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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78048 ***
+
+[Illustration: THE LUMBEE TWISTS THROUGH THE SANDHILLS]
+
+
+
+
+                           Sandhills Sketches
+
+
+                                   BY
+                            WILLIAMS HAYNES
+
+                  _Author of “Casco Bay Yarns,” etc._
+
+
+                      ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS
+                       BY THE AUTHOR AND OTHERS.
+
+
+                                NEW YORK
+                     D. O. HAYNES & CO. Publishers
+
+
+
+
+                 _COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY WILLIAMS HAYNES_
+
+
+This little book is just what its title implies: pages from a note book
+kept during a winter spent in the Piedmont Country of North Carolina.
+Because the story of the Sandhills has not heretofore been told, it has
+seemed worth while to collect them in this form.
+
+With one exception, the following sketches have been published in
+various magazines, and my thanks are due the proprietors of “Travel,”
+“Forecast,” “House and Garden,” and “Outing” for their kind permission
+to reprint material that first appeared in their publications.
+
+                                                   WILLIAMS HAYNES.
+
+Northampton, Mass.
+
+
+
+
+                                CONTENTS
+
+
+                 DODGING WINTER                      5
+
+                 “THEM HUGGINS BOYS”                15
+
+                 A SANDHILLS CHRISTMAS CAROL        31
+
+                 “TAR BURNIN’”                      43
+
+                 SOME QUAIL DOGS AND OTHERS         54
+
+                 THE CLAY BIRDS                     67
+
+                 THROUGH A JUNGLE TO THE OLD SOUTH  79
+
+
+
+
+                             Dodging Winter
+
+
+A winter vacation is as seductive as the opium pipe. Slip away to the
+sunny Southland just once during the winter; next season you will
+surely want to do it again--one whiff and you are an habitué.
+
+How drear and dismal snow-bound January seems! What a torrent of
+chilly discomfort is the sleet and slush of March! The golf bag, or
+the gun case, in the corner by the fireplace is a subtle, suggestive
+temptation, and even the cheery open fire itself calls up memories of
+crackling pine knots that spluttered and blazed not in deadly earnest,
+so that you should not shiver, but lightly and brightly, impregnating
+the air with the pungent frankincense of comradeship.
+
+There is a glorious exultation in dodging Winter. You cannot really
+fight on equal terms with the old rascal--a steam heater is such a
+pitiful weapon after all--so there is a keen delight in snapping your
+fingers under his frost-bitten nose. When you slip out of the freezing
+grasp of his long, cold arms, you have cheated a cruel, inexorable
+Fate. You feel like the hero of a Greek tragedy who has gloriously
+turned the play to comedy, and there is a peculiarly delicious feeling
+of freedom. The smelly coolness of the mid-summer woods is a respite
+from the burning heat of the city in July; the tingling, briny
+freshness of the wind-swept sea rocks is a reprieve--but the southern
+sun in winter gives freely a full pardon to the weather prisoner. It is
+he himself who weaves the enticing spell of the winter vacation, and
+the minute you tumble out of the Pullman, from whose blackened eaves
+the ghosts of icicles still trickle, you become a pagan sun worshipper.
+
+Some winter vacationists carry their sun worshipping to a fanatic
+extreme. They are not at all content to bask in the sun, they must go
+way to Florida or Bermuda to be fairly baked. This sun gluttony carries
+its own punishments of lazy lassitude and all the risks of a sniffling
+cold or hacking cough when one must, as one always must, return to the
+cold North. It is wiser and more temperate to slip just far enough into
+the South to find a friendly sun, but not so far that he becomes a bore.
+
+Isn’t the ideal winter play-place a country where it is warm enough
+for you to feel the sun, so, if you are out-of-doors, you do not need
+mufflers and ear tabs; where you can ride or motor, shoot or fish, play
+golf or tennis without a bungling sweater clinging to your shoulders
+and elbows; where you can sit under the trees an hour and read a
+favorite book without your fingers being numbed to blueness? But don’t
+you like a tang of frost in the morning air? Fifteen minutes in that
+air before breakfast is worth a whole month of cold baths and setting
+up exercises for starting the day right. In such a country too, the
+nights will be cool and refreshing as spring water, and you will sleep
+a sleep more strengthening than the most potent tonic in the whole
+pharmacopoeia.
+
+Such a winter play-place is the Piedmont country of the Carolinas, the
+Sandhills, as the natives who “made cotton and corn on the clay” of the
+lowlands contemptuously christened them years ago. This was the old
+sea shore of the continent, and the sandy soil is even today, after all
+these geological ages, almost as white as a beach. The Sandhills roll
+away gently, not unlike great dunes, and through each little valley
+trickles a little stream--“branches” the natives call them--on whose
+banks crowd great clumps of holly bushes, bluegums, and magnolias. The
+dry, sandy soil, like a great blotter, keeps the air as dry as cotton,
+and the most soaking rain leaves no puddles or mud holes behind it.
+This, as the Old North State’s hearty toast proudly proclaims, is indeed
+
+  “The land of the long leaf pine,
+  The southern land where the sun doth shine.”
+
+[Illustration: Photo by Dr. Achorn
+GRAPES, PEACHES AND COTTON THE STAPLE PRODUCTS OF THE SANDHILLS ALL
+GROWING IN ONE FIELD]
+
+Even the golfer on the Pinehurst links, who is so strictly admonished
+“to keep his eye on the ball,” carries away with him the picture of
+the towering long-leaf pines with their great, foot-long needles and
+their giant cones. The Aiken motorist, as he bowls down the hillsides
+and rattles over the little wooden bridge that spans the branch, cannot
+fail to distinguish out of the whirling landscape the sandy hilltops
+and the green thickets along the valley bottoms. The fox hunter, since
+Reynard will surely lay a line of scent ’way off the beaten tracks into
+the heart of the pine woods and the magnolia lowlands, will know the
+Sandhills better. But the one who tramps over the Sandhills behind a
+brace of bird dogs will know them best. Up through the valley, skirting
+the branch--over the hillside and across the fallow cotton fields--a
+scramble over the rail fence and a plunge through the tangle of holly
+bushes and briars all snarled with creepers--splash, splash, through
+the stream and up the other side of the hill. He is sure to learn the
+country first hand, and he will meet all sorts of interesting people.
+A lusty negro boy will be perfectly delighted to stop chopping at
+the black-jack stumps to tell him, “Dere’s a whalin’ big cobey ob
+birds done feed ober in dat field ob cow-peas. Ah hyah ’em whistlin’
+’bout half an hour ’go.” On a level hilltop an old darky tar burner
+will be his willing instructor in the mysteries of tar making. In a
+little hollow, miles from the high road, he will come suddenly upon a
+slatternly cabin with a curious chimney of clay and crossed sticks.
+Here a trio of putty faced babies will eye him suspiciously from behind
+the pig sty while their mother, a drab, timid woman, gives him a dipper
+of water.
+
+The quail shooter cannot wander over the Sandhills without sooner or
+later being reminded of the post card with the picture of the revenue
+officers and the score of captured blockade whisky stills he sent
+off to his particular friend the first night he reached his hotel. I
+remember very well a suspicious old fellow, whose curt answers and
+strange advice sent our imaginations weaving tales of the moonshiners.
