RICHARD TRAVIS
Strength was written in the face of
Richard Travis the owner of The Gaffs intellectual,
physical, passion-strength, strength of purpose and
of doing. Strength, but not moral strength; and
hence lacking all of being all-conquering.
He had that kind of strength which
made others think as he thought, and do as he would
have them do. He saw things clearly, strongly,
quickly. His assurance made all things sure.
He knew things and was proud of it. He knew himself
and other men. And best of all, as he thought,
he knew women.
Richard Travis was secretary and treasurer
of the Acme Cotton Mills.
To-night he was alone in the old-fashioned
but elegant dining-room of the Gaffs. The big
log fire of ash and hickory was pleasant, and the
blaze, falling in sombre color on the old mahogany
side-board which sat opposite the fireplace, on the
double ash floor, polished and shining, added a deeper
and richer hue to it. From the toes of the dragon
on which it rested, to the beak of the hand-carved
eagle, spreading his wings over the shield beneath
him, carved in the solid mahogany and surrounded by
thirteen stars, all was elegance and aristocracy.
Even the bold staring eyes of the eagle seemed proud
of the age of the side-board, for had it not been
built when the stars numbered but thirteen? And
was not the eagle rampant then?
The big brass andirons were mounted
with the bronzed heads of wood-nymphs, and these looked
saucily up at the eagle. The three-cornered cupboard,
in one corner of the room, was of cherry, with small
diamond-shaped windows in front, showing within rare
old sets of china and cut glass. The handsome
square dining table matched the side-board, only its
dragon feet were larger and stronger, as if intended
to stand up under more weight, at times.
Everything was ancient and had a pedigree.
Even the Llewellyn setter was old, for he was grizzled
around the muzzle and had deep-set, lusterless eyes,
from which the firelight, as if afraid of their very
uncanniness, darted out as soon as it entered.
And he carried his head to one side when he walked,
as old and deaf dogs do.
He lay on a rug before the fire.
He had won this license, for opposite his name on
the kennel books were more field-trials won than by
any other dog in Alabama. And now he dozed and
dreamed of them again, with many twitchings of feet,
and cocked, quivering ears, and rigid tail, as if
once more frozen to the covey in the tall sedge-grass
of the old field, with the smell of frost-bitten Lespedeza,
wet with dew, beneath his feet.
Travis stooped and petted the old
dog. It was the one thing of his household he
loved most.
“Man or dog ’tis
all the same,” he mused as he watched the dreaming
dog “it is old age’s privilege
to dream of what has been done it is youth’s
to do.”
He stretched himself in his big mahogany
chair and glanced down his muscular limbs, and drew
his arms together with a snap of quick strength.
Everything at The Gaffs was an open
diary of the master’s life. It is so in
all homes that which we gather around us,
from our books to our bed-clothes, is what we are.
And so the setter on the rug meant
that Richard Travis was the best wing-shot in the
Tennessee Valley, and that his kennel of Gladstone
setters had won more field trials than any other kennel
in the South. No man has really hunted who has
never shot quail in Alabama over a well-broken setter.
All other hunting is butchery compared to the scientific
sweetness of this sport.
There was a good-night, martial, daring
crow, ringing from the Hoss-apple tree at the dining-room
window. Travis smiled and called out:
“Lights waked you up, eh, Dick?
You’re a gay Lothario go back to
sleep.”
Richard Travis had the original stock the
Irish Greys which his doughty old grandsire,
General Jeremiah Travis, developed to championship
honors, and in a memorable main with his friend, General
Andrew Jackson, ten years after the New Orleans campaign,
he had cleared up the Tennesseans, cock and pocket.
It was a big main in which Tennessee, Georgia and
Alabama were pitted against each other, and in which
the Travis cocks of the Emerald Isle strain, as Old
Hickory expressed it, “stood the steel like a
stuck she-b’ar, fightin’ for her cubs.”
General Travis had been an expert
at heeling a cock; and it is said that his skill on
that occasion was worth more than the blood of his
Greys; for by a peculiar turn of the gaffs, so
slight as to escape the notice of any but an expert his
champion cock had struck the blow which ended the
battle. With the money won, he had added four
thousand acres to his estate, and afterwards called
it The Gaffs.
And a strong, brave man had been General
Jeremiah Travis, pioneer, Indian fighter,
Colonel in the Creek war and at New Orleans, and a
General in the war with Mexico.
His love for the Union had been that
of a brave man who had gone through battles and shed
his blood for his country.
The Civil War broke his heart.
In his early days his heart had been
in his thoroughbred horses and his fighting cocks,
and when he heard that his nephew had died with Crockett
and Bowie at the Alamo, he drew himself proudly up
and said: “A right brave boy, by the Eternal,
and he died as becomes one crossed on an Irish Grey
cock.”
That had been years before. Now,
a new civilization had come on the stage, and where
the grandsire had taken to thoroughbreds, Richard
Travis, the grandson, took to trotters. In the
stalls where once stood the sons of Sir Archie, Boston,
and imported Glencoe himself, now were sons of Mambrino
Patchin, and George Wilkes and Harold. And a
splendid lot they were sires, brood
mares and colts, in the paddocks of The Gaffs.
Travis took no man’s dust in
the Tennessee Valley. At county fairs he had
a walk-over.
He had inherited The Gaffs from his
grandfather, for both his parents died in his infancy,
and his two remaining uncles gave their lives in Virginia,
early in the war, following the flag of the Confederacy.
One of them had left a son, whom Richard
Travis had educated and who had, but the June before,
graduated from the State University.
Travis saw but little of him, since
each did as he pleased, and it did not please either
of them to get into each other’s way.
