The Starbucks. Opie Percival Read
of Contents
Reproduced in Colors from Photographs
| page | |
| "She was the only mother I knowed," | Frontispiece |
| "Them what hain't had trouble ain't had no cause to look fur the Lord," | 48 |
| "Yes, I d-d-d-do say so, a-a-a-atter a f-f-f-fashion." | 80 |
| "Kotch 'em stealin' hosses, I reckon." | 128 |
| "Well," Margaret exclaimed, "I never was so surprised." | 208 |
| "Go on erway an' let me talk ter myse'f. You kain't talk." | 240 |
| "If you air the Jedge, I am sorter diserp'inted in you." | 288 |
| "Jedge, there ain't no better man than he is, an' for the Lord's sake don't hang him." | 304 |
"THE STARBUCKS."
[From the Drama of the Same Name.]
CHAPTER I.
THE PEOPLE OF THE HILLS.
In every age of the world people who live close to nature have, by the more cultivated, been classed as peculiar. An ignorant nation is brutal, but an uneducated community in the midst of an enlightened nation is quaint, unconsciously softened by the cultivation and refinement of institutions that lie far away. In such communities live poets with lyres attuned to drollery. Moved by the grandeurs of nature, the sunrise, the sunset, the storm among the mountains, the tiller of the gullied hill-side field is half dumb, but with those apt "few words which are seldom spent in vain," he charicatures his own sense of beauty, mingling rude metaphor with the language of "manage" to a horse.
I find that I am speaking of a certain community in Tennessee. And perhaps no deductions drawn from a general view of civilization would apply to these people. Some of their feuds, it is said, may be traced back to the highlands of Scotland, and it is true that many of their expressions seem to come from old books which they surely have never read, but they do not eat oats, nor do they stand in sour awe of Sunday. What religion they have is a pleasure to them. In the log meeting-house they pray and sing, sometimes with a half-open eye on a fellow to be "thrashed" on the following day for not having voted as he agreed; "Amen" comes fervently from a corner made warm by the ardor of the repentant sinner; "Hallelujah!" is shouted from the mourner's bench, and a woman in nervous ecstasy pops her streaming hair; but the average man has come to talk horse beneath the trees, and the young fellow with sun-burnt down on his lip is there slily to hold the hand of a maid frightened with happiness and boastingly to whisper shy words of love.
"Do you like Sam Bracken?" he inquires.
"Not much."
"If you like him much, I bet I can whup him. Like Steve Smith?"
"Not so powerful well."
"I can whup him."
"Bet you can't."
"You wait."
And the chances are that unless she modifies her statement the Smith boy will be compelled to answer for the crime of her compliment.
In this community, in the edge of what is known as East Tennessee, the memory of Andrew Jackson is held in deepest reverence. To those people he was as a god-like hero of antiquity. Single-handed he defeated the British at New Orleans. Nicholas Biddle, a great banker somewhere away off yonder, had gathered all the money in the land, and it was Jackson who compelled him to disgorge, thus not only establishing himself as the master of war, but as the crusher of men who oppress the poor.
Prominent in the neighborhood of Smithfield, a town of three or four hundred inhabitants, was Jasper Starbuck. Earlier in his life he had whipped every man who stood in need of that kind of training. Usually of a blythesome nature, he was subject to fits of melancholy, only to be relieved by some sort of physical entanglement with an enemy. Then, his "spell" having passed, he would betake himself to genial affairs, help a neighbor with his work, lend his chattels to shiftless farmers, cut wood and haul it for widows, and gathering children about him entertain them with stories of the great war.
And how dearly that war had cost him. East Tennessee did not tear itself loose from the Union; Andrew Johnson and Parson Brownlow, one a statesman and the other a fanatic, strangled the edicts of the lordly lowlanders and sent regiment after regiment to the Federal army. Among the first to enlist were old Jasper Starbuck and his twin boys. The boys did not come back. In the meantime their heart-broken mother died, and when the father returned to his desolate home, there was a grave beneath the tree where he had heard a sweet voice in the evening.
Years passed and he married again, a poor girl in need of a home; and at the time which serves as the threshold of this history, he was sobered down from his former disposition to go out upon a "pilgrimage" of revenge. His "spells" had been cured by grief, but nothing could kill his humor. Drawling and peculiar, never boisterous, it was stronger than his passion and more enduring than the memory of a wrong. He was not a large man. A neighbor said that he was built after the manner of a wild-cat. He was of iron sinew and steel nerve. His eyes were black with a glint of their youthful devilishness. His thick hair was turning gray.
Margaret, his wife, was a tender scold. She was almost a foundling, but a believer in heredity could trace in her the evidences of good blood. From some old mansion, long years in ruin, a grace had escaped and come to her. An Englishman, traveling homeward from the defunct colony of Rugby, declared that she was an uncultivated duchess.
"This union was blessed,"—say the newspapers and story-books, speaking of a marriage—"with a beautiful girl," or a "manly boy." Often this phrase is flattery, but sometimes, as in this instance, it is the truth. Lou Starbuck was beautiful. In her earlier youth she was a delicious little riot of joy. As she grew older, she was sometimes serious with the thought that her father and mother had suffered. She loved the truth and believed that bravery was not only akin to godliness, but the right hand of godliness.
In Starbuck's household, or at least attached to his log-house establishment, there were two other persons, an old black mammy who had nursed Jasper, and a trifling negro named Kintchin.
One day in summer there came two notable visitors, Mrs. Mayfield, and her nephew Tom Elliott, both from Nashville, sister and son