+’Way back in the hills the dogs found a big covey beside a swamp and
+the birds flushed over the hill. We followed them to pick up the
+scattered singles and found two before we noticed this old fellow
+sitting on a stump at the edge of the thicket. We called in the dogs
+and walked over to him. He sat there, his elbows on his knees, his
+hands clasped in front of him, quite motionless. A rusty, single
+barrelled shotgun, with a hammer as big as a clothes hook, rested in
+the crook of his arm, and between his feet sat a thin, black and tan
+foxhound, with a meek, sorrowful expression in her dark eyes. Neither
+man nor dog moved as we came up to them.
+
+“Hello. Is this your land?” I asked.
+
+He had been peering at us keenly from under his heavy brows as we
+approached, but now he dropped his eyes and mumbled noncommittally,
+“Dunno.”
+
+“It isn’t posted, is it?”
+
+“Tain’t posted,” he replied shortly.
+
+“Are you finding many rabbits?” I asked him cheerfully.
+
+“Ain’t huntin’ rabbits.”
+
+“’Possums then?” I suggested.
+
+“Ain’t huntin’ ’possum.”
+
+“Does your hound point quail?”
+
+“Nope.”
+
+“Are you running deer? We saw some tracks back in the swamp.”
+
+“Ain’t huntin’ deer.”
+
+“Well, what are you hunting?”
+
+“Ain’t huntin’ nawthin’.”
+
+I gave up in despair, and my friend asked him very politely, “Do you
+live hereabouts?”
+
+“Ovah yondah,” he answered without a sign, so whether his home was
+north, south, east, or west, and whether a hundred yards or ten miles
+away, there was no telling.
+
+“Are there many birds about here?”
+
+“Dunno,” he answered shortly.
+
+“Queen” had found another bird and was pointing beautifully. We went
+over to her and my friend made a fine shot on a hard single. We started
+on and the old man yelled after us. We stopped and turned. He was
+hobbling slowly towards us.
+
+“Is it possible he has found his tongue?” I whispered.
+
+“The age of miracles is past,” replied my companion.
+
+“Them birds you-all is huntin’,” said the old man when he was close
+beside us, “went ovah t’other side o’ the swamp.”
+
+“But,” protested my friend, “we saw them come over the hill and we’ve
+found three singles already.”
+
+“Right smart o’ ’em circled ’round.”
+
+“Are you sure?” I persisted.
+
+“Sartin’,” he grunted.
+
+We exchanged glances, both wondering whether we were receiving a
+friendly tip from a strange fellow-sportsman or whether we were being
+gently warned away from the proximity of an illicit whisky still. We
+accepted his advice and recrossed the swamp. We found just one lone
+bird on that hillside where he had indicated, that “right smart o’ ’em”
+had flown.
+
+As we went down the hill on the other side my friend asked me in all
+seriousness, “You know something about this Tar Heel dialect--would you
+call one, ’right smart’?”
+
+“Would you?” I asked, and we both laughed.
+
+If “the East is East and the West is West,” so the North is North and
+the South, South. That, if you really know the Sandhills, is one of
+the best charms of a winter vacation in that fascinating country. It
+is a very different country with different trees and flowers and birds
+and animals. The people too, are different. The Sandhill darky is a
+type quite distinct, and the Tar Heel is as fascinating and romantic
+as his cousin up in the Cumberland Mountains. You will not find these
+things at your hotel nor in the shops at Southern Pines, or Hamlet,
+or Aberdeen. You will not find them on the golf links or the tennis
+courts. You are very apt to ride over them on horseback, and you will
+surely pass them in a motor; but they are there, and over and above the
+good sport of winter play, they add a great deal to the fun of dodging
+winter in the Sandhills.
+
+
+
+
+                          “Them Huggins Boys”
+
+
+Everybody in the Sandhills, it seemed, knew “them Huggins boys”, and
+nobody had a good word to say for them. Everywhere I went I heard of
+them, and everything that I heard was ill.
+
+Just after my arrival, as I was superintending the loading of my trunk
+onto a most rickety wagon, the station agent touched my arm and,
+pointing across the tracks, said, “Thar’s one o’ them Huggins boys,
+suh.”
+
+I caught a fleeting glance of an amazingly long and lank youth jogging
+away astraddle a dilapidated mule.
+
+“Looks like Ichabod Crane, doesn’t he?” I noted casually.
+
+The station agent was frankly puzzled to find the resemblance. He
+scratched his sandy head and spat thoughtfully.
+
+“Ah doan reckon,” he drawled, “Ah know What’s-his-name Crane. Is he
+kin to the Cranes over in Scotland County?”
+
+“No,” I laughed, “he’s a school-master in a book.”
+
+This information relieved him immensely. He would have been touched to
+the quick in his pride had he failed to recognize anyone in all the
+Sandhills, but a character in a book was quite a different matter. He
+grinned appreciatively.
+
+“Oh,” he replied easily, “Ah ain’t much at book readin’; but ef
+What’s-his-name Crane looked laik them Huggins boys, Ah bet he wasn’t
+much of a school teacher.”
+
+“Looks are deceiving,” I quoted.
+
+“They shore are--them Huggins boys ain’t more’n half as mean lookin’ as
+they is.”
+
+It was my turn to be puzzled, but the trunk was loaded now, and by the
+time I had given Uncle Willis his instructions, the agent had stepped
+back into his cubbyhole office. I wanted to question him further about
+“them Huggins boys” and find out the reason for his venomous words, but
+there were many things to be attended to, and, resolving to drop in on
+him some day between train times, I hurried over to the store.
+
+Ten minutes later I again heard of “them Huggins boys.” The
+storekeeper, introductions having been completed and after he had
+done his duty by the good weather and the abundance of quail in the
+vicinity, remarked in his cheerful, talkative way that a neighbor of
+mine had just left.
+
+“Is that so--who was it?” I asked politely.
+
+“One of them Huggins boys.”
+
+I began to be distinctly curious about these mysterious youths.
+
+“’Bout a mile away,” the storekeeper replied to my question, “but Ah
+reckon you’ll find that close enough.”
+
+“These Huggins boys don’t seem to be very popular,” I said, hoping to
+lead him on.
+
+“They ain’t,” he answered shortly, adding confidentially, “Doan you
+lend ’em nawthin’ you set no value on.”
+
+Another customer interrupted us. I thanked him for his advice, and he
+supplemented it with the information. “We-all doan give ’em no credit
+here.”
+
+That evening my next door neighbor, who lived half a mile away, dropped
+in to extend his welcome. He too, warned me about these boys. Later
+I questioned his overseer, who had ordered them off the plantation,
+and he characterized them shortly as “the damnedest nuisances in the
+country”. Uncle Willis, after a deal of questioning, confessed, “Well,
+Massa Billie, hit’s disaway, dey is jest natcherly meaner dan a mad
+mule”.
+
+Bits like this, a little here and a little there, I gathered up
+everywhere. In little scraps too, I collected their history. Their
+father before them had been a notorious character, famous as a fighter
+and a leader of moonshiners. All his life he had been a hard-drinking,
+work-hating good-for-nothing, and his sons, according to common report,
+were following right in his unsteady footsteps. There was not enough
+energy among the four of them to cultivate their little farm properly.
