Two Adventures

In a country neighborhood where half the people were cousins to the other half, gossip could not but spring up and flourish as lushly as pursley, named by the Indians, “the white man’s foot.”

The gossip was usually kindly; sometimes it was captious, now and then it was almost malicious. Everything depends upon the medium through which the floating matter in the air is strained.

Cousin Molly Belle’s best friends thought and said that she chose judiciously in marrying the clean-lived, high-minded gentleman who had loved her before she was grown and whom she loved dearly in return. Her next best friends intimated that the most popular girl in the county might have done better for herself than to take Frank Morton, as fine a fellow as ever lived, but whose share of his father’s estate was a small plantation with a tolerable house upon it, a dozen “hands” and, maybe, a thousand dollars or so in bonds and stocks. The girls she had out-belled, the girls’ mothers, and sundry youths to whom Mrs. Frank Morton had given the mitten in her singlehood, said openly that she had quite thrown herself away in settling down to house-keeping, poultry-raising, and home-making in an out-of-the-way farmstead, with little society except that of a man ten years older, and thirty years soberer, than herself.

What a different story I could have told to those who doubted, and those who pitied! Nowhere in all our broad and bonny State did human lives flow on more smoothly and radiantly than in the white house nestled under the great oak that was a landmark for miles around. It had but five rooms, kitchen, store-room, smoke-house, and other domestic offices being in detached buildings, as was the custom of the region and times. If there had been fifty they could not have held the happiness that streamed through the five as lavishly as the sunshine, and, like the sunshine, was newly made every day.

I was going on ten years old when my sweet mother gave a little sister to Bud and me. She had been with us but three days when Cousin Molly Belle drove over for me and the small hair trunk that meant a visit of several days when it went along. This time it signified four of the very loveliest weeks of my life, and two Adventures.

The blessed grandchildren, at whose instance these tales of that all-so-long-ago are written with flying pen and brimming heart, and sometimes eyes so moist that the lines waver and swim upon the page, will have it as their parents insisted before them that “we never, never can have such good times and so many happenings as you had when you were new.”

If I smile quietly in telling over to myself the simple elements and few, out of which the good times were made, and how tame the happenings would be to modern young folk, I cannot gainsay the truth that my daily life was full and rich, and that every hour had a peculiar interest.

For one thing, there was a baby at Oakholme, a bouncing boy, sturdy of limb and of lung, and so like both his parents in all the good qualities possible to a baby, as to leave nothing to be desired by the best friends aforesaid, and no room for criticism on the part of the malcontents. Out-of-doors were chickens, ducks, turkeys, guinea-fowls, pigs, calves, pigeons, and a couple of colts, all, like the baby boy, the best of their kind. What time was left on our hands after each had had its meed of attention, was more than consumed by a library such as few young planters had collected in a county where choice literature was as much household plenishing as beds, tables, and candlesticks.

It was July, and the days were at their longest according to the Warrock’s Almanac that hung over Cousin Frank’s desk in a corner of the dining room. They were never so short to me before.

Adventure N befell us one forenoon, as Cousin Molly Belle and I were topping and tailing gooseberries for tarts, on the side porch. Baby Carter was on the mat at our feet, bulging his eyes and swelling his cheeks in futile efforts to extort a squeak from a chinquapin whistle his father had made for him. The kind that, as you may recollect, kept the whistle in them over night, and did not shrivel up.

“It’s there, old fellow, if you really know how to get it out,” Cousin Frank told his son and heir. “Everything depends upon yourself.”

“Like other things that people fret for,” moralized the mother.

Nevertheless, she reached down for the whistle, wiped the mouthpiece dry, and sent the baby into ecstasies by executing “Yankee Doodle” flourishingly upon it. A chinquapin fife lends itself more readily to the patriotic, step-and-go-fetch-it melody than to any other in the national repertoire. Carter crowed, opened his mouth wide, and beat his fat pink palms together.

“Just as they applaud the clown at the circus!” said the performer. “He already recognizes his mother’s talents.”

“If he ever fails to do that, I’ll flog him out of his boots!” retorted the father.

