Chapter I: Part 1

Sandhills Sketches

BY
WILLIAMS HAYNES

_Author of “Casco Bay Yarns,” etc._

ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS
BY THE AUTHOR AND OTHERS.

NEW YORK
D. O. HAYNES & CO. Publishers

_COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY WILLIAMS HAYNES_

This little book is just what its title implies: pages from a note book kept during a winter spent in the Piedmont Country of North Carolina. Because the story of the Sandhills has not heretofore been told, it has seemed worth while to collect them in this form.

With one exception, the following sketches have been published in various magazines, and my thanks are due the proprietors of “Travel,” “Forecast,” “House and Garden,” and “Outing” for their kind permission to reprint material that first appeared in their publications.

WILLIAMS HAYNES.

Northampton, Mass.

CONTENTS

DODGING WINTER 5

“THEM HUGGINS BOYS” 15

A SANDHILLS CHRISTMAS CAROL 31

“TAR BURNIN’” 43

SOME QUAIL DOGS AND OTHERS 54

THE CLAY BIRDS 67

THROUGH A JUNGLE TO THE OLD SOUTH 79

Dodging Winter

A winter vacation is as seductive as the opium pipe. Slip away to the sunny Southland just once during the winter; next season you will surely want to do it again--one whiff and you are an habitué.

How drear and dismal snow-bound January seems! What a torrent of chilly discomfort is the sleet and slush of March! The golf bag, or the gun case, in the corner by the fireplace is a subtle, suggestive temptation, and even the cheery open fire itself calls up memories of crackling pine knots that spluttered and blazed not in deadly earnest, so that you should not shiver, but lightly and brightly, impregnating the air with the pungent frankincense of comradeship.

There is a glorious exultation in dodging Winter. You cannot really fight on equal terms with the old rascal--a steam heater is such a pitiful weapon after all--so there is a keen delight in snapping your fingers under his frost-bitten nose. When you slip out of the freezing grasp of his long, cold arms, you have cheated a cruel, inexorable Fate. You feel like the hero of a Greek tragedy who has gloriously turned the play to comedy, and there is a peculiarly delicious feeling of freedom. The smelly coolness of the mid-summer woods is a respite from the burning heat of the city in July; the tingling, briny freshness of the wind-swept sea rocks is a reprieve--but the southern sun in winter gives freely a full pardon to the weather prisoner. It is he himself who weaves the enticing spell of the winter vacation, and the minute you tumble out of the Pullman, from whose blackened eaves the ghosts of icicles still trickle, you become a pagan sun worshipper.

Some winter vacationists carry their sun worshipping to a fanatic extreme. They are not at all content to bask in the sun, they must go way to Florida or Bermuda to be fairly baked. This sun gluttony carries its own punishments of lazy lassitude and all the risks of a sniffling cold or hacking cough when one must, as one always must, return to the cold North. It is wiser and more temperate to slip just far enough into the South to find a friendly sun, but not so far that he becomes a bore.

Isn’t the ideal winter play-place a country where it is warm enough for you to feel the sun, so, if you are out-of-doors, you do not need mufflers and ear tabs; where you can ride or motor, shoot or fish, play golf or tennis without a bungling sweater clinging to your shoulders and elbows; where you can sit under the trees an hour and read a favorite book without your fingers being numbed to blueness? But don’t you like a tang of frost in the morning air? Fifteen minutes in that air before breakfast is worth a whole month of cold baths and setting up exercises for starting the day right. In such a country too, the nights will be cool and refreshing as spring water, and you will sleep a sleep more strengthening than the most potent tonic in the whole pharmacopoeia.

Such a winter play-place is the Piedmont country of the Carolinas, the Sandhills, as the natives who “made cotton and corn on the clay” of the lowlands contemptuously christened them years ago. This was the old sea shore of the continent, and the sandy soil is even today, after all these geological ages, almost as white as a beach. The Sandhills roll away gently, not unlike great dunes, and through each little valley trickles a little stream--“branches” the natives call them--on whose banks crowd great clumps of holly bushes, bluegums, and magnolias. The dry, sandy soil, like a great blotter, keeps the air as dry as cotton, and the most soaking rain leaves no puddles or mud holes behind it. This, as the Old North State’s hearty toast proudly proclaims, is indeed

“The land of the long leaf pine,
The southern land where the sun doth shine.”

Even the golfer on the Pinehurst links, who is so strictly admonished “to keep his eye on the ball,” carries away with him the picture of the towering long-leaf pines with their great, foot-long needles and their giant cones. The Aiken motorist, as he bowls down the hillsides and rattles over the little wooden bridge that spans the branch, cannot fail to distinguish out of the whirling landscape the sandy hilltops and the green thickets along the valley bottoms. The fox hunter, since Reynard will surely lay a line of scent ’way off the beaten tracks into the heart of the pine woods and the magnolia lowlands, will know the Sandhills better. But the one who tramps over the Sandhills behind a brace of bird dogs will know them best. Up through the valley, skirting the branch--over the hillside and across the fallow cotton fields--a scramble over the rail fence and a plunge through the tangle of holly bushes and briars all snarled with creepers--splash, splash, through the stream and up the other side of the hill. He is sure to learn the country first hand, and he will meet all sorts of interesting people. A lusty negro boy will be perfectly delighted to stop chopping at the black-jack stumps to tell him, “Dere’s a whalin’ big cobey ob birds done feed ober in dat field ob cow-peas. Ah hyah ’em whistlin’ ’bout half an hour ’go.” On a level hilltop an old darky tar burner will be his willing instructor in the mysteries of tar making. In a little hollow, miles from the high road, he will come suddenly upon a slatternly cabin with a curious chimney of clay and crossed sticks. Here a trio of putty faced babies will eye him suspiciously from behind the pig sty while their mother, a drab, timid woman, gives him a dipper of water.