+They raised a little cotton and harbored a scrubby cow and half a dozen
+gaunt, half-wild hogs, but land and stock, little cabin and dilapidated
+barn were all going to rack and ruin as fast as abuse and neglect
+could drive them. Failing to make a living out of what might have been
+a good little plantation, they hired out for odd jobs and in the winter
+burned tar. But their services were never greatly in demand, and just
+how they managed to live, and their old mother and sister too, was a
+mystery. Some people, with a great show of pretended knowledge, hinted
+at a blockade still and raw corn liquor sold to the darkies for two
+bits a quart. Others pointed out that whatever ready money they scraped
+together was invested in the cheapest and most virulent whisky, which
+argued against any home-made intoxicants. All this I learned before I
+made their acquaintance, and our first meeting did not tend to improve
+the opinion I had formed of them.
+
+One Sunday morning, as I was sitting on the verandah pretending to
+read, but really luxuriating in the January sun, the Sabbath peace was
+rudely broken by a quavering falsetto voice whining out a darky song:
+
+  “De Lord he thought he’d mak’ a man.
+      Dese bones gwine t’ rise again!
+  Lil’ bit o’ earth an’ lil’ bit o’ sand.
+      Dese bones gwine t’ rise again!
+  Ah knows it: de-ed Ah do know: Ah knows it,
+      Dese bones gwine t’ rise again!
+
+  Thought He’d mak’ a ’ooman too.
+      Dese bones gwine t’ rise again!
+  Cast about see what He’d do.
+      Dese bones gwine rise again!
+  Ah knows it: de-ed Ah do know: Ah knows it,
+      Dese bones gwine t’ rise again!”
+
+The mournful sound was getting louder and louder. Evidently the singer
+was coming up the driveway. I laid aside my book and walked around the
+house to see who it was.
+
+  “Took a rib from Adam’s side.
+      Dese bones gwine t’ rise again!
+  Made Miss Eve t’ be his bride.
+      Dese bones gwine rise again!
+  Ah knows it: de-ed Ah----”
+
+I stepped around the corner and the song stopped abruptly. A most
+remarkable vehicle, an ancient phaeton, all besplattered with red clay
+mud and held together with odd bits of rope, twine, and wire, was
+approaching at a slow and dignified pace. It was drawn by a little
+moth-eaten mule who dragged his hoofs through the sand and flopped his
+big ears in a distressingly spiritless manner. In violent contrast
+to their melancholy equipage two cheerful figures sprawled in the
+carriage. The driver, his great feet thrust over the wobbly dashboard
+his head resting on the back of the seat, was paying much more
+attention to the wisps of white clouds overhead than to his steed. His
+companion, the singer, sat sideways, swinging his legs over the side
+in time with his song. He broke off in the middle of a word when he
+caught sight of me, and giving the driver a violent nudge, switched
+himself around into the carriage. The driver slipped his feet off the
+dashboard and hunched up into an almost sitting position. The mule just
+stopped and, for all the world with the Dormouse at the mad tea-party,
+immediately went to sleep. The singer, too, might have posed for the
+drawings of the Mad Hatter himself. He had the same lean face with
+high cheek bones; the same bulging eyes and prominent nose; the same
+protruding teeth and receding chin. Nor was the driver unlike the March
+Hare. There was a strange mixture of brazen effrontery and extreme
+timidity in his manner. His shifting eyes and shuffling feet belied his
+bold speech.
+
+“Good morning,” I said.
+
+The singer nodded embarrassedly, and the driver, his eyes scanning the
+landscape, grunted, “Mawnin’”.
+
+“What can I do for you?” I asked.
+
+“Is you the gemmen’s rented dis place?” asked the driver bluntly.
+
+I told them I had and they exchanged glances.
+
+“Ah’m Jim Huggins,” the driver replied to my question, “an’ he’s mah
+brother Tom,” indicating the singer with a side-wise jerk of his head.
+“We live ovah yondah.”
+
+“Oh,” I exclaimed, “two of the Huggins boys. I’m glad to meet you. I’ve
+heard of you.”
+
+They shook hands doubtfully, and Jim questioned me with open suspicion.
+“What’d you heah ’bout us?”
+
+Tom, who had not spoken till now, shifted uneasily, and before I could
+reply asked if I didn’t want to buy some eggs.
+
+“MacDougall’s sellin’ ’em at the store,” he added, “fo’ fo’ty cents a
+dozen, but we-all’l let you have ’em for thirty-five.”
+
+I had bought eggs from MacDougall just the day before for thirty-five
+cents.
+
+“You say,” I said, “that you’ll sell me eggs for five cents less than
+the store price?”
+
+He nodded eagerly.
+
+“Well, then. I’ll give you thirty cents a dozen for them--if Sally
+wants some.”
+
+Again they exchanged glances.
+
+“Ah reckon that’ll be alright,” said Jim, looking everywhere but at me.
+
+I called Sally out of her kitchen, and she explained that “’deed, Massa
+Billie, we-all has all de aiggs we kin use till ’bout Wednesday,” so
+I told the Huggins boys to come back then. Their almost proverbial
+meanness flared up at this. They considered my refusal to buy of them
+an insult and a great injustice, and muttered threats and abuse.
+
+“Here,” I said, “stop your grumbling and clear out. I didn’t ask you to
+bring me eggs, and I’ve ordered some for next Wednesday though you lied
+about the price. Stop your grumbling and get along with you. And next
+time you come round here leave that home.”
+
+I pointed to an empty flask that lay neglected on the floor of the
+carriage. Jim kicked it under the seat, jerked at the reins to wake up
+the mule, and with something about “Jest’s you say, boss,” drove slowly
+off.
+
+So these were the far-famed Huggins boys. I watched them half way down
+the driveway, and then went back to my sunny seat and the book. As I
+settled myself, the quavering tones of Tom’s high voice, taking up
+again his interrupted song, came floating to me.
+
+  ‘Put ’em in a gardin fair.
+      Dese bones gwine t’ rise again!
+  Tole ’em eat what they see there.
+      Dese bones gwine rise again!
+  Ah knows it: de-ed Ah do know: Ah knows it,
+      Dese bones gwine ’t rise again.
+
+  “Sarpint wound around a trunk.
+      Dese bones gwine t’ rise again.
+  At Miss Eve his eye he wunk.
+      Dese bones gwine rise again.
+  Ah knows it: de-ed Ah----”
+
+The words faded gradually in the distance into a thin minor wail.
+
+[Illustration: THIS IS A “FRUIT-STAND & PORK”]
+
+The very next morning I had another visit from “them Huggins boys”.
+I was out riding at the time, and when I came back I noticed someone
+had driven in and out of the driveway. It had rained during the night
+and the fresh tracks were plain in the sandy road. The hoof prints
+were long and narrow, evidently of a mule, and I wondered idly who my
+visitor could have been. Sally told me.
+
+“Hit’s dose shiftless Huggins boys again. They was trying t’ sell mo’
+eggs, an’ they got out an’ cum right in de libin’ room. Ah couldn’t
+stop ’em nohow.”
+
+Evidently they were going to make themselves a first-class nuisance
+unless I put my foot down firmly. Resolving to read them the riot
+act next time they came around, I tied the pony and went into the
+house, Sally protesting all the while against “all dese heah pore
+white trash”. I went to the mantlepiece to fill my pipe. There was
+the tobacco pouch, but my pipe, my favorite briar, which I was sure I
+had put there just before I went out, was not there. Sally remembered
+seeing it, but had not touched it.
+
+“Hit mus’ a been them Huggins boys tuk hit,” she suggested.
+
+I hurried out and jumped on the pony.
+
+“Ef dey’s been drinkin’ look out fo’ ’em,” Sally called after me.
+“Dey’s pow’rful mean in liquah.”