A wild commotion at “the quarters” cut his speech short. Women shrieked, children bellowed, men roared, and two words disentangled themselves from the turmoil.

“Mad dog! mad dog!” pronounced, as the warning cry is spoken everywhere at the South, with a heavy accent on the first word.

Cousin Frank whipped up the baby; Cousin Molly thrust her hand under the collar of Hector, a fine pointer who lay on the floor, and, urging me before them, they hustled us all into the house in the half twinkle of an eye. In another, Cousin Frank was driving a load of buckshot into his gun faster than it was ever loaded before, even by him, and he was a hunting expert.

“Dear!” his wife caught the hand laid on the door-knob; her eyes were wild and imploring.

“Yes, my darling!”

He was out and the door was shut.

We flew to the window. Right up the path leading by the quarters from the spring at the foot of the hill, trotted an enormous bull dog. Half a dozen men were pelting him with stones from a respectful distance. He paid no attention to stones or shouts. Keeping the straight path, his brute head wagging drunkenly, he was making directly for the open yard-gate, from which a gravel walk led to the porch where we had been sitting. Snap, his master’s favorite hunter, and the petted darling of his mistress, was hitched to the rack by the gate, ready-saddled for Cousin Frank’s morning round of the plantation. At the noise behind him, the intelligent creature threw up his handsome head, glanced over his shoulder, and began to plunge and snort, as if aware of the danger. His master spoke soothingly as he planted his own body between him and the ugly beast.

“Steady, old boy! steady!”

In saying it he raised the gun to his shoulder. It was all done so quickly that I had hardly seen the livid horror in Cousin Molly Belle’s face when the good gun spoke, the muzzle within ten yards of the dog’s head, and he rolled over in the path.

“What if you had missed him! He would have been upon you before you could reload!” shuddered the wife, as we ran out to meet Cousin Frank.

“I did not mean to miss him. If I had, I should have clubbed my gun and brained him. No, dear love! it would not ’have done as well had I fired at him over the palings.’ Snap was on the other side of the gate. And” with an arch flash he might have learned from her “you and Namesake and I think the world and all of Snap, you know.”

It was the only allusion he ever made in my hearing to the escapade that won him his wife.

We learned, within a few hours, that the dog had bitten several cows, five other dogs, and a valuable colt, before he reached Oakholme.

I was always very fond of Cousin Frank. Henceforward, he stepped into the vanguard of my heroes. I did not believe that Israel Putnam could have done anything more daring than what I had witnessed in the safe place in which he put us “before he sallied forth into the very jaws of death.” That was the way I described it to myself.

Tramping through the lower pasture at his side that afternoon I tried to voice my admiration to him, but used less inflated language. I dearly enjoyed these long walks over the plantation in his company. He was an excellent farmer, and kept no overseer. I learned a great deal of forestry and botany from his talk. If he adapted himself, consciously, to my understanding, he did not let me perceive it. The recollection of his unfailing patience and his apparent satisfaction in the society of the child who worshipped him and his wife, has been a useful lesson to me in my intercourse with the young. I had told Cousin Molly Belle, a long time ago, that he “talked straight to children,” with none of the involved meanings and would-be humorous turns of speech with which some grown-uppers diverted themselves and mystified us.

When he smiled at my well-mouthed, “Do you know, Cousin Frank, that your bravery may have saved at least four lives Cousin Molly Belle’s, and baby’s, and Snap’s, and mine?” I felt that he was not laughing at me inside, as the manner of some is.

“I don’t know about that, Namesake.” Nobody but himself and his wife was allowed to call me that. They were one, you know. “All of you would probably have got out of the way, except Snap. It would have been a great pity to have him bitten. But here is a wee bit of a thing that could, and would, save a good many lives if people were as well acquainted with it as they ought to be. I am surprised that it is so little known in a part of the country where snakes abound as they do about here.”

He stooped to gather, and gave to me, some succulent sprigs from a plant that grew in profusion along the branch running through the meadow.