The quail shooter cannot wander over the Sandhills without sooner or later being reminded of the post card with the picture of the revenue officers and the score of captured blockade whisky stills he sent off to his particular friend the first night he reached his hotel. I remember very well a suspicious old fellow, whose curt answers and strange advice sent our imaginations weaving tales of the moonshiners. ’Way back in the hills the dogs found a big covey beside a swamp and the birds flushed over the hill. We followed them to pick up the scattered singles and found two before we noticed this old fellow sitting on a stump at the edge of the thicket. We called in the dogs and walked over to him. He sat there, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped in front of him, quite motionless. A rusty, single barrelled shotgun, with a hammer as big as a clothes hook, rested in the crook of his arm, and between his feet sat a thin, black and tan foxhound, with a meek, sorrowful expression in her dark eyes. Neither man nor dog moved as we came up to them.

“Hello. Is this your land?” I asked.

He had been peering at us keenly from under his heavy brows as we approached, but now he dropped his eyes and mumbled noncommittally, “Dunno.”

“It isn’t posted, is it?”

“Tain’t posted,” he replied shortly.

“Are you finding many rabbits?” I asked him cheerfully.

“Ain’t huntin’ rabbits.”

“’Possums then?” I suggested.

“Ain’t huntin’ ’possum.”

“Does your hound point quail?”

“Nope.”

“Are you running deer? We saw some tracks back in the swamp.”

“Ain’t huntin’ deer.”

“Well, what are you hunting?”

“Ain’t huntin’ nawthin’.”

I gave up in despair, and my friend asked him very politely, “Do you live hereabouts?”

“Ovah yondah,” he answered without a sign, so whether his home was north, south, east, or west, and whether a hundred yards or ten miles away, there was no telling.

“Are there many birds about here?”

“Dunno,” he answered shortly.

“Queen” had found another bird and was pointing beautifully. We went over to her and my friend made a fine shot on a hard single. We started on and the old man yelled after us. We stopped and turned. He was hobbling slowly towards us.

“Is it possible he has found his tongue?” I whispered.

“The age of miracles is past,” replied my companion.

“Them birds you-all is huntin’,” said the old man when he was close beside us, “went ovah t’other side o’ the swamp.”

“But,” protested my friend, “we saw them come over the hill and we’ve found three singles already.”

“Right smart o’ ’em circled ’round.”

“Are you sure?” I persisted.

“Sartin’,” he grunted.

We exchanged glances, both wondering whether we were receiving a friendly tip from a strange fellow-sportsman or whether we were being gently warned away from the proximity of an illicit whisky still. We accepted his advice and recrossed the swamp. We found just one lone bird on that hillside where he had indicated, that “right smart o’ ’em” had flown.

As we went down the hill on the other side my friend asked me in all seriousness, “You know something about this Tar Heel dialect--would you call one, ’right smart’?”

“Would you?” I asked, and we both laughed.

If “the East is East and the West is West,” so the North is North and the South, South. That, if you really know the Sandhills, is one of the best charms of a winter vacation in that fascinating country. It is a very different country with different trees and flowers and birds and animals. The people too, are different. The Sandhill darky is a type quite distinct, and the Tar Heel is as fascinating and romantic as his cousin up in the Cumberland Mountains. You will not find these things at your hotel nor in the shops at Southern Pines, or Hamlet, or Aberdeen. You will not find them on the golf links or the tennis courts. You are very apt to ride over them on horseback, and you will surely pass them in a motor; but they are there, and over and above the good sport of winter play, they add a great deal to the fun of dodging winter in the Sandhills.

“Them Huggins Boys”

Everybody in the Sandhills, it seemed, knew “them Huggins boys”, and nobody had a good word to say for them. Everywhere I went I heard of them, and everything that I heard was ill.

Just after my arrival, as I was superintending the loading of my trunk onto a most rickety wagon, the station agent touched my arm and, pointing across the tracks, said, “Thar’s one o’ them Huggins boys, suh.”

I caught a fleeting glance of an amazingly long and lank youth jogging away astraddle a dilapidated mule.

“Looks like Ichabod Crane, doesn’t he?” I noted casually.

The station agent was frankly puzzled to find the resemblance. He scratched his sandy head and spat thoughtfully.

“Ah doan reckon,” he drawled, “Ah know What’s-his-name Crane. Is he kin to the Cranes over in Scotland County?”

“No,” I laughed, “he’s a school-master in a book.”

This information relieved him immensely. He would have been touched to the quick in his pride had he failed to recognize anyone in all the Sandhills, but a character in a book was quite a different matter. He grinned appreciatively.

“Oh,” he replied easily, “Ah ain’t much at book readin’; but ef What’s-his-name Crane looked laik them Huggins boys, Ah bet he wasn’t much of a school teacher.”

“Looks are deceiving,” I quoted.

“They shore are--them Huggins boys ain’t more’n half as mean lookin’ as they is.”

It was my turn to be puzzled, but the trunk was loaded now, and by the time I had given Uncle Willis his instructions, the agent had stepped back into his cubbyhole office. I wanted to question him further about “them Huggins boys” and find out the reason for his venomous words, but there were many things to be attended to, and, resolving to drop in on him some day between train times, I hurried over to the store.