+
+“Don’t worry about me, Sally,” I called back. “They wouldn’t hurt
+anybody.”
+
+By riding ’cross lots I came out on the road to their farm ahead of
+them. The telltale tracks in the sand told they had driven out, but
+had not yet returned. I rode back to meet them. Half way to the main
+road I came up with them. They were coming along at their usual funeral
+pace, and the musical Tom was whistling a jolly jig tune. I rode up and
+stopped their mule.
+
+“Good mawnin’, suh,” they chorused.
+
+“Which of you boys smokes a pipe?” I asked.
+
+They were surprised and outdid each other in looking as innocent as
+lambs.
+
+“Whichever it is, hand over my pipe.”
+
+They shifted uneasily, but neither made a move to restore my property.
+
+“Come, be quick,” I said, moving the pony in closer to their carriage.
+
+Tom slowly reached in his pocket and drew out my pipe. He reached it
+out to me silently.
+
+“Thanks,” I said. “Now understand this: the next time I catch or hear
+of one of you boys on my place except on business I am coming after him
+with this.”
+
+I shook my riding crop and they nodded solemnly. The pony was dancing
+about and I rode off, leaving them looking after me surprised and
+disgusted, a little mad, but properly scared. After that we became
+friends.
+
+Till recently the country where “them Huggins boys” live has been known
+all over North Carolina as “poor old Moore County”. It lies in the
+very heart of the Sandhills, and the farmers who “make corn and cotton
+on the clay” have long scoffed at the sandy slopes where, so the joke
+runs, “you can hear the cotton grunting trying to make a living in the
+poor soil”. Too poor even to give a decent stand of grass--except the
+coarse, useless crab grass--the Sandhills supported a fine growth of
+long leafed pine, and years ago the Huggins boys’ grandfather and his
+neighbors eked out their thin crops with the tall, straight timber and
+with turpentine. Their sons, the best of the timber gone, hewed out
+railroad ties and burned tar. They were poor farmers on poor soil, a
+ruinous combination. The roads were bad, and the Sandhills’ natives,
+having little to sell and nothing with which to buy, lived sufficient
+unto themselves. Theirs was a narrow life and a hard one, a life of few
+pleasures and almost no advantages, of much labor and little reward.
+
+[Illustration: Photo by Dr. Achorn
+DESERTED TURPENTINE STILL]
+
+A score of years ago new factors entered into the life of the
+Sandhills. Inspired by the few passengers and little freight on this
+division of the road, railroad men turned their attention to this
+country. They sent agricultural and industrial experts who reported
+back that all the Sandhills had was a glorious winter climate. So the
+general passenger agent and the traffic manager consulted physicians,
+and the Sandhills became famous as a resort for tubercular patients.
+But wiser men nipped the growing sanitoriums in the bud and planted in
+their stead great winter resorts, big hotels, golf courses, hunting
+preserves.
+
+Men and women came from all over the country to slip away from Jack
+Frost and play in the open, and the mysterious spell of the Sandhills
+was thrown over them.
+
+Under this spell a little group of Northern men, fresh from college,
+ambitious and full of energy, decided the Sandhills should be good for
+other things besides golf and quail shooting. Agricultural experts from
+Raleigh and Washington said things that confirmed this belief, and
+these young men turned Sandhills farmers. The Huggins boys’ father and
+his neighbors in poor old Moore County laughed at these soft-handed
+agriculturists; but they fattened cattle with great profit over at
+Jackson Springs; they grew tobacco at Samarcand which brought top price
+in the open market, and their big dairy near Hoffman sold cream to
+the railroad and fed hogs on the skimmed milk. The pioneers have been
+followed by others, and most of the Huggins boys’ neighbors from good
+examples have learned to get bigger crops and sell them for higher
+prices.
+
+[Illustration: AT THE PINEHURST FARM]
+
+[Illustration: LORD OF THE PINEHURST DAIRY]
+
+But in among the hills, a little way back from the railroad and the
+new automobile highways the old life, the hard, narrow life, is still
+lived. “Them Huggins boys” and their poor, old mother and drab sister
+are still drudging along in the old way. That, after I knew them,
+was the only real fault I found. They are not vicious or mean: they
+are frightened and suspicious. They are not clever and they are very
+lazy, so they have no confidence in themselves to cope with the keener
+competition that the new life has brought. They have neither the speed
+nor the stamina to stand the swifter pace, and they balk. Underneath
+their diffidence and sham effrontery they are helpless and hopeless.
+They are the tattered remnants of an out-worn age.
+
+[Illustration: OLD SLAVE QUARTERS]
+
+
+
+
+                      A Sandhills Christmas Carol
+
+
+“Chris’mas gift, Massa Billie, Chris’mas gift!”
+
+Aunt Sally, black and beaming stood at the door of my room, trying at
+once to waken me and arouse my Christmas spirit. I opened one eye and
+she redoubled her efforts, laughing.
+
+“Merry Christmas, Sally! What time is it?”
+
+“Merry Chris’mas, yo’self, Massa Billie--’deed hit’s ’most aight
+o’clock.”
+
+“The dickens it is!” I cried sitting bolt upright in bed, “didn’t I
+tell you to call me at six?”
+
+“Yassah, yo’ shore did, but Ah jest knowed you’d not want to go
+shootin’ dis mawnin’. Hit’s rainin’.”
+
+Sally was right; it was raining, a steady, soaking, most
+un-Christmas-like rain. Out of the little windows I could see the
+Sandhills drenched and dripping. The great long-leafed pines, so proud
+and stately in the bright sunlight, stood dejected and tawdry. Even the
+jovial little holly bush at the corner of the porch had quite lost its
+gay, holiday air. Down in the valley, at the head of the branch, the
+rich, warm greens and olives of the magnolias and bluegums seemed grey
+and melancholy in the fine mist that spread over the lowlands. “Sam,”
+the most sedate and dignified of pointers, strolled into my room and
+put his head on the side of the bed.
+
+“No hunting for us today, old man,” I said to him, and he sniffed
+sympathetically and blinked his yellow eyes as much as to say, “I know
+it--ain’t it the devil?” He was so very sad about it that I could not
+help laughing at the old sportsman.
+
+Indeed it was not a pleasing prospect. A rainy Christmas--no
+shooting--and stuck off in a tiny bungalow, several miles from
+anywhere, with only the remnants of another man’s library for
+company--Ugh! I dragged on my clothes without any enthusiasm for the
+day. But Aunt Sally’s breakfast--golden scrambled eggs heaped up in the
+center of a fringe of crisp bacon, with corn bread, and steaming
+cakes smothered in molasses--cheered me wonderfully; and then, after
+breakfast, Uncle Willis, her husband, came shuffling up from his cabin
+for his “Chris’mas gift.”
+
+He inspected his present thoughtfully, and thanked me with verbose
+formality for it. Then he began talking. Willis is always an
+entertaining conversationalist, though I fear he is not a thoroughly
+reliable source of exact information. As Toby confided to me one day,
+“Dat nigger’s de wo’st liar in de Sandhills, ef not on de whol’ state
+of No’th Carolina, an’ thar’s some tol’ably good liars down disaways.”
