“Come now, dad, no accusations. Didn’t I just hear you tuning your gospel melody as much as to say, ‘Keep still up there,’ and didn’t I hear you tell mother last night, when you thought we children were asleep, you didn’t know what to do? But I did, and I’ve done it and now you needn’t try to keep this thing from me any longer. You’ve thought I don’t know what’s up, but I guess I’ve seen the last twenty darkies you’ve holed in the shop and Uncle Sam has taken away, and now that I’ve got those fellows off, I think you can afford to let me take a hand after this.”
A look of astonishment, mingled with satisfaction, overspread the countenance of Azel Tracy at this revelation of the fact that his son was acquainted with so much of the method of the _road_, a thing of which he and many another parent, for prudential reasons, tried to keep their children in ignorance, and taking the hand of the boy he replied, “You shall have all the hand in it you wish, my son.”
The sun had dropped below the western horizon when the aforesaid bare-footed boy might have been seen making his way eastward to the home of farmer Fuller, bearing the following note:
Dud has cooked the goose. The feathers are left—they are good for Fennland, and the parson needs a text for to-morrow. The loft is good—the cellar better.
As a result of this note, when darkness had settled down upon the earth, when candles were extinguished alike in farm house and village home, the old-fashioned buggy of Samuel Fuller stood before the little Hartford shop, and Dud, the Caucassian, surrendered his seat to an African of deepest sable, and soon the vehicle was speeding rapidly northward.
Night, sable goddess, had let her curtains down not only upon a day, but upon a week of toil, for the “Cotter’s Saturday Night” had come to all alike, and the good people of Gustavus, Ohio, had been several hours in the Land of Nod; the dome on the old academy and the spires of the village churches were already casting moonlight shadows eastward, and good old Parson Fenn was dreaming of “Seventeenthly” in to-morrow’s sermon, when there came three distinct raps upon his back door. Such signals were in no wise unusual to him, and he immediately responded to the call, only to find there a friend from fifteen miles away, and beside him a dusky figure crouching and trembling as if fearful of the moonbeams themselves.