It was past ten o'clock when they hr.d finished their coffee; and by the time their cigars were burned out, and the dogs brought up, the sun had nearly touched the meridian. But the cover was near by; and, once they had started, it was not long till they had scattered a fine bevy of quails in a field of low weeds and sedge-grass. Cauthorne and Vance each made a fine double-shot, bringing four birds to bag. Willard did not lift his gun. He was, in fact, examining some lily-pads in a little pool, at the time the birds rose. It was rather dry for the dogs' noses. They did not work well. The quail took to wing, too, at great distances; but Vance and Cauthorne cut them down all the same. Willard loitered by the thin, tangled hedges of Cherokee-rose and yellow jasmine, now and then putting aside his gun to whip from his pocket a little sketch-book and a pencil, as some new combination of foliage or some striking bit of landscape attracted his artistic notice. He heard the sudden, spiteful reports of his companions' guns, now here, now there, as they zealously followed the frightened bevies. The dog set apart for his use had soon deserted him, to go join the huntsmen of birds instead of staying with the sketcher of flowers. He did not note the loss. The mild sunshine fell upon him, the blue sky beamed overhead, the perfumes hung round him. In the course of his slow rambling, he came upon a high bluff overlooking a miniature lake. He cast himself upon the ground under some pine-trees, amid a scattered growth of sand-lilies. Here he lay and dreamed, dimly conscious all the time of the roaring guns and the sweet smells. The spirit of the South was taking deep hold of him. Ragged negroes ploughing in an adjacent field were singing "Dixie," their voices ringing clear and high. Now and then the words of the song, intensely Southern, with the incongruous conditions accompanying them, grated harshly on his ear. It seemed so strange that these freedmen could sing at all, much less with such feeling, that red-hot secession song. A small, sluggish alligator crept out of the lake, and stretched itself on a log in the sun. Willard sketched it in all its realistic ugliness, with some saw-grass and spatter-dock showing in the background. Then a snake-bird came wriggling along in the clear water, its head above the surface, its meandering neck and lean body below. It looked like a winged serpent, a veritable water-dragon. This he also caught in a slight sketch, showing some broad-leaved riparian weeds, and tall, slender, reed-grass stalks. The guns were now far in the distance, their softened reports rising along the horizon with nothing in them to startle the wild things of the lake. Now and then beautiful wood-ducks, in all the glory of variegated plumage, sailed by on the open water from one to another thicket of bay or cypress, their trim bodies suspended in duplicate below them. A great white-breasted, forked-tailed hawk skimmed the lake's surface like a giant swallow. Over against where he sat, a little brook fell into the lake; near the current a belted halcyon swung on a magnolia-bough, now and then cackling loudly, or dropping into the water with a plash, and coming out bright and dry, with a fish in his mouth. Willard, in all his rambles, had never happened upon a spot so full of the spirit of poetry. The little landscape was primeval. The air was more ancient and pastoral, with those half-savage negro voices ringing down it, than any line of Theocritus. But what were those voices singing? The tune had changed, and the words, —
"Oh, de Tallahassee girl she's a charmer,entering his ears, seemed to diffuse themselves, like some potent charm, all through him. Her form and her face, who was the only Tallahassee girl for him, came into the field of his inner vision, with all their simple grace and inexpressible beauty. Of late she had been too much in his mind; sleeping or waking, he could not get her quite out of sight. He was not happy away from her.
She sings like de mocking-bird in May," —
Col. Vance and Cauthorne, during this time, had been enjoying such sport as rarely comes, even to the most inveterate roamer by flood and field. It is no dressed-up story, it is a fact, that the Tallahassee region literally teems with quail; and our friends found them at their best. Up to their twentieth bird neither had missed. On his twenty-first Cauthorne failed; and Vance, after waiting to see if the bird was hit, fired, and cut it down at sixty yards, thus doing what, in field-parlance, is known as "wiping the eye" of one's competitor.
"It was the fault of the loading of your shell, sir," said Vance, bowing apologetically: "it scattered the shot too widely."
"You are too generous," replied Cauthorne with a smile. "It was a failure to cover the bird, or rather to allow for flight: I aimed too far ahead of it."
"I did not like the sound of the shell, nevertheless," insisted Vance: "it was a dead, puffy report."
They were now on a high, windy hill, — there are so many such in the region, — and were wading knee-deep in thin gray weeds. The birds were springing up, singly, or two or three together, and with swift flight were swinging over the brow of the hill, and plunging into a thicket in the ravine below. It required quick work to hit them. Cauthorne saw that he for once had met more than his match with the gun. The ease with which Vance covered the hurtling game was comparable to nothing but the finest exhibitions of Paine or Carver. As yet he had not so much as winged a bird. Every one had dropped short off from its flight, stopped dead on the instant of his firing. Cauthorne missed again, a very difficult bird which got up behind him, and to his right, flying low, and whisking behind a tall tuft of briers just as he drew trigger. Vance could have killed it, but did not try. He only turned to Cauthorne, and said, —
"You ought not to have risked that. It was not fair to you."