Ten minutes later I again heard of “them Huggins boys.” The storekeeper, introductions having been completed and after he had done his duty by the good weather and the abundance of quail in the vicinity, remarked in his cheerful, talkative way that a neighbor of mine had just left.

“Is that so--who was it?” I asked politely.

“One of them Huggins boys.”

I began to be distinctly curious about these mysterious youths.

“’Bout a mile away,” the storekeeper replied to my question, “but Ah reckon you’ll find that close enough.”

“These Huggins boys don’t seem to be very popular,” I said, hoping to lead him on.

“They ain’t,” he answered shortly, adding confidentially, “Doan you lend ’em nawthin’ you set no value on.”

Another customer interrupted us. I thanked him for his advice, and he supplemented it with the information. “We-all doan give ’em no credit here.”

That evening my next door neighbor, who lived half a mile away, dropped in to extend his welcome. He too, warned me about these boys. Later I questioned his overseer, who had ordered them off the plantation, and he characterized them shortly as “the damnedest nuisances in the country”. Uncle Willis, after a deal of questioning, confessed, “Well, Massa Billie, hit’s disaway, dey is jest natcherly meaner dan a mad mule”.

Bits like this, a little here and a little there, I gathered up everywhere. In little scraps too, I collected their history. Their father before them had been a notorious character, famous as a fighter and a leader of moonshiners. All his life he had been a hard-drinking, work-hating good-for-nothing, and his sons, according to common report, were following right in his unsteady footsteps. There was not enough energy among the four of them to cultivate their little farm properly. They raised a little cotton and harbored a scrubby cow and half a dozen gaunt, half-wild hogs, but land and stock, little cabin and dilapidated barn were all going to rack and ruin as fast as abuse and neglect could drive them. Failing to make a living out of what might have been a good little plantation, they hired out for odd jobs and in the winter burned tar. But their services were never greatly in demand, and just how they managed to live, and their old mother and sister too, was a mystery. Some people, with a great show of pretended knowledge, hinted at a blockade still and raw corn liquor sold to the darkies for two bits a quart. Others pointed out that whatever ready money they scraped together was invested in the cheapest and most virulent whisky, which argued against any home-made intoxicants. All this I learned before I made their acquaintance, and our first meeting did not tend to improve the opinion I had formed of them.

One Sunday morning, as I was sitting on the verandah pretending to read, but really luxuriating in the January sun, the Sabbath peace was rudely broken by a quavering falsetto voice whining out a darky song:

“De Lord he thought he’d mak’ a man.
Dese bones gwine t’ rise again!
Lil’ bit o’ earth an’ lil’ bit o’ sand.
Dese bones gwine t’ rise again!
Ah knows it: de-ed Ah do know: Ah knows it,
Dese bones gwine t’ rise again!

Thought He’d mak’ a ’ooman too.
Dese bones gwine t’ rise again!
Cast about see what He’d do.
Dese bones gwine rise again!
Ah knows it: de-ed Ah do know: Ah knows it,
Dese bones gwine t’ rise again!”

The mournful sound was getting louder and louder. Evidently the singer was coming up the driveway. I laid aside my book and walked around the house to see who it was.

“Took a rib from Adam’s side.
Dese bones gwine t’ rise again!
Made Miss Eve t’ be his bride.
Dese bones gwine rise again!
Ah knows it: de-ed Ah----”

I stepped around the corner and the song stopped abruptly. A most remarkable vehicle, an ancient phaeton, all besplattered with red clay mud and held together with odd bits of rope, twine, and wire, was approaching at a slow and dignified pace. It was drawn by a little moth-eaten mule who dragged his hoofs through the sand and flopped his big ears in a distressingly spiritless manner. In violent contrast to their melancholy equipage two cheerful figures sprawled in the carriage. The driver, his great feet thrust over the wobbly dashboard his head resting on the back of the seat, was paying much more attention to the wisps of white clouds overhead than to his steed. His companion, the singer, sat sideways, swinging his legs over the side in time with his song. He broke off in the middle of a word when he caught sight of me, and giving the driver a violent nudge, switched himself around into the carriage. The driver slipped his feet off the dashboard and hunched up into an almost sitting position. The mule just stopped and, for all the world with the Dormouse at the mad tea-party, immediately went to sleep. The singer, too, might have posed for the drawings of the Mad Hatter himself. He had the same lean face with high cheek bones; the same bulging eyes and prominent nose; the same protruding teeth and receding chin. Nor was the driver unlike the March Hare. There was a strange mixture of brazen effrontery and extreme timidity in his manner. His shifting eyes and shuffling feet belied his bold speech.

“Good morning,” I said.

The singer nodded embarrassedly, and the driver, his eyes scanning the landscape, grunted, “Mawnin’”.

“What can I do for you?” I asked.

“Is you the gemmen’s rented dis place?” asked the driver bluntly.

I told them I had and they exchanged glances.

“Ah’m Jim Huggins,” the driver replied to my question, “an’ he’s mah brother Tom,” indicating the singer with a side-wise jerk of his head. “We live ovah yondah.”

“Oh,” I exclaimed, “two of the Huggins boys. I’m glad to meet you. I’ve heard of you.”

They shook hands doubtfully, and Jim questioned me with open suspicion. “What’d you heah ’bout us?”

Tom, who had not spoken till now, shifted uneasily, and before I could reply asked if I didn’t want to buy some eggs.

“MacDougall’s sellin’ ’em at the store,” he added, “fo’ fo’ty cents a dozen, but we-all’l let you have ’em for thirty-five.”