“It is a cure for a snake-bite if bruised into a poultice and bound upon the place soon after one is bitten. My father showed it to me a great many years ago, when I was a little shaver, and told me how he had learned about it from an old Indian herb-doctor. He tried it several times for moccasin-and adder-and copperhead-bites among his servants, and it was a cure in every instance. It grows on both sides of this branch, and nowhere else that I know of on the plantation. My father was an admirable botanist.”

“So are you,” said I, stoutly.

“Oh, no. As the saying is, his chips were worth more than my logs.”

No law of nature is more nearly invariable than that Events are twins, and often triplets. That very evening, after supper, Cousin Frank was on his way from the stables to the house, and saw what he mistook for a carriage whip lying in the walk. The moon was shining and he had no doubt as to what the thing was when he stooped to pick it up. Before he touched it, it made one swift writhe and dart and struck him on the wrist.

Cousin Molly Belle was laying Carter in the cradle, the last note of her lullaby upon her lips when her husband entered. He clutched his right wrist tightly with the left hand and was pale, but his voice was steady and gentle.

“Dear,” he said, “don’t be frightened, but I have been bitten by a snake. A copperhead, I think. Get me some whiskey, please.”

“The whiskey, Flora! Quick!” called the wife to her maid who stood by. “Pour out a tumblerful and give it to him.”

For herself, she fell upon her knees, seized her husband’s wrist and carried it to her mouth. This I saw, and heard the first words of his startled protest as the dear lips closed upon the wound. I was out of the room and clear of the house the next minute and speeding down the path and hill to the lower pasture.

The snake was at large, and might waylay me from any bush or tuft of grass. The moonbeams were ghostly and the stillness of the wide solitude was eerie. Being but a child, and a girl-child, I thought of these things, and of the likelihood of meeting runaway negroes, and mad dogs, and stray sane curs whose duty it was to attack nocturnal trespassers, and of a vicious bull never let out to roam the pasture except at night. I was afraid of them all, intellectually. My heart was too full of a mightier dread to let bugbears turn me back. I ran right on until the branch, a silver ribbon on the dark bosom of the meadow, was before me. Grasses and weeds were laden with dew, and the water whirled and whispered about the roots. I could have believed that the purling formed itself into words when I knelt down to fumble for the snake-bite cure. I would not let myself be scared. I kept saying over and over “To save his life! to save his life!”

In the intensity of my excitement, language that I was afraid was blasphemous, yet could not exclude from my mind, pressed upon me:

“He saved others. Himself he cannot save!”

He might be dying now. He had said that the poultice ought to be applied at once. Horrid stories of what had happened to people who were bitten by rattlesnakes and cobras tormented me, and would not be beaten off.

“A copperhead, I think he said. How could he know that it was not a cobra? Would he swell up, turn black, and expire in convulsions before I could reach him?” I said “expire in convulsions,” out of a book. Everyday Virginia vernacular fell short of the exigency.

My feet were drenched, my pantalettes and skirts were bedraggled up to the knees, my eyes were large and black in my colorless face, when I burst into the chamber, and threw the bunch of priceless herbs into Cousin Molly Belle’s lap. I was too spent for speech.

Cousin Frank’s coat and vest were off; his right shirt-sleeve was rolled up to the shoulder, and he was holding his hand and wrist in a deep bowl of warm water. The air reeked with the fumes of whiskey and hartshorn.

I concluded, when I came to think of it the next day, that the whiskey must have been doing antidotal work by getting into his head, for he laughed outright at sight of the specific I had brought. Then, tears real tears and plenty of them suffused his eyes and made his voice weak and husky. Or was it the whiskey?

“You are a dear, brave, thoughtful Namesake!” he said, clearing his throat. “Darling!” to his wife who was eyeing the herbs wonderingly, “She has been all the way to the lower meadow for those. I showed her the snake-bite cure to-day. Bruise them and put them on my wrist. Then Namesake must get off her wet clothes and go to bed. The danger is over.”

I was thirty years old before I found out that what I had risked so much to procure was not the panacea he had showed me, but common jewel-weed, or wild touch-me-not, a species of the Impatiens of botanists, harmless, but not curative.

And they had never let me guess what a blunder I had made!