+His vivid imagination made penniless, ragged Willis a Midas. He knew
+more about cotton than the whole of the Department of Agriculture, and
+as for tar burning, he could sweat more black, sticky stuff out of a
+cord of pine wood than any nigger in Moore County, though he would
+begrudgingly acknowledge that Jim Watson could go him one better in
+this. There was a wonderful, childlike simplicity in his optimism, but
+his absolute faith in your belief of his yarns was irritating till you
+recognized the artist in him. I remember how out of patience I was
+with him when he solemnly informed me one day “dat ’bout fo’ y’ars ago
+he’d been huntin’ b’ar wif Massa Teddy Roos’velt down in Drownin’ Creek
+Swamp.”
+
+“Willis,” I said to him sharply, “you are an unmitigated liar!”
+
+“’Deed I is, Massa Billie, but Ah jest thought you’d like t’ heah ’bout
+hit.”
+
+So I did, but this Christmas morning I was in no humor to listen to his
+prattle, and until he got on the subject of “hants and conjurin’,” I
+gave him but scant attention. The sly rascal knows this way of arousing
+my flagging interest, and employs it very effectively.
+
+“Massa Billie,” he said, “Ah doan’ su’pose yo’ done heah dat sumbuddy’s
+been conjurin’ Lee Gordon, has yo’?”
+
+“I haven’t, no--who is Lee Gordon?”
+
+“He’s a cousin of mah Sally’s over at Cognac. He’s been a-workin’ on de
+railroad wid de section gang, but he done move to Hoffman las’ night.”
+
+“In all the rain? On Christmas eve?” I asked skeptically.
+
+“Yassah, right in de rain an’ on Chris’mas eve. When he come home last
+evenin’ he done found a conjure layin’ right on de front do’-step. Ah
+doan’ jest ’actly know what kind ob a conjure, but hit war shore a
+mighty pow’ful one.” And sure of his audience he launched forth in full
+details of how the darky had moved his wife and numerous children, all
+his goods and chattels, right over to Hoffman and was staying with his
+wife’s brother, Noah Wilson.
+
+“Why did he move last night?” I asked to egg him on.
+
+“But yo’ shore doan’ ’spect him t’ stay in dat cabin wid a conjure
+layin’ on de front do’-step, does yo’, Massa Billie?”
+
+“Why not?” I replied, New England fashion, to draw him out.
+
+“Eff yo’ steps ober a conjure,” he replied earnestly, “yo’ is laik
+t’ die, an’ eben eff yo’ doan’ step ober it, yo’ is laik t’ die
+anyway. But dey all moved out de back do’,” he added reassuringly. He
+digressed to tell how all the household goods had been taken out the
+back way, stopping to recount the history of a certain bed, a family
+heirloom of slavery days. Finally, however, he got back to conjuring,
+and, expressing in the same breath his most abject fear and his
+utter contempt for all Black Art, he told me considerable about this
+mysterious matter. “Eff yo’ has de conjurin’ pow’rs,” so I learned, you
+can kill your enemies by placing a conjure where they will walk over
+it. If, however, you are not so terribly vindictive, you can merely
+drive them crazy by placing a hair of their head in the tough bark of a
+little, twisted black-jack oak. Should you be very merciful indeed, and
+if you merely wish to get some objectionable person out of your path,
+you can pick up a bit of dirt out of his footprint in the high-road and
+throw it, accompanied by proper chants and incantations, into running
+water. Henceforth that person will be a hapless wanderer over the face
+of the earth. There are, I gather, other awful powers that obey the
+commands of the conjurer, and his poor victims can only be freed from
+his spell by applying to a witch doctor. He, his palm having been duly
+crossed, will first determine the exact nature of the spell. He takes
+a little iron kettle about the size of your two fists, and mounts this
+upon a little pyramid of dry pine sticks. In the kettle he places cold
+water from a running stream and into it he throws salt, herbs, and
+sundry mysterious powders. Then he kindles the fire. While the little
+blaze crackles, he chants, and then, if the kettle falls off the sticks
+before the kettle boils it means “yo’ is shore conjured”--a thing that
+must assuredly happen if the doctor is careful to use dry wood that is
+fairly steeped with rosin. Then you must cross his palm again, and he
+will throw about you a counter-charm.
+
+At this point my lesson in Black Art was interrupted.
+
+Jerry, a half-grown negro who lived over by the Tower, knocked on the
+door, and I could never get Willis to resume his course of instruction.
+Jerry, grinning and bobbing, delivered a formal invitation from the
+switch operator over at the signal tower on the railroad, half a mile
+away, to come and share with him a Christmas box he had received from
+his wife. I accepted, and we set off, the boy and I, through the warm
+drizzle that enveloped you and soaked through your clothes as if they
+had been tissue paper.
+
+The Christmas box was not a perfect success. It had been packed in
+cardboard and had been sadly damaged in transit, so that you would
+bite into a crumpled piece of capital, homemade cake to find the
+frosting--and maybe a brick-like gum drop--embedded in the center. But
+my host, the operator, is a communicative, ingenuous soul whose spirits
+no amount of Christmas rain could dampen. On Christmas Eve he had spent
+two hours of his spare time ploughing through swamps to pick a great
+bunch of holly. He had even found a mistletoe, a sprig of which dangled
+at the end of a silver cord, relic of a box of candy, over the levers
+of his switches. The day was close and muggy, but in honor of the
+occasion his little, pot-bellied, iron stove glowed ruddy with heat.
+Over his telegraph instruments was strung a line of garish Christmas
+post cards, flaming with scarlet and emerald green daubs of color,
+besprinkled with tinsel, declaring, as through a megaphone, “Peace on
+Earth--Good Will to Men.” The stuffy little signal tower fairly reeked
+with the Christmas spirit, and as we sat munching fruit cake I looked
+over at my happy host and was ashamed that a little rain should wash
+all the warm, generous Christmas out of me.
+
+Yes, this was decidedly better than moping alone in the bungalow.
+With every freight that came to a screeching, bumpy stop beneath,
+a burly brakeman would thrump up the steps of the signal tower for
+train orders. Dripping rain water from his rubber coat, he would throw
+open the door with a “Merry Christmas! Say, ain’t this a peach of a
+Christmas day?” If his train must wait on the switch for another to
+pass, he would sit down by the fire and between enormous mouthfuls
+of cake and candy, tell a railroad yarn or retail a bit of railroad
+gossip. For hours I perched on the telegraph table watching this
+strange procession. After a short nod they paid little attention to
+me, for my host never bothered with introductions, and I sat there
+with the curious feeling that I was at the theatre. Certainly these
+men were of another world, each so different and yet each so true to
+the type. A thick-set, square-faced little fellow with the sharp twang
+of Down East in his voice would be followed by a tall, light stripling
+whose low drawl betrayed him long before he casually mentioned that he
+wished he could have been home in Savannah this day. They talked only
+of railroading. They whirled up and down the length of the country from
+New York to Florida and back again, many times during the year and saw
+nothing but switches and roundhouses; they passed nothing but expresses
+and other freights; they met no one save engineers, conductors, and
+brakemen like themselves. They lived a life divided into miles and
+minutes, bounded by the glistening rails, but within this life they
+found complete absorption, for it is a complicated, dangerous life in
+which exact knowledge is at a premium.
+
+[Illustration: ON THE SWITCH BY THE TOWER]
+
+About three o’clock in the afternoon, “Shorty” thrumped in from Cognac.
+He was working the “second trick,” or as we out of the signal towers
+would say, the second shift, and he came over on a freight to be ready
+to take up his duties at four.
+
+“Say,” he exclaimed gleefully, after the season’s greetings had been
+exchanged and he had sampled the now nearly demolished Christmas box,
+“McNab sure did play some good trick on some of his niggers last
+night.”