I had bought eggs from MacDougall just the day before for thirty-five cents.

“You say,” I said, “that you’ll sell me eggs for five cents less than the store price?”

He nodded eagerly.

“Well, then. I’ll give you thirty cents a dozen for them--if Sally wants some.”

Again they exchanged glances.

“Ah reckon that’ll be alright,” said Jim, looking everywhere but at me.

I called Sally out of her kitchen, and she explained that “’deed, Massa Billie, we-all has all de aiggs we kin use till ’bout Wednesday,” so I told the Huggins boys to come back then. Their almost proverbial meanness flared up at this. They considered my refusal to buy of them an insult and a great injustice, and muttered threats and abuse.

“Here,” I said, “stop your grumbling and clear out. I didn’t ask you to bring me eggs, and I’ve ordered some for next Wednesday though you lied about the price. Stop your grumbling and get along with you. And next time you come round here leave that home.”

I pointed to an empty flask that lay neglected on the floor of the carriage. Jim kicked it under the seat, jerked at the reins to wake up the mule, and with something about “Jest’s you say, boss,” drove slowly off.

So these were the far-famed Huggins boys. I watched them half way down the driveway, and then went back to my sunny seat and the book. As I settled myself, the quavering tones of Tom’s high voice, taking up again his interrupted song, came floating to me.

‘Put ’em in a gardin fair.
Dese bones gwine t’ rise again!
Tole ’em eat what they see there.
Dese bones gwine rise again!
Ah knows it: de-ed Ah do know: Ah knows it,
Dese bones gwine ’t rise again.

“Sarpint wound around a trunk.
Dese bones gwine t’ rise again.
At Miss Eve his eye he wunk.
Dese bones gwine rise again.
Ah knows it: de-ed Ah----”

The words faded gradually in the distance into a thin minor wail.

The very next morning I had another visit from “them Huggins boys”. I was out riding at the time, and when I came back I noticed someone had driven in and out of the driveway. It had rained during the night and the fresh tracks were plain in the sandy road. The hoof prints were long and narrow, evidently of a mule, and I wondered idly who my visitor could have been. Sally told me.

“Hit’s dose shiftless Huggins boys again. They was trying t’ sell mo’ eggs, an’ they got out an’ cum right in de libin’ room. Ah couldn’t stop ’em nohow.”

Evidently they were going to make themselves a first-class nuisance unless I put my foot down firmly. Resolving to read them the riot act next time they came around, I tied the pony and went into the house, Sally protesting all the while against “all dese heah pore white trash”. I went to the mantlepiece to fill my pipe. There was the tobacco pouch, but my pipe, my favorite briar, which I was sure I had put there just before I went out, was not there. Sally remembered seeing it, but had not touched it.

“Hit mus’ a been them Huggins boys tuk hit,” she suggested.

I hurried out and jumped on the pony.

“Ef dey’s been drinkin’ look out fo’ ’em,” Sally called after me. “Dey’s pow’rful mean in liquah.”

“Don’t worry about me, Sally,” I called back. “They wouldn’t hurt anybody.”

By riding ’cross lots I came out on the road to their farm ahead of them. The telltale tracks in the sand told they had driven out, but had not yet returned. I rode back to meet them. Half way to the main road I came up with them. They were coming along at their usual funeral pace, and the musical Tom was whistling a jolly jig tune. I rode up and stopped their mule.

“Good mawnin’, suh,” they chorused.

“Which of you boys smokes a pipe?” I asked.

They were surprised and outdid each other in looking as innocent as lambs.

“Whichever it is, hand over my pipe.”

They shifted uneasily, but neither made a move to restore my property.

“Come, be quick,” I said, moving the pony in closer to their carriage.

Tom slowly reached in his pocket and drew out my pipe. He reached it out to me silently.

“Thanks,” I said. “Now understand this: the next time I catch or hear of one of you boys on my place except on business I am coming after him with this.”

I shook my riding crop and they nodded solemnly. The pony was dancing about and I rode off, leaving them looking after me surprised and disgusted, a little mad, but properly scared. After that we became friends.

Till recently the country where “them Huggins boys” live has been known all over North Carolina as “poor old Moore County”. It lies in the very heart of the Sandhills, and the farmers who “make corn and cotton on the clay” have long scoffed at the sandy slopes where, so the joke runs, “you can hear the cotton grunting trying to make a living in the poor soil”. Too poor even to give a decent stand of grass--except the coarse, useless crab grass--the Sandhills supported a fine growth of long leafed pine, and years ago the Huggins boys’ grandfather and his neighbors eked out their thin crops with the tall, straight timber and with turpentine. Their sons, the best of the timber gone, hewed out railroad ties and burned tar. They were poor farmers on poor soil, a ruinous combination. The roads were bad, and the Sandhills’ natives, having little to sell and nothing with which to buy, lived sufficient unto themselves. Theirs was a narrow life and a hard one, a life of few pleasures and almost no advantages, of much labor and little reward.

A score of years ago new factors entered into the life of the Sandhills. Inspired by the few passengers and little freight on this division of the road, railroad men turned their attention to this country. They sent agricultural and industrial experts who reported back that all the Sandhills had was a glorious winter climate. So the general passenger agent and the traffic manager consulted physicians, and the Sandhills became famous as a resort for tubercular patients. But wiser men nipped the growing sanitoriums in the bud and planted in their stead great winter resorts, big hotels, golf courses, hunting preserves.

Men and women came from all over the country to slip away from Jack Frost and play in the open, and the mysterious spell of the Sandhills was thrown over them.