Of course Cauthorne admitted to himself that he was beaten; but the reader is respectfully asked to recall an instance where any man ever directly and orally confessed his inferiority to any other living or dead man, when it came to a test of marksmanship. There is always somewhere to lay the blame of defeat so as not to touch the skill of the defeated party. Cauthorne thought of a thousand reasons why he had not done better, but he could see no special reason why Vance had done so well. He did not know that he was pitted against the best shot in Florida, which would mean the best in America, or the world.
When their shells were all expended, and they were trudging back to the plantation house loaded with game, a single quail sprang from a tuft of grass at their feet, and went whizzing away in a straight line from them. Quick as thought Vance snatched a small pistol from a back pocket, levelled it, and fired. To Cauthorne's utter amazement, the bird fell: he turned, and looked his astonishment.
Vance smiled.
"I beg pardon," he said: "the pistol is not a gentleman's sporting weapon; but I assure you I have long used it as such. It must look a little brigandish to you, sir, to see me using it. I hope you are not — not offended."
"No," said Cauthorne; and then he added with enthusiasm, "You are the finest shot I ever saw. This last was superb."
"Thank you, sir: you are kind to say so much," replied Vance.
They looked at each other as if they were going to shake hands, but they did not.
Willard had reached the house ahead or" them. Dinner was ready. It consisted of three courses, — soup and baked bass (bass are called trout in Florida); boiled ham and vegetables and corn-bread; a big sweet-potato pie, with brandy sauce, and a lemon-custard; scuppernong wine, coffee. Some of the table-ware attracted Willard's close attention. The plate upon which his wedge of lemon-custard was brought was at least sixty years old, white, decorated in dark indigo-blue. The sauce-jug matched it. A water-pitcher was white, printed with pink. The huge blue platter bearing the ham showed the genuine Wedgwood decoration. The squat sugar-bowl had deep-blue roses on a pale-blue ground. The cream-jug was egg-shell china, decorated with crude pale-green flowers.
"What extremely beautiful old ware you have, Col. Vance! where did you find it?" he asked.
"What, these? Oh! they are Mr. John's, my man who oversees my freedman renters. I suppose he has picked them up here and there," replied Vance, without exhibiting any interest. "Mr. John lives here, but is not at home to day. He is down at St. Mark's. He is an excellent man, an old bachelor, a queer case; well educated, sir, and a great reader, but queer. He is forever collecting all manner of old things. He some years ago found a pretty well preserved suit of Spanish armor, out here in a field of mine which he was having ploughed unusually deep. He sent it North."
"These pieces are Wedgwood; that is Adams ware; this is Hall; the sugar-bowl I cannot make out; the cream-jug is of a rare pattern and print, extremely fine," Willard ran on. "All are valuable. That platter is worth a hundred dollars."
He was enthusiastic, but he could get no sympathetic response from Cauthorne and Vance. The latter merely said, —
"I see such things now and then in the negro-cabins, — old odds and ends given to the freedmen by the whites."
In the cool shadows of the evening they retraced their way to Tallahassee; Col. Vance telling them, as they went along, how this Augustine road was built by one man and his slaves, under a contract with the government, many years ago. Forty thousand dollars was the price, he thought; and the man worked about two hundred negroes.
They met, along the road, freedmen returning from Tallahassee to their cabins in the hills. Some of them were walking, some were riding mules; but the greater number had little carts, to each of which a single ox was harnessed. A few were drunk and noisy. All looked squalid and pinched, or greasy and listless. The driver of the carriage sat upon his high seat, proud and stiff, passing his less fortunate fellows by without a nod or a look. Once, however, he deigned to speak to one. It was at the crossing of the little brook heretofore mentioned as running at the foot of the hill east of the city. As the carriage-horses entered the water at one side, a tipsy negro drove in his one-ox-cart on the other side.
"Cl'ar de way dar fur de gentlem carriage, yo' lazy goober-grabbler!" shouted the aristocrat. "What fo' yo' stop dar! Whip up dat calf, an' git to yo' place. I got no time ter fool wid you!"
The gentlemen in the carriage smiled at each other. They had seen such things in a higher walk of life.
The sun was quite down long before they reached the city; but a rosy flush still lingered in the west as they whirled along the level top of the Capitol hill.
Cauthorne got out at the hotel, and went to his room deeply impressed with the day's history. He thought it would be good material.