+
+“He’s like to play one too many tricks on them niggers of his,” said
+our host. “D’you remember ’bout that section boss over on the L. & N.
+that was found with his skull stove in with a sledge?”
+
+“Aw, shucks! McNab treats his niggers good, but there was a family of
+them livin’ in a shack right behind his house, an’ they’d sing an’
+howl half the night, so McNab’s been ’bout crazy to get shut of them
+someway. He tried fifty ways to close them up, but yesterday he took
+a bit of rabbit skin and rolled it up in a little ball and wrapped it
+round with a strip of red flannel, and tied it all ’round with a horse
+hair. Then he went an’ left it on the nigger’s front door step. When
+the nigger comes home, he starts hollerin’ bloody murder about somebody
+tryin’ to conjure him. He and his whole tribe moves out last night,
+an’ every bit of their studdings went out the back door to dodge that
+conjure of McNab’s.”
+
+[Illustration: Photo by Dr. Achorn
+NEGRO FAMILY AT HOME]
+
+Shorty broke off laughing, and I asked, “Was the nigger’s name Lee
+Gordon?”
+
+“’Deed I don’t know, but they moved to Hoffman. Say, I’ll bet there
+ain’t a nigger in the whole Sandhills will live in that cabin now,” and
+Shorty chuckled to himself.
+
+I told Uncle Willis all about it later. All that he would say was,
+“H’m! Those railroad men am mighty smart, ain’t dey?” He did not,
+however, mean to be sarcastic, for a couple of weeks later when I
+suggested that his brother Henry move into Lee Gordon’s old cabin in
+Cognac he was horrified at the thought. Yet Henry lived in Hoffman and
+worked in Cognac and was always complaining of the length and expense
+of his commuting. Although the cabin in Cognac would have solved this
+problem and was really a first-class house in good condition, Willis
+could only answer with a shrug and a shuffle, and a “Ah doan’ ’spect
+Henry’ll care none ’bout livin’ in dat dere shack.”
+
+[Illustration: SANDHILLS RAPID TRANSIT]
+
+
+
+
+                             “Tar Burnin’”
+
+
+When first I went to North Carolina to spend the winter in the
+Sandhills, my knowledge of tar was limited to schoolboy memories of
+tar-balls made from material purloined from the contractors who paved
+New York’s streets and a rather indirect connection through a cousin
+who had once put a tar roof on his stables and cordially regretted it.
+Down in the Sandhills, old Uncle Willis Baldwin, by verbose precept and
+halting example, taught me just how the black, sticky stuff is wrung
+from the dried wood of the long-leaf pine, barreled up, and brought to
+market.
+
+Soon the good old-fashioned way that Uncle Willis burns his tar will
+be replaced by a very efficient, but thoroughly uninteresting machine,
+a great still, with a gigantic metal retort in a brick oven as big as
+Willis’ little shanty. The old darky tar burner who considers himself
+lucky to get a barrel of crude tar from a cord of dry pine is but a
+faltering competitor of the machine that from the same wood can wring
+two barrels of tar, valuable creosote, and other important wood oils.
+Squeezing out fifteen dollars where before but three or four were
+extracted is all in strict accord with economic progress, and plainly
+it is very much more profitable--for those who own the stills--but
+this fine machine is costly beyond the dreams even of Willis’ vivid
+imagination, and it is but a question of time when the negro tar burner
+and his handmade tar kilns will be another vanished bit of the Old
+South.
+
+[Illustration: THE BURNING TAR KILN]
+
+Willis had made a tar-burning agreement--the usual one in such
+cases--with Massa Ralph. Massa Ralph supplied the dry pine wood--“light
+’ud” Willis calls it--and he further agreed to furnish the barrels
+to hold the tar. Uncle Willis, on his part, undertook to collect the
+wood on Massa Ralph’s land, to build and burn the tar-kiln, to fill
+the barrels and deliver them to the railroad at Hoffman. Each was to
+receive a half of the receipts from the sale of the tar.
+
+On a piece of level ground, down in the valley beside the little
+trickling branch, just behind my bungalow, Willis “done built hisself a
+whalin’ big tar-kil’.” First he dug out a slight hollow, like a great
+wash basin full twenty feet across, with a trench leading from the
+center to a deep pit dug just outside the outer edge. Then he and his
+brother Henry hitched up their old grey mule and scoured all over the
+land, piling the dilapidated wagon with the dry wood they picked up
+everywhere and hauling load after load to the site of the kiln. After
+a great store had been collected, Henry fell to work chopping up the
+knotty stumps and splitting the long logs, while Willis painstakingly
+constructed the kiln. This must be carefully and neatly done, for the
+quantity of the tar yielded depends most directly upon the close and
+proper building of the kiln. Around the outer edge Uncle Willis laid
+row upon row of the long, straight, split rails, each pointing due to
+the center and each one fitted with scrupulous nicety into its place.
+In the center of the kiln he stowed away the little twisted knots and
+gnarled bits of root, all so rich in tar. This is rough work too, and
+were not old Willis’ black hands as tough as sole leather, they would
+be filled with splinters.
+
+[Illustration: THE TAR BURNER’S WAGON]
+
+After the kiln had slowly risen till it was full seven feet high at
+its outer rim, it was topped off with a roof made of the split rails.
+Aunt Sally and “de chilluns” were now pressed into service flagging the
+kiln. On the roof they laid a covering of long-leaf pine boughs, and
+then they stuck similar branches into the crevices of the sides until
+the whole looked like a great, regular mound of giant pine needles.
+Uncle Willis and Henry again took up the work. They now banked the
+kiln. Starting at the ground, and building up tier on tier, they laid
+long logs of green wood round the kiln. In between the long logs and
+the kiln itself they packed sod and dirt, transforming the great heap
+of pine needles into an octagonal, log block house in miniature. Sand
+and clay piled six inches deep on the top and then packed down finished
+the job. Willis was now ready to burn his kiln.
+
+[Illustration: FLAGGING]
+
+So far everything had gone swimmingly, but now a long series of
+troubles began to fall with distressing regularity on Willis’ woolly
+head. A dozen times a day he would come shuffling up for my consolation
+and advice. Off would come his battered hat and he would begin, “’Deed,
+Massa Billie, Ah doan’ know----”, till, had I not felt so sorry for the
+old man, I would have been driven crazy by these woeful consultations.
+
+In this big tar-kiln he had planned and executed his _magnum opus_,
+which should not only re-establish his shaky credit at the store in
+Hoffman, but must also supply the necessary capital for cotton seed and
+fertilizer against the fast approaching planting season. He was staking
+more than his little all on this kiln; he was gambling in futures,
+futures of slab-side pork and corn meal; a promised dress for the
+Xantippean Sally and much needed shoes for Carolina, Liza, Sally II,
+Robert Lee, and a couple of the other children whose names I forget.
