve, proved a failure. In the course of the winter the little work-room was dismantled and the partitions taken down; there is nothing there now but the plain wall of the mill. The red lights no longer shine across the marsh to Vickery Island, and there is no one there to see them. The new keeper lives in a cabin at the bridge, and plays no tricks on the superintendent, who, a man of spirit still, but not quite so sanguine as to the future of Wilbarger, still rolls by on his hand-car from northeast to southeast.
Bro has grown old; he is very patient with everybody. Not that he ever was impatient, but that patience seems now his principal characteristic. He often asks to hear portions of Marion's letters read aloud, and always makes gently the final comment: "Yes, yes; she _is_ happy!"
It is whispered around Wilbarger that he "has had a stroke"; Mrs. Manning herself thinks so.
Well, in a certain sense, perhaps she is right.
I met a traveler on the road; His face was wan, his feet were weary; Yet he unresting went with such A strange, still, patient mien--a look Set forward in the empty air, As he were reading an unseen book.
The scholars were dismissed. Out they trooped--big boys, little boys, and full-grown men. Then what antics--what linked lines of scuffling; what double shuffles, leaps, and somersaults; what rolling laughter, interspersed with short yelps and guttural cries, as wild and free as the sounds the mustangs make, gamboling on the plains! For King David's scholars were black--black as the ace of spades. He did not say that; he knew very little about the ace. He said simply that his scholars were "colored"; and sometimes he called them "the Children of Ham." But so many mistakes were made over this title, in spite of his careful explanations (the Children having an undoubted taste for bacon), that he finally abandoned it, and fell back upon the national name of "freedmen," a title both good and true. He even tried to make it noble, speaking to them often of their wonderful lot as the emancipated teachers and helpers of their race; laying before them their mission in the future, which was to go over to Africa, and wake out of their long sloth and slumber the thousands of souls there. But Cassius and Pompey had only a mythic idea of Africa; they looked at the globe as it was turned around, they saw it there on the other side, and then their attention wandered off to an adventurous ant who was making the tour of Soodan and crossing the mountains of Kong as though they were nothing.