He rolled up his eyes until only the whites showed. Doby clutched the canvas in alarm. What if they should not come down again?
"So that is a darky," he thought as he stared. "I can guess how he got the name."
Many a boy has seen a darky, but few have ever watched one with a gourd fiddle, the primitive African violin.
New England Doby did not approve of slavery. He had been taught that it was a dreadful thing. So it gave him something of a surprise to see what he had supposed would be a miserable, downtrodden captive having such a very good time.
Tuning his fiddle and swinging his bow, the negro began to play and to dance and to sing, drawing round him a dozen or so of other black boys who joined the dance and the song, giving themselves up to such utter enjoyment as Doby had never seen among any white people.
At first his Northern ears could not make out the words of the song. When he had guessed at them, he listened with his attention so divided between the syllables and the melody and the negroes' appearance and actions, that their full meaning did not come to him until long afterward.
Night wind in the trees, peeper frogs in the sedges, bare feet thumping on the turf, and the sweet obligato of the gourd strings accompanied the lyric tenor, who sang:
"Dar am a b'ar, A big, la'ge b'ar, He wave hes tail so high, He wave hes tail, Hes big, la'ge tail At no'th star in de sky.
"Dar am a b'ar, A sma', wee b'ar, He wave hes tail so high, He wave hes tail, Hes sma', wee tail At no'th star in de sky.
"All night he wave, Big b'ar he wave, And show de nig' what dar. He wave hes tail, Hes big, la'ge tail, 'Til nigger see dat star.
"All night he wave, Sma' b'ar he wave, And show de nig' what dar. He wave hes tail, Hes sma', wee tail, 'Til nigger see dat star."
Several melodious baritones took up the air and a superb bass joined in. To this happy narcotic the boy gave himself up and went to sleep again.
Doby's place in the train was with Simon Kenton's group of mounted scouts. Many of them had belonged to Col. Richard Johnson's Kentucky regiment of rangers. From Boonesboro, they had accompanied this wagon party of Quaker emigrants northward on the road to Lexington.
The Quakers were a religious sect who did not believe in slavery. They had left the Carolinas, where it was practised, and were going north across the Ohio, where it was not allowed. They were opposed to war in any form and continually preached the gospel of peace.