Under this spell a little group of Northern men, fresh from college, ambitious and full of energy, decided the Sandhills should be good for other things besides golf and quail shooting. Agricultural experts from Raleigh and Washington said things that confirmed this belief, and these young men turned Sandhills farmers. The Huggins boys’ father and his neighbors in poor old Moore County laughed at these soft-handed agriculturists; but they fattened cattle with great profit over at Jackson Springs; they grew tobacco at Samarcand which brought top price in the open market, and their big dairy near Hoffman sold cream to the railroad and fed hogs on the skimmed milk. The pioneers have been followed by others, and most of the Huggins boys’ neighbors from good examples have learned to get bigger crops and sell them for higher prices.

But in among the hills, a little way back from the railroad and the new automobile highways the old life, the hard, narrow life, is still lived. “Them Huggins boys” and their poor, old mother and drab sister are still drudging along in the old way. That, after I knew them, was the only real fault I found. They are not vicious or mean: they are frightened and suspicious. They are not clever and they are very lazy, so they have no confidence in themselves to cope with the keener competition that the new life has brought. They have neither the speed nor the stamina to stand the swifter pace, and they balk. Underneath their diffidence and sham effrontery they are helpless and hopeless. They are the tattered remnants of an out-worn age.

A Sandhills Christmas Carol

“Chris’mas gift, Massa Billie, Chris’mas gift!”

Aunt Sally, black and beaming stood at the door of my room, trying at once to waken me and arouse my Christmas spirit. I opened one eye and she redoubled her efforts, laughing.

“Merry Christmas, Sally! What time is it?”

“Merry Chris’mas, yo’self, Massa Billie--’deed hit’s ’most aight o’clock.”

“The dickens it is!” I cried sitting bolt upright in bed, “didn’t I tell you to call me at six?”

“Yassah, yo’ shore did, but Ah jest knowed you’d not want to go shootin’ dis mawnin’. Hit’s rainin’.”

Sally was right; it was raining, a steady, soaking, most un-Christmas-like rain. Out of the little windows I could see the Sandhills drenched and dripping. The great long-leafed pines, so proud and stately in the bright sunlight, stood dejected and tawdry. Even the jovial little holly bush at the corner of the porch had quite lost its gay, holiday air. Down in the valley, at the head of the branch, the rich, warm greens and olives of the magnolias and bluegums seemed grey and melancholy in the fine mist that spread over the lowlands. “Sam,” the most sedate and dignified of pointers, strolled into my room and put his head on the side of the bed.

“No hunting for us today, old man,” I said to him, and he sniffed sympathetically and blinked his yellow eyes as much as to say, “I know it--ain’t it the devil?” He was so very sad about it that I could not help laughing at the old sportsman.

Indeed it was not a pleasing prospect. A rainy Christmas--no shooting--and stuck off in a tiny bungalow, several miles from anywhere, with only the remnants of another man’s library for company--Ugh! I dragged on my clothes without any enthusiasm for the day. But Aunt Sally’s breakfast--golden scrambled eggs heaped up in the center of a fringe of crisp bacon, with corn bread, and steaming cakes smothered in molasses--cheered me wonderfully; and then, after breakfast, Uncle Willis, her husband, came shuffling up from his cabin for his “Chris’mas gift.”

He inspected his present thoughtfully, and thanked me with verbose formality for it. Then he began talking. Willis is always an entertaining conversationalist, though I fear he is not a thoroughly reliable source of exact information. As Toby confided to me one day, “Dat nigger’s de wo’st liar in de Sandhills, ef not on de whol’ state of No’th Carolina, an’ thar’s some tol’ably good liars down disaways.” His vivid imagination made penniless, ragged Willis a Midas. He knew more about cotton than the whole of the Department of Agriculture, and as for tar burning, he could sweat more black, sticky stuff out of a cord of pine wood than any nigger in Moore County, though he would begrudgingly acknowledge that Jim Watson could go him one better in this. There was a wonderful, childlike simplicity in his optimism, but his absolute faith in your belief of his yarns was irritating till you recognized the artist in him. I remember how out of patience I was with him when he solemnly informed me one day “dat ’bout fo’ y’ars ago he’d been huntin’ b’ar wif Massa Teddy Roos’velt down in Drownin’ Creek Swamp.”

“Willis,” I said to him sharply, “you are an unmitigated liar!”

“’Deed I is, Massa Billie, but Ah jest thought you’d like t’ heah ’bout hit.”

So I did, but this Christmas morning I was in no humor to listen to his prattle, and until he got on the subject of “hants and conjurin’,” I gave him but scant attention. The sly rascal knows this way of arousing my flagging interest, and employs it very effectively.

“Massa Billie,” he said, “Ah doan’ su’pose yo’ done heah dat sumbuddy’s been conjurin’ Lee Gordon, has yo’?”

“I haven’t, no--who is Lee Gordon?”

“He’s a cousin of mah Sally’s over at Cognac. He’s been a-workin’ on de railroad wid de section gang, but he done move to Hoffman las’ night.”

“In all the rain? On Christmas eve?” I asked skeptically.

“Yassah, right in de rain an’ on Chris’mas eve. When he come home last evenin’ he done found a conjure layin’ right on de front do’-step. Ah doan’ jest ’actly know what kind ob a conjure, but hit war shore a mighty pow’ful one.” And sure of his audience he launched forth in full details of how the darky had moved his wife and numerous children, all his goods and chattels, right over to Hoffman and was staying with his wife’s brother, Noah Wilson.