+
+[Illustration: BUILDING THE TAR KILN]
+
+His great tar-kiln, built so patiently and with such great
+expectations, contained about seventy cords of good wood and should,
+according to all expert calculation, yield about seventy barrels of
+tar. Massa Ralph’s overseer, deputized to get these seventy barrels,
+had only been able to collect forty. He scoured the country, mills,
+cross-road stores, freight offices, but every available source of
+supply that usually had barrels almost to give away had no barrels now,
+even at fancy prices. And Willis, because once the kiln was started
+there would be no stopping nor turning back, was afraid to fire the
+kiln until he had on hand enough containers to hold his expected
+quantity of tar. Moreover, poor Willis had agreed to pay Henry fifty
+cents a day till the tar was all run, and he saw the wages of his
+helper daily eating deeper and deeper into his profits. To cap the
+climax, the market price of tar was tumbling down at an amazing rate,
+and every no-’count nigger that passed along the road took a diabolical
+delight in stopping at Willis’s cabin and giving him the very latest
+and most discouraging market quotations. Poor old Willis! Whenever
+he saw me he implored help in getting him some barrels, and I never
+rode over to Hoffman without bearing an urgent message to the freight
+agent--“Fo’ de Lawd’s sake, Massa Billie, tell him t’ hurry hup dat lot
+ob bar’ls what Massa Ralph done order in Wilmington.”
+
+[Illustration: FILLING THE BARRELS]
+
+At last the long-expected barrels came, and one evening about dusk
+Jim Watson scraped the dirt and boughs off the roof of Willis’ kiln
+for a couple of square feet and applied a match to the dry lightwood
+underneath. As the red flames darted through the black smoke, Willis
+heaved a great sigh of relief. Had everything gone smoothly, Willis
+would have run the kiln himself. So many things had gone wrong and so
+very much depended on this kiln that he called in Jim Watson, who plays
+the part of tar burning efficiency expert throughout the Sandhills, in
+the hope, I believe, of his being able to break the spell of bad luck.
+In the back of his brain there was some notion that the fee he paid to
+Jim Watson hired not only his supposedly superior experience, but also
+bought a charm against further misfortune.
+
+All night long the ruddy glow of the burning kiln lighted up the little
+valley, and the pungent, piney smell of the black smoke filled the
+air. Up at the bungalow, two hundred yards away, we could hear the
+snap and crackle of the burning knots and the thick scent of the pitch
+penetrated the house. Early in the morning, Willis covered the hole in
+the banking of the roof under the direction of Jim Watson who, perched
+on an up-turned barrel, gave directions with a thoroughly expert and
+professional air. Now the kiln began to smoulder, and the pair sat
+down, only getting up to patch with great shovelsful of earth any
+cracks that appeared in the banking.
+
+[Illustration: BANKING]
+
+About the middle of the afternoon, the tar, sweated out of the pine
+wood by the intense heat, began to ooze out of the trench. Slowly at
+first, drop by drop; soon in a little trickle that grew in size, till
+by nightfall, it was pouring out so that one of the workers must busily
+ply the bucket all the time. This bucket Willis had fastened on the end
+of a long pole, and with it he scooped the black, sticky mess out of
+the pit, pouring it into a rough wooden trough through which it flowed
+into the waiting barrel. This work must go on day and night, and the
+kiln must also be carefully watched lest it catch fire; so Willis had
+built a crude hut for shelter, and here, when not on duty, the burners
+rested on a great heap of filthy blankets. Sally brought them their
+meals, and they slept by turns in snatches.
+
+Jim Watson had not brought good luck with him, for just as the tar
+began to run, it started to rain. A chilly northwest wind sent the
+shivers chasing each other down old Willis’ sun-loving back, and the
+water soon came pouring through the chinks in the imperfect shelter.
+The wet and cold could, at worst, mean a heavy cold or a sharp twinge
+of the rheumatism; a heavier blow of misfortune awaited Willis.
+
+The great kiln behaved itself very properly indeed for a day and a
+half, and twenty good barrels were filled with tar. In spite of the
+bad weather old Willis was jubilant, but his joy was untimely, for
+despite his expert help, things went wrong with the kiln. Air sneaked
+in somewhere through some unnoticed crack in the banking, and then the
+lightwood, instead of smouldering, burst into flame, burning up both
+wood and tar. What a blaze the tar-soaked pine made! It roared and
+it snapped. Great jets of red fire, followed by puffs of inky smoke,
+thrust themselves through the banking. Every now and then a blazing
+knot, accompanied by a whole train of bright sparks, would be hurled
+through the roof and shot ten feet into the air. Fifty feet from the
+kiln I had to hold my hands over my face to keep off the intense heat,
+but like a great black Satan stoking the brimstone fires, Willis
+slaved, patching the shattered banking, throwing dirt on the roof
+in the hope of smothering the fierce fire and saving the remnant of
+the tar. And Jim Watson worked too, like a Trojan, for the blame and
+disgrace of the accident were his.
+
+Finally, they succeeded in choking the flames under control, but the
+seventy barrels of tar for which Willis had worked so hard and waited
+so long had shrunk to thirty-one. Over at Hoffman he received just four
+dollars and a quarter a barrel for his tar, and but ten days before the
+price had been five dollars. He paid off his high-priced expert and
+settled up with his brother Henry. Then he came over to consult with
+me. He took the crumpled, little wad of dirty bank notes out of his
+pocket and looked at it ruefully.
+
+“Hit doan’ mak’ much ob ah show fo’ all dat work an’ all dat time,
+does hit, Massa Billie?” and then he added earnestly, his black face
+seamed with doubt and apprehension, “Mebbe so--Ah doan’ know--but hit
+do ’most seem as eff thar’s sumbuddy conjured dat ole tar kil’.”
+
+
+
+
+                      Some Quail Dogs--And Others
+
+
+“Old Joe” and his daughter “Queen” are as ill-assorted a brace of
+pointers as ever hunted a covey along the edge of a field of cow peas.
+In the first place, nobody, to look at them, would ever suspect their
+relationship.
+
+“Joe” is a strapping, lemon marked dog, with a heavy head and a tail
+like a couple of feet of garden hose. He has too much “lumber” to
+please any bench show judge, but no sportsman can look at him without
+recognizing a sturdy, capable workman. He is one of the stolid,
+old-time type of “Mainspring,” “Rip Rap,” “Bow,” “Faust” and the other
+heroes of his race imported in the early days from England. Despite
+his coarseness, he shows his breeding, but his daughter, on the other
+hand, is a common looking rat of a pointer, light and racy, thin as
+a match stick and as nervous as the needle of a pocket compass. She
+is a thickly ticked liver all splotched over with great patches of
+solid color. Her nose is snipy, her skull is domed, her tail curls
+provokingly upwards, and her thin ears are long and pendulous, so that
+one suspects that somewhere in her mother’s family there may have been
+a _mesalliance_ with a foxhound. This suspicion is emphatically denied
+by her owner. Perversely, he worships this ugly duckling of his.
+
+The old dog is a mighty hunter and quail are his favorite sport, but
+he takes his pleasures sadly. He is as sedate as a senior deacon and
+as serious as the professor of Sanskrit in a German University. Even
+when his beloved Master appears in his battered felt hat and stained
+and faded hunting coat, “Joe,” though he trembles with excitement,
+never allows his feelings to get the better of him. His self control
+is marvelous. ’Round and ’round he walks, stiff legged like a terrier
+boiling for a fight, his tail as straight and stiff as a broom handle,
+his big nose quivering, his yellow eyes flashing. But “Queen” skips
+about, barking short, yappy barks, wagging her tail and wriggling her
+slender body. She is always as flighty as a giggling schoolgirl. Last
+winter was her first hunting season, and she threw herself into the
+good sport of finding quail as a giddy debutante abandons herself to
+the social whirl. She was out for a good time, and she had it. So did
+we who followed her mad racings over the Sandhills.