There had been no sympathy between
them. There could not be, for they were too much
alike in many ways.
There can be no sympathy in selfishness.
All through the summer Harry Travis
had spent his time at picnics and dances, and, but
for the fact that his cousin now and then missed one
of his best horses from the stable, or found his favorite
gun put away foul, or his fishing tackle broken, he
would not have known that Harry was on the place.
Cook-mother Charity kept the house.
Bond and free, she had spent all her life at The Gaffs.
Of this she was prouder than to have been housekeeper
at Windsor. Her word was law; she was the only
mortal who bossed, as she called it, Richard Travis.
Usually, friends from town kept the
owner company, and The Gaffs’ reputation for
hospitality, while generous, was not unnoted for its
hilarity.
To-night Richard Travis was lonely.
His supper tray had not been removed. He lit
a cigar and picked up a book it was Herbert
Spencer, and he was soon interested.
Ten minutes later an octoroon house-girl,
with dark Creole eyes, and bright ribbons in her hair,
came in to remove the supper dishes. She wore
a bright-colored green gown, cut low. As she reached
over the table near him he winced at the strong smell
of musk, which beauties of her race imagine adds so
greatly to their aesthetic status-quo.
She came nearer to him than was necessary, and there
was an attempted familiarity in the movement that
caused him to curve slightly the corner of his thin,
nervous lip, showing beneath his mustache. She
kept a half glance on him always. He smoked and
read on, until the rank smell of her perfume smote
him again through the odor of his cigar, and as he
looked up she had busied around so close to him that
her exposed neck was within two feet of him bent in
seeming innocence over the tray. With a mischievous
laugh he reached over and flipped the hot ashes from
his cigar upon her neck. She screamed affectedly
and danced about shaking off the ashes. Then with
feigned maidenly piquancy and many reproachful glances,
she went out laughing good humoredly.
He was good natured, and when she
was gone he laughed boyishly.
Good nature is one of the virtues of impurity.
Still giggling she set the tray down
in the kitchen and told Cook-mother Charity about
it. That worthy woman gave her a warning look
and said:
“The frisk’ness of this
new gen’ration of niggers makes me tired.
Better let Marse Dick alone he’s a
dan’g’us man with women.”
In the dining-room Travis sat quiet
and thoughtful. He was a handsome man, turning
forty. His face was strong, clean shaved, except
a light mustache, with full sensual lips and an unusually
fine brow. It was the brow of intellect all
in front. Behind and above there was no loftiness
of ideality or of veneration. His smile was constant,
and though slightly cold, was always approachable.
His manner was decisive, but clever always, and kind-hearted
at times.
Contrary to his habit, he grew reminiscent.
He despised this kind of a mood, because, as he said,
“It is the weakness of a fool to think about
himself.” He walked to the window and looked
out on the broad fields of The Gaffs in the valley
before him. He looked at the handsomely furnished
room and thought of the splendid old home. Then
he deliberately surveyed himself in the mirror.
He smiled:
“’Survival of the fittest’ yes,
Spencer is right a great great
mind. He is living now, and the world, of course,
will not admit his greatness until he is dead.
Life, like the bull that would rule the herd, is never
ready to admit that other life is great. A poet
is always a dead rhymester, a philosopher,
a dead dreamer.
“Let Spencer but die!
“Tush! Why indulge in weak
modesty and fool self-depreciation? Even instinct
tells me that very lowest of animal intellectual
forces that I survive because I am stronger
than the dead. Providence God whatever
it is, has nothing to do with it except to start you
and let you survive by overcoming. Winds you up
and then devil take the hindmost!
“It is brains brains brains
that count brains first and always.
This moral stuff is fit only for those who are too
weak to conquer. I have accomplished everything
in life I have ever undertaken everything and by
brains! Not once have I failed I have
done it by intellect, courage intuition the
thing in one that speaks.
“Now as to things of the heart,” he
stopped suddenly he even scowled half humorously.
It came over him his failure there, as one
who, sweeping with his knights the pawns of an opponent,
suddenly finds himself confronting a queen and
checkmated.
He walked to the window again and
looked toward the northern end of the valley.
There the gables of an old and somewhat weather-beaten
home sat in a group of beech on a rise among the foothills.
“Westmoreland” he
said “how dilapidated it is getting
to be! Something must be done there, and Alice Alice,” he
repeated the name softly reverently “I
feel I know it she even
she shall be mine after all these years she
shall come to me yet.”
He smiled again: “Then
I shall have won all around. Fate? Destiny?
Tush! It’s living and surviving weaker things,
such for instance as my cousin Tom.”
He smiled satisfactorily. He
flecked some cotton lint from his coat sleeve.
“I have had a hard time in the
mill to-day. It’s a beastly business robbing
the poor little half-made-up devils.”
He rang for Aunt Charity. She
knew what he wished, and soon came in bringing him
his cocktail his night-cap as she always
called it, only of late he had required
several in an evening, a thing that set
the old woman to quarreling with him, for she knew
the limit of a gentleman. And, in truth, she
was proud of her cocktails. They were made from
a recipe given by Andrew Jackson. For fifty years
Cook-mother Charity had made one every night and brought
it to “old marster” before he retired.
Now she proudly brought it to his grandson.
“Oh, say Mammy,” he said
as the old woman started out “Carpenter
will be here directly with his report. Bring another
pair of these in we will want them.”
The old woman bristled up. “To
be sure, I’ll fix ’em, honey. He’ll
not know the difference. But the licker he gits
in his’n will come outen the bottle we keep
for the hosses when they have the colic. The
bran’ we keep for gem’men would stick in
his th’oat.”
Travis laughed: “Well be
sure you don’t get that horse brand in mine.”