“Why did he move last night?” I asked to egg him on.

“But yo’ shore doan’ ’spect him t’ stay in dat cabin wid a conjure layin’ on de front do’-step, does yo’, Massa Billie?”

“Why not?” I replied, New England fashion, to draw him out.

“Eff yo’ steps ober a conjure,” he replied earnestly, “yo’ is laik t’ die, an’ eben eff yo’ doan’ step ober it, yo’ is laik t’ die anyway. But dey all moved out de back do’,” he added reassuringly. He digressed to tell how all the household goods had been taken out the back way, stopping to recount the history of a certain bed, a family heirloom of slavery days. Finally, however, he got back to conjuring, and, expressing in the same breath his most abject fear and his utter contempt for all Black Art, he told me considerable about this mysterious matter. “Eff yo’ has de conjurin’ pow’rs,” so I learned, you can kill your enemies by placing a conjure where they will walk over it. If, however, you are not so terribly vindictive, you can merely drive them crazy by placing a hair of their head in the tough bark of a little, twisted black-jack oak. Should you be very merciful indeed, and if you merely wish to get some objectionable person out of your path, you can pick up a bit of dirt out of his footprint in the high-road and throw it, accompanied by proper chants and incantations, into running water. Henceforth that person will be a hapless wanderer over the face of the earth. There are, I gather, other awful powers that obey the commands of the conjurer, and his poor victims can only be freed from his spell by applying to a witch doctor. He, his palm having been duly crossed, will first determine the exact nature of the spell. He takes a little iron kettle about the size of your two fists, and mounts this upon a little pyramid of dry pine sticks. In the kettle he places cold water from a running stream and into it he throws salt, herbs, and sundry mysterious powders. Then he kindles the fire. While the little blaze crackles, he chants, and then, if the kettle falls off the sticks before the kettle boils it means “yo’ is shore conjured”--a thing that must assuredly happen if the doctor is careful to use dry wood that is fairly steeped with rosin. Then you must cross his palm again, and he will throw about you a counter-charm.

At this point my lesson in Black Art was interrupted.

Jerry, a half-grown negro who lived over by the Tower, knocked on the door, and I could never get Willis to resume his course of instruction. Jerry, grinning and bobbing, delivered a formal invitation from the switch operator over at the signal tower on the railroad, half a mile away, to come and share with him a Christmas box he had received from his wife. I accepted, and we set off, the boy and I, through the warm drizzle that enveloped you and soaked through your clothes as if they had been tissue paper.

The Christmas box was not a perfect success. It had been packed in cardboard and had been sadly damaged in transit, so that you would bite into a crumpled piece of capital, homemade cake to find the frosting--and maybe a brick-like gum drop--embedded in the center. But my host, the operator, is a communicative, ingenuous soul whose spirits no amount of Christmas rain could dampen. On Christmas Eve he had spent two hours of his spare time ploughing through swamps to pick a great bunch of holly. He had even found a mistletoe, a sprig of which dangled at the end of a silver cord, relic of a box of candy, over the levers of his switches. The day was close and muggy, but in honor of the occasion his little, pot-bellied, iron stove glowed ruddy with heat. Over his telegraph instruments was strung a line of garish Christmas post cards, flaming with scarlet and emerald green daubs of color, besprinkled with tinsel, declaring, as through a megaphone, “Peace on Earth--Good Will to Men.” The stuffy little signal tower fairly reeked with the Christmas spirit, and as we sat munching fruit cake I looked over at my happy host and was ashamed that a little rain should wash all the warm, generous Christmas out of me.

Yes, this was decidedly better than moping alone in the bungalow. With every freight that came to a screeching, bumpy stop beneath, a burly brakeman would thrump up the steps of the signal tower for train orders. Dripping rain water from his rubber coat, he would throw open the door with a “Merry Christmas! Say, ain’t this a peach of a Christmas day?” If his train must wait on the switch for another to pass, he would sit down by the fire and between enormous mouthfuls of cake and candy, tell a railroad yarn or retail a bit of railroad gossip. For hours I perched on the telegraph table watching this strange procession. After a short nod they paid little attention to me, for my host never bothered with introductions, and I sat there with the curious feeling that I was at the theatre. Certainly these men were of another world, each so different and yet each so true to the type. A thick-set, square-faced little fellow with the sharp twang of Down East in his voice would be followed by a tall, light stripling whose low drawl betrayed him long before he casually mentioned that he wished he could have been home in Savannah this day. They talked only of railroading. They whirled up and down the length of the country from New York to Florida and back again, many times during the year and saw nothing but switches and roundhouses; they passed nothing but expresses and other freights; they met no one save engineers, conductors, and brakemen like themselves. They lived a life divided into miles and minutes, bounded by the glistening rails, but within this life they found complete absorption, for it is a complicated, dangerous life in which exact knowledge is at a premium.

About three o’clock in the afternoon, “Shorty” thrumped in from Cognac. He was working the “second trick,” or as we out of the signal towers would say, the second shift, and he came over on a freight to be ready to take up his duties at four.

“Say,” he exclaimed gleefully, after the season’s greetings had been exchanged and he had sampled the now nearly demolished Christmas box, “McNab sure did play some good trick on some of his niggers last night.”

“He’s like to play one too many tricks on them niggers of his,” said our host. “D’you remember ’bout that section boss over on the L. & N. that was found with his skull stove in with a sledge?”

