第28章

"I reckon I would; but how am I goin' to school, now, I'd like to know? Iain't got no money to buy books, and the school-teacher said you have to pay to go to school, up here.""Well, we'll see about that," said the Major, and Chad wondered what he meant.

Presently the Major got up and went to the sideboard and poured out a drink of whiskey and, raising it to his lips, stopped:

"Will you join me?" he asked, humorously, though it was hard for the Major to omit that formula even with a boy.

"I don't keer if I do," said Chad, gravely. The Major was astounded and amused, and thought that the boy was not in earnest, but he handed him the bottle and Chad poured out a drink that staggered his host, and drank it down without winking. At the fire, the Major pulled out his chewing tobacco. This, too, he offered and Chad accepted, equalling the Major in the accuracy with which he reached the fireplace thereafter with the juice, carrying off his accomplishment, too, with perfect and unconscious gravity. The Major was nigh to splitting with silent laughter for a few minutes, and then he grew grave.

"Does everybody drink and chew down in the mountains?""Yes, sir," said Chad. "Everybody makes his own licker where I come from.""Don't you know it's very bad for little boys to drink and chew?""No, sir."

"Did nobody ever tell you it was very bad for little boys to drink and chew?""No, sir"--not once had Chad forgotten that.

"Well, it is."

Chad thought for a minute. "Will it keep me from gittin' to be a BIG man?""Yes."

Chad quietly threw his quid into the fire.

"Well, I be damned," said the Major under his breath. "Are you goin' to quit?""Yes, sir."

Meanwhile, the old driver, whose wife lived on the next farm, was telling the servants over there about the queer little stranger whom his master had picked up on the road that day, and after Chad was gone to bed, the Major got out some old letters from a chest and read them over again. Chadwick Buford was his great-grandfather's twin brother, and not a word had been heard of him since the two had parted that morning on the old Wilderness Road, away back in the earliest pioneer days. So, the Major thought and thought suppose--suppose?" And at last he got up and with an uplifted candle, looked a long while at the portrait of his grandfather that hung on the southern wall.

Then, with a sudden humor, he carried the light to the room where the boy was in sound sleep, with his head on one sturdy arm, his hair loose on the pillow, and his lips slightly parted and showing his white, even teeth; he looked at the boy a long time and fancied he could see some resemblance to the portrait in the set of the mouth and the nose and the brow, and he went back smiling at his fancies and thinking--for the Major was sensitive to the claim of any drop of the blood in his own veins--no matter how diluted. He was a handsome little chap.

"How strange! How strange!"

And he smiled when he thought of the boy's last question.

"Where's YO' mammy?"

It had stirred the Major.

"I am like you, Chad," he had said. "I've got no mammy--no nothin', except Miss Lucy, and she don't live here. I'm afraid she won't be on this earth long. Nobody lives here but me, Chad."