Chapter VII

I walked into two years of pelting wretchedness. It is quite true that Amory Hall and Colonel Amory and Williams and Barget and Old Mill quarter took on by comparison an angelic hue. I had been bought by a man who in any land or time would have been a kind of devil.

I suppose many Virginians knew that he was an “unkind” master. But he kept just within the law, that to be sure allowed impatient or exacting masters leeway enough. And there was the greatest feeling of sanctity of property and of the individual rights of owners. So no one interfered. They would have said that they “could” not, that he was within his “rights.” It is true that there was a social displeasure, at times coming within sight of ostracism. Virginians are no unkindlier than Englishmen and Scots, whom in truth they are. Domestic tyranny occurs in England too, and now and then arises there or anywhere some misbegotten son of darkness who works havoc. But slavery may place many in the power of a demon.

David Scott did not philosophize those two years. He suffered in a black and dumb rage, and he hardened and grew more evil than he was. Eboe Sam was with me, but Askew broke Eboe Sam’s spirit. He became an apathetic or timidly smiling poor Negro. My spirit was not broken, but I arrived at the man named Vengeful.

I ran away, was taken and maltreated; ran away again and was taken and maltreated. I began to think of murder.

It would have come to that, but the third time I tried _I got away_.

It was September. I left at night, and it was hot and very still with tension in the air. I sweated as I ran through the forest. Askew had great dogs, and I knew he would follow with them. What I aimed at was a stream running through the forest. If I could reach it, I might throw them off the scent. It was some distance away and a question if I could gain it before dawn, gain it and wade down it and across and begin again with a faint, a temporary security. As I ran the stars went out above me, group by group. “Storm!” I thought. “Well, it might help.”

The forest leaped into a pale gold, instant light, then died again into blackness. Thunder followed. “You’re coming up quickly at the last,” I thought, “but you’ve been on the way for a day and night.” A hot puff of wind struck my cheek, the forest began to talk. There came a dazzling glare, a Judgment crack. In a moment the forest was shouting, then rushed a downpour like the crest of Noah’s forty days. I could not run, but crouched beside an uprooted tree and exulted in the deluge that would wash my tracks away.

At dawn still was howling and havoc. I knew now that it was no ordinary storm, but one of those gales, edges or effects of the more southerly hurricanes, that at long intervals struck Virginia. While it lasted I might make hay. It lasted two days, and the land ran with water like a sluice. The stream I sought for had become a dozen, great trees were overthrown and doubtless chimneys fell. None but a runagate with Askew to fear would have liked that being abroad! But I liked it. I liked that great fight with wind and water that were yet my helpers and might be exulted in and with. I was fey. And, ah, God, I liked the loneliness, I liked my freedom!

I went west for a time and then I bent south to the River James that was running high and strong and yellow. I wished to cross it and make for North Carolina, yet how I did not know. It might not be swam as it was, and no boats were forth to-day, and if they were how would they receive me who had not a groat, and “man in trouble” written all over him? Askew’s ragged, grim plantation lay considerably to the west and the wilderness from the Amory Hall neighborhood. Hereabouts stretched ancient forest, and any dwellings, few and small, stood far apart. A road ran near the river, bottomless now with mud and pools of water. I stood there in the storm that still raved, though with a sunken fury, and saw no life upon its long stretches to one hand or the other.

I was wet through and torn by the forest; the bread and meat I had abstracted from the plantation I was leaving was long ago eaten; I had had little sleep and no shelter, I was half naked, burned and gaunt as a wolf. As I stood there, back flashed to me Tolbooth Lane, Saint Giles and the high roofs of the Luckenbooths. That, too, was witches’ weather, and Sandy Scott’s barn had proved no long shelter. Five years ago, five lang, lang years ago! Suddenly night thicker than a knife could cut descended on my soul. Through it I heard the river there below me, swollen and hoarse, flinging itself to the sea. I said, “Drowning’s short. Let’s be over with it!” and put myself into motion toward the yellow flood that was already carrying logs and broken trees enough.

A bank of earth and a row of huge, ghostly sycamores hid from me the stream’s edge. As I came down, my head dizzy now and singing, I heard bagpipes, and knew that I must be dead already and back in Scotland.