“Aw, shucks! McNab treats his niggers good, but there was a family of them livin’ in a shack right behind his house, an’ they’d sing an’ howl half the night, so McNab’s been ’bout crazy to get shut of them someway. He tried fifty ways to close them up, but yesterday he took a bit of rabbit skin and rolled it up in a little ball and wrapped it round with a strip of red flannel, and tied it all ’round with a horse hair. Then he went an’ left it on the nigger’s front door step. When the nigger comes home, he starts hollerin’ bloody murder about somebody tryin’ to conjure him. He and his whole tribe moves out last night, an’ every bit of their studdings went out the back door to dodge that conjure of McNab’s.”

Shorty broke off laughing, and I asked, “Was the nigger’s name Lee Gordon?”

“’Deed I don’t know, but they moved to Hoffman. Say, I’ll bet there ain’t a nigger in the whole Sandhills will live in that cabin now,” and Shorty chuckled to himself.

I told Uncle Willis all about it later. All that he would say was, “H’m! Those railroad men am mighty smart, ain’t dey?” He did not, however, mean to be sarcastic, for a couple of weeks later when I suggested that his brother Henry move into Lee Gordon’s old cabin in Cognac he was horrified at the thought. Yet Henry lived in Hoffman and worked in Cognac and was always complaining of the length and expense of his commuting. Although the cabin in Cognac would have solved this problem and was really a first-class house in good condition, Willis could only answer with a shrug and a shuffle, and a “Ah doan’ ’spect Henry’ll care none ’bout livin’ in dat dere shack.”

“Tar Burnin’”

When first I went to North Carolina to spend the winter in the Sandhills, my knowledge of tar was limited to schoolboy memories of tar-balls made from material purloined from the contractors who paved New York’s streets and a rather indirect connection through a cousin who had once put a tar roof on his stables and cordially regretted it. Down in the Sandhills, old Uncle Willis Baldwin, by verbose precept and halting example, taught me just how the black, sticky stuff is wrung from the dried wood of the long-leaf pine, barreled up, and brought to market.

Soon the good old-fashioned way that Uncle Willis burns his tar will be replaced by a very efficient, but thoroughly uninteresting machine, a great still, with a gigantic metal retort in a brick oven as big as Willis’ little shanty. The old darky tar burner who considers himself lucky to get a barrel of crude tar from a cord of dry pine is but a faltering competitor of the machine that from the same wood can wring two barrels of tar, valuable creosote, and other important wood oils. Squeezing out fifteen dollars where before but three or four were extracted is all in strict accord with economic progress, and plainly it is very much more profitable--for those who own the stills--but this fine machine is costly beyond the dreams even of Willis’ vivid imagination, and it is but a question of time when the negro tar burner and his handmade tar kilns will be another vanished bit of the Old South.

Willis had made a tar-burning agreement--the usual one in such cases--with Massa Ralph. Massa Ralph supplied the dry pine wood--“light ’ud” Willis calls it--and he further agreed to furnish the barrels to hold the tar. Uncle Willis, on his part, undertook to collect the wood on Massa Ralph’s land, to build and burn the tar-kiln, to fill the barrels and deliver them to the railroad at Hoffman. Each was to receive a half of the receipts from the sale of the tar.

On a piece of level ground, down in the valley beside the little trickling branch, just behind my bungalow, Willis “done built hisself a whalin’ big tar-kil’.” First he dug out a slight hollow, like a great wash basin full twenty feet across, with a trench leading from the center to a deep pit dug just outside the outer edge. Then he and his brother Henry hitched up their old grey mule and scoured all over the land, piling the dilapidated wagon with the dry wood they picked up everywhere and hauling load after load to the site of the kiln. After a great store had been collected, Henry fell to work chopping up the knotty stumps and splitting the long logs, while Willis painstakingly constructed the kiln. This must be carefully and neatly done, for the quantity of the tar yielded depends most directly upon the close and proper building of the kiln. Around the outer edge Uncle Willis laid row upon row of the long, straight, split rails, each pointing due to the center and each one fitted with scrupulous nicety into its place. In the center of the kiln he stowed away the little twisted knots and gnarled bits of root, all so rich in tar. This is rough work too, and were not old Willis’ black hands as tough as sole leather, they would be filled with splinters.

After the kiln had slowly risen till it was full seven feet high at its outer rim, it was topped off with a roof made of the split rails. Aunt Sally and “de chilluns” were now pressed into service flagging the kiln. On the roof they laid a covering of long-leaf pine boughs, and then they stuck similar branches into the crevices of the sides until the whole looked like a great, regular mound of giant pine needles. Uncle Willis and Henry again took up the work. They now banked the kiln. Starting at the ground, and building up tier on tier, they laid long logs of green wood round the kiln. In between the long logs and the kiln itself they packed sod and dirt, transforming the great heap of pine needles into an octagonal, log block house in miniature. Sand and clay piled six inches deep on the top and then packed down finished the job. Willis was now ready to burn his kiln.

So far everything had gone swimmingly, but now a long series of troubles began to fall with distressing regularity on Willis’ woolly head. A dozen times a day he would come shuffling up for my consolation and advice. Off would come his battered hat and he would begin, “’Deed, Massa Billie, Ah doan’ know----”, till, had I not felt so sorry for the old man, I would have been driven crazy by these woeful consultations.

In this big tar-kiln he had planned and executed his _magnum opus_, which should not only re-establish his shaky credit at the store in Hoffman, but must also supply the necessary capital for cotton seed and fertilizer against the fast approaching planting season. He was staking more than his little all on this kiln; he was gambling in futures, futures of slab-side pork and corn meal; a promised dress for the Xantippean Sally and much needed shoes for Carolina, Liza, Sally II, Robert Lee, and a couple of the other children whose names I forget.