It was not the pipes but a man with a flute, seated before a kind of cabin built up from a flatboat laden with skins and other matters, and fastened to a sycamore in a backwater under the bank. I saw him and checked myself and would have vanished among hazel and alder, but his eye was keen or he heard the loosened stone and earth. He took the flute from his lips and laid his hand upon a musket on the deck beside him. “You there in the bushes! Better come out--but in case you mean any harm, I’ll just state that I’m a dead shot!”

I left the alders and he saw that I was unarmed. It was the middle of the day, the rain had halted and a cold and lurid light wrapped the world. He stared at me.

“Well, I know what you are! You’re a runaway! Isn’t Daniel Askew’s land over that-away?”

“You’re in the right,” I answered, and came to the water’s edge, a strip of flood being yet between him and me. “If you’ve got a bite of anything, remember that we are both men!”

“Why did you come racing down as though to a meeting?”

“I meant to plunge in and have life over that I was tired of. But life has an awful amount of life in it. My mind’s changing.”

“If you think you can take my boat, you’re mistook.”

“I don’t, man!” I said. “You’ve got a gun. And I’m nigh dead, and you look fresh and limber as a Maytime buck. What I’m asking you for is just mercy.”

“I’m not putting across to the other side. As soon as the sky clears and the old river stops her tossing a mite, I’m dropping on down to Norfolk.”

As he spoke there rose before the inner eye a ship with heaped canvas. If I could get to a ship, if a ship would take me aboard! Ships forever wanted seamen and were never too cautious whence they came. It was like threading a needle in the dark, but I threaded it, and willed Norfolk port, not Carolina. _O what guided ye, David Scott?_

I said, “Take me to Norfolk, man! By any chance, are you knowing Daniel Askew?”

He spat. “Yes, I know him.”

“Then you know why I’m running. If you hate him, you’ll not be anxious to gratify him. If you love him, you’ll be serving him, for if I’m taken I mean to murder him.”

“You may scalp him for all I care!” and he spat again. “I suppose you’d make yourself useful? Jim Halfman that was my partner got drowned at the falls.”

“Try me and see,” I said. “And in the name of all that’s good, man, haven’t you anything to eat?”

He looked at me hard again, then rising brought a plank and with it made a bridge from boat to shore. I came across, and ah, that flatboat and its stinking skins seemed to me as fair as a palace! And when he gave me venison and maize cakes to eat and poured for me half a pint of rum and water, I felt that he was a kind of woodland god.

Christian Todd, that was his name, a man of forty and trader to the Indians for half those years. He had an old hunting shirt and leggings and an otter-skin cap, a long knife and a short knife, a musket and powderhorn and bag of shot, and his flute. His hair and beard were long and tawny yellow, and his gray eyes looked vague and never were so in the least. His tongue lay silent nine-tenths of the time in the cavern of his jaws. The other tenth, if there were no other need, he slowly talked of Indians and their ways or of forest beasts and theirs.

The blue sky shone, the light played, the air grew balm. We loosed the boat from the shore. There were two great oars and also a short mast and small patched sail the color of a dead leaf. The hutch of a cabin, the jut of his heaps of skins and other truck furnished cover for me when boats passed us or we were hailed from the shore. Neither happened often, for this is a hugeous river and country and the human life is not numerous. Moreover, Christian Todd seemed to be known and his ways respected. When he shouted, “Going down the river and I’m late!” none overpersuaded or tried to prevent. The first night, the river still rough and high, we laid to beside an ancient, broken landing, but the second the moon was bright and the water wide and we went on with the flood, one sleeping while the other waked. No one pursued, no one summoned us in the name of the law.

“My luck has turned!” said David Scott, and was no more thankful or in-seeing than that.

But I liked Christian Todd who never asked a question as to my past or my future, who could keep a colorful silence, and who lived with the great forest, not chopped it down. It is true he traded in the lives of the beasts; there were heaped about us skins and fur of fox and bear and marten and squirrel, doe and fawn and beaver. But David Scott thought of that no otherwise than as a matter of course. David Scott and Christian Todd. David Scott, twenty-seven years old, going down James River on a flatboat, good meat and bread to eat and rum to drink, and before him day and night a dream ship, tall and white as the moon, that might even take him back to Scotland.

Now and then Christian Todd took up his flute. He played strange airs, Indian maybe. By now I knew well the melodies of the Negroes. It was not these, nor was it English or Scots. He may have taken them from the Indians or from himself. He was a strange, Panlike creature.

So I went, so safely and securely, down to Norfolk. It was as though, suddenly, a warlock had taken me up.

The river grew enormously broad, the sea was felt, the sun glistened against gull wings and the sails of tall ships. Now I saw, though still afar, that small, rude, port town that I had not seen since the _King William_ bore me by it. And not a hitch; as smoothly had we gone as though Heaven had said, Let it be so! Christian Todd pointed. “That black mark’s my landing. The merchant there in the brick house takes my skins.”

“It’ll be dusk before we get there. Am I at all like Jim Halfman?”

“Not the least bit. And there’s always a power of people around.”

I shook myself and woke up and tried to plan. The sun was setting, fiery red. Flood and our small sail carrying us on, Christian Todd picked up his flute and began to play an air sweet as the throat of the mocking bird and melancholy as the whippoorwill. In his boat, in the forest, he was a wise man, but I knew without being told that in a white man’s town with white man’s law around, his magic would depart.

And yet I could not plan. I was in a dream and yet not so. And what it might be I did not know, but I never truly doubted that now at last I was quitting Virginia who had dreamed so often of quitting it. I say I do not know, and yet maybe I do.

The sun went down. There flared a great, red, autumnal afterglow. We were over toward the southern shore, and now the landing, the brick houses of the merchants and the town beyond increased in size, and the anchored ships in number. I had reached the point that I might easily stay upon the flatboat through the night, leaving my wits to work at dawn, and just as I rested upon that and looked again at the sky that flamed as though the earth beneath were on fire, and at the wide water and smelled the sea, the lanterns were lighted upon a large ship swinging at anchor close before us.

“I don’t know her,” said Christian Todd. “But then I forget ships, being gone so long in the land of canoes.”

It was not so dark but that much of her might be seen, lying there under bare masts, and now we drew nearer and nearer. She had a collected and tidy look, her boats were in, her men aboard. We heard the bo’sn’s pipe. “She’s a creature ready for the sea,” said David Scott, and his voice had to himself a fatal and resonant sound.

“Aye, at dawn the stag will be gone.”

We were moving past her, we saw her name. The great lantern showed it. _Janet._ The _Janet_ of Bristol.

David Scott stood up. “Bring her to a bit.” He hailed the ship. “_Janet_, ahoy!”

A man leaning over the rail answered. “Ye crazed wee boatie, what d’ ye want?”

I shouted back, “I wad gae tae sea. Tak me and ye’ll find me useful!”

Two more heads appeared. There seemed a colloquy, then the first man called out, “Come aboard then if your health’s na cracked!”

“This is my ship, Christian Todd,” I said, and we lowered sail and took up oars. When we got to her side I thanked him. “If there’s Fate or Necessity or something of that kind, then these three days have been just at its beck! Maybe all days are. You’ve been a spirit of deliverance to me, sent out of the wood, and I’m thanking you, man!”

“I was lying under a tree smoking oncet,” said Christian Todd, “and all of a sudden I sat up and said as loud as ever I spoke in my life, ‘By Jiminy! there’s very few things that aren’t meant!’ Well, there’s my hand, and think of Virginia kindly!”

So we parted, and I climbed the side of the ship, using the rope they dropped for me. When I stood on the deck and looked back, Christian Todd had pushed off; up went his dead-leaf sail, he swung toward Norfolk. The red of the sky had grown purple and a huge, round moon was coming up from the east.

“Are ye a mariner?” said the voice that, I now perceived, belonged to the first mate.

“I was one summer, for fun, on a brig that went from Berwick to Glasgow by the Hebrides.”

“‘For fun.’ D’ye hear that, Michaelson? I’m always telling ye that the sea and the ship and the trade have got their glints. All right, my billie, my name’s Mr. McNaughton. And now I’ll be taking you to cabin and the auld man.”

By the lantern I saw that he was red Scot, red as a fox, lean and dry, and six feet two. Of the sailors with him, one, Michaelson, had been born in Stirling; the other, Dory, was an Englishman. I gazed around me, but little could be seen now save by moonlight. It seemed, however, a tidy, fine ship, and I heard men laughing in the forecastle.

So we went to the great cabin. “Come in, Mr. McNaughton, and whom have you got there?” said a full, reasonable voice. And to cap the strangeness of a strange day, it seemed to David Scott that he had heard that voice before.