His great tar-kiln, built so patiently and with such great expectations, contained about seventy cords of good wood and should, according to all expert calculation, yield about seventy barrels of tar. Massa Ralph’s overseer, deputized to get these seventy barrels, had only been able to collect forty. He scoured the country, mills, cross-road stores, freight offices, but every available source of supply that usually had barrels almost to give away had no barrels now, even at fancy prices. And Willis, because once the kiln was started there would be no stopping nor turning back, was afraid to fire the kiln until he had on hand enough containers to hold his expected quantity of tar. Moreover, poor Willis had agreed to pay Henry fifty cents a day till the tar was all run, and he saw the wages of his helper daily eating deeper and deeper into his profits. To cap the climax, the market price of tar was tumbling down at an amazing rate, and every no-’count nigger that passed along the road took a diabolical delight in stopping at Willis’s cabin and giving him the very latest and most discouraging market quotations. Poor old Willis! Whenever he saw me he implored help in getting him some barrels, and I never rode over to Hoffman without bearing an urgent message to the freight agent--“Fo’ de Lawd’s sake, Massa Billie, tell him t’ hurry hup dat lot ob bar’ls what Massa Ralph done order in Wilmington.”

At last the long-expected barrels came, and one evening about dusk Jim Watson scraped the dirt and boughs off the roof of Willis’ kiln for a couple of square feet and applied a match to the dry lightwood underneath. As the red flames darted through the black smoke, Willis heaved a great sigh of relief. Had everything gone smoothly, Willis would have run the kiln himself. So many things had gone wrong and so very much depended on this kiln that he called in Jim Watson, who plays the part of tar burning efficiency expert throughout the Sandhills, in the hope, I believe, of his being able to break the spell of bad luck. In the back of his brain there was some notion that the fee he paid to Jim Watson hired not only his supposedly superior experience, but also bought a charm against further misfortune.

All night long the ruddy glow of the burning kiln lighted up the little valley, and the pungent, piney smell of the black smoke filled the air. Up at the bungalow, two hundred yards away, we could hear the snap and crackle of the burning knots and the thick scent of the pitch penetrated the house. Early in the morning, Willis covered the hole in the banking of the roof under the direction of Jim Watson who, perched on an up-turned barrel, gave directions with a thoroughly expert and professional air. Now the kiln began to smoulder, and the pair sat down, only getting up to patch with great shovelsful of earth any cracks that appeared in the banking.

About the middle of the afternoon, the tar, sweated out of the pine wood by the intense heat, began to ooze out of the trench. Slowly at first, drop by drop; soon in a little trickle that grew in size, till by nightfall, it was pouring out so that one of the workers must busily ply the bucket all the time. This bucket Willis had fastened on the end of a long pole, and with it he scooped the black, sticky mess out of the pit, pouring it into a rough wooden trough through which it flowed into the waiting barrel. This work must go on day and night, and the kiln must also be carefully watched lest it catch fire; so Willis had built a crude hut for shelter, and here, when not on duty, the burners rested on a great heap of filthy blankets. Sally brought them their meals, and they slept by turns in snatches.

Jim Watson had not brought good luck with him, for just as the tar began to run, it started to rain. A chilly northwest wind sent the shivers chasing each other down old Willis’ sun-loving back, and the water soon came pouring through the chinks in the imperfect shelter. The wet and cold could, at worst, mean a heavy cold or a sharp twinge of the rheumatism; a heavier blow of misfortune awaited Willis.

The great kiln behaved itself very properly indeed for a day and a half, and twenty good barrels were filled with tar. In spite of the bad weather old Willis was jubilant, but his joy was untimely, for despite his expert help, things went wrong with the kiln. Air sneaked in somewhere through some unnoticed crack in the banking, and then the lightwood, instead of smouldering, burst into flame, burning up both wood and tar. What a blaze the tar-soaked pine made! It roared and it snapped. Great jets of red fire, followed by puffs of inky smoke, thrust themselves through the banking. Every now and then a blazing knot, accompanied by a whole train of bright sparks, would be hurled through the roof and shot ten feet into the air. Fifty feet from the kiln I had to hold my hands over my face to keep off the intense heat, but like a great black Satan stoking the brimstone fires, Willis slaved, patching the shattered banking, throwing dirt on the roof in the hope of smothering the fierce fire and saving the remnant of the tar. And Jim Watson worked too, like a Trojan, for the blame and disgrace of the accident were his.

Finally, they succeeded in choking the flames under control, but the seventy barrels of tar for which Willis had worked so hard and waited so long had shrunk to thirty-one. Over at Hoffman he received just four dollars and a quarter a barrel for his tar, and but ten days before the price had been five dollars. He paid off his high-priced expert and settled up with his brother Henry. Then he came over to consult with me. He took the crumpled, little wad of dirty bank notes out of his pocket and looked at it ruefully.

“Hit doan’ mak’ much ob ah show fo’ all dat work an’ all dat time, does hit, Massa Billie?” and then he added earnestly, his black face seamed with doubt and apprehension, “Mebbe so--Ah doan’ know--but hit do ’most seem as eff thar’s sumbuddy conjured dat ole tar kil’.”

Some Quail Dogs--And Others

“Old Joe” and his daughter “Queen” are as ill-assorted a brace of pointers as ever hunted a covey along the edge of a field of cow peas. In the first place, nobody, to look at them, would ever suspect their relationship.