+
+In the field, this strange pair carry with them all their differences,
+but by a system of hunting that the trifling “Queen” invented herself,
+they managed between them to find an amazing number of birds. “Joe” is
+blessed with a truly wonderful power of scent and cursed with an excess
+of caution. Not in the memory of man has he ever been known to over-run
+his birds. Time and again his fine nose catches the scent of the covey
+twenty or more yards off. Then he takes so long creeping up to them
+that they run merrily off, leaving a confusing and exasperatingly
+tempting foot scent for him to snuffle over. Poor old “Joe”--there is
+no more snap to his work than there is to pea soup, but “Queen”--she
+hunts, as a Bobby Watson says, “laik ah bunch o’ fiah-crackers.” She
+loves to run. Over the Sandhills she races, head up, tail waving.
+
+[Illustration: Photo by Mr. Kirkover
+A COVEY IN THE LONG-LEAF PINE]
+
+At first she often ran plumb into a covey before she had the slightest
+idea that there was such a thing as a quail within a hundred miles of
+her. Startled and disgusted she would stand stock still for a moment,
+and then, as much as to say, “O well, no matter--better luck next
+time,” she would be off again.
+
+But this was only at first. She soon got the hang of the game, and,
+while she continued to range far afield, she learned not to flush.
+“Joe” is too old a dog to learn any new tricks, but the versatile
+“Queen” has devised an unscrupulous hunting system of her own that
+is absolutely unorthodox but which fits in admirably with his slow
+methods. As she prances over the hills, she keeps one eye on her steady
+sire. When she sees him acting “birdy” she will rush in, dart in front
+of him, and hold the birds till he comes up. It is, of course, very
+wrong of her indulgent owner to allow her to ravish points in this
+high handed manner. He knows it, and will sheepishly excuse her, by
+saying he hadn’t the heart to leave the old dog home, but he is such
+a potterer, we should never find birds unless he let “Queen” have her
+way. In this way of hers she has a splendid good time. Without giving
+up the sport of running riot, she has the sport of pointing with
+the warm scent in her quivering nostrils, all the excitement of the
+shooting, and the pleasant duty of retrieving.
+
+Poor old “Joe” regards this erratic system of hunting with the greatest
+disfavor. Whenever “Queen” darts in front of him to point the covey
+he has found, he stops and looks at her, saying, just as plain as
+English, “Impudent puppy!” Then he turns and looks at his Master, “It’s
+a disgrace, sir, the disrespect of the younger generation--a disgrace.
+Whatever are we coming to?” He sniffs an emphatically contemptuous
+sniff and walks in very dignifiedly to back up her point. How annoyed
+he is if she breaks ever so little at the sound of the guns, and with
+what a perfect holier-than-thou air he will wait patiently for the
+command, “Fetch!” His self-righteousness knows no bounds if, when
+“Queen” is seeking busily about, he can, as he often does, go straight
+to the dead bird, pick it up, toss it into his mouth, and walk off,
+saying, “There, little girl, that’s the proper way to do it.” What
+a splendid conservative he is! Poor old chap, his hunting days are
+nearly over now. Though he stoutly refuses to acknowledge it, he has
+outlived his generation. I don’t suppose that even as a puppy he was a
+dashing performer, and now, on the verge of his dotage, he has become
+unbearably deliberate. Yet for all his provoking faults one cannot but
+admire his stout heart and his passion for hunting. He is the very
+pattern of the good sportsman of the Old School, kindly, keen, and
+a bit old fashioned in his ways. He is thoroughly game and will go
+hunting till he drops. Even now, old as he is, he will face a swamp
+thicket bristling with briars, at five in the afternoon that many a
+younger dog would not hunt the first thing in the morning.
+
+There is “Gypsy,” for example--she never will hunt any but the easiest
+places. She is a little picture setter who comes down to the Sandhills
+from Connecticut every winter for the quail season. She is clever as
+an urchin and dainty as a princess. She has a capital nose and all
+the speed in the world--when it pleases her ladyship to use her gifts.
+She knows just where to hunt for the birds and she handles them in a
+truly masterful way, but she has no more real love of hunting than
+a Berkshire hog and not half the spunk of a cottontail. She is as
+different from “Joe” as “Queen,” yet I know a very nice old lady whose
+sons, she says, keep her “horse and dog poor,” who finds all their
+hunting dogs uninteresting, because forsooth they lack individuality.
+
+I wish that she might know Capt’n Jack Evans’s four dogs. They are all
+half brothers and sisters, but nobody could fail to note their marked,
+distinct personalities. The rollicking “Bob” and the timid “Dot” are
+full brother and sister; brilliant “Bessie” and plodding “Sport” have
+the same daddy as the others, but different mothers.
+
+The privilege of going hunting with Capt’n Jack and this quartet may
+be purchased at reasonable rates by the day or the week, but the honor
+of accompanying him when he himself goes hunting for sport is bestowed
+upon very few. I was delighted then when one morning he took me aside,
+as we were waiting for the mail at the post office, and whispered
+that had found a piece of country back in the hills “whar Ah reckon,
+suh, thar’s more’n a million quail t’ the acre.” Capt’n Jack knows the
+Sandhills, and he is not given to making promises he cannot keep. I was
+sure we should find plenty of good sport.
+
+[Illustration: “HUNTER’S HOME”]
+
+Bright and early next morning, while the snap of the night frost was
+still in the air, we set off to hunt this quail metropolis. The four
+dogs tumbled about in the tonneau over the gun cases and lunch basket.
+“Bob” jumped from side to side, critically inspecting the country,
+while “Dot” and “Sport” lay on the floor, and “Bess” bounced about on
+the rear seat. We left the main road soon and burrowed for five or six
+miles along a twisting, sandy trail through the pine woods. We stopped
+on the flat top of a hill, a miniature plateau over the edge of which
+stood the tree tops of the valley. Right in the middle of the deserted
+tote road we left the car, and, leaving coats, lunch, extra shells,
+all, walked off across the hilltop. Through a grove of long-leafed
+pines we went into the valley and worked forward, skirting the edge
+of thick growth that marked the course of the winding stream. “Bob”
+scoured the hilltop. “Dot” and “Sport” hunted carefully along close to
+the swamp thickets. “Bess” beat up and down the southern side of the
+hill just under the brow.
+
+“‘Bess’ shore does know what t’ hunt fo’ ah covey on ah cold mawnin’,
+don’t she”--and the words had hardly slipped lazily from the Capt’n’s
+lips before she came to a stiff point. A high, shrill whistle and the
+other dogs came and backed. We walked in; the birds flushed; and the
+sport began. On up over the crest of the hill, hunting the scattered
+singles. “Steady thar, you ‘Bob’!” The young dog had found one and
+was trembling with suppressed eagerness. Before we could get to him,
+“Sport” was pointing another bird over to the left, and, as we watched,
+both “Dot” and “Bess” suddenly froze stiff on points. “Ah swear! all
+fo’ o’ ’em on points on singles.” We separated and flushed our birds
+at the same moment. Whur-r-r-r, whur-r-r-r-r, whur-r-r-r-r-r! To the
+right, the left, on in front scattered quail got up on all sides of us.
+“Bess” broke excitedly, and had to be properly reprimanded, and then,
+a hundred yards further on, she redeemed herself by finding a second
+covey. After this we did not hunt singles at all. During the day we got
+up twenty-seven coveys, which is a pretty good true quail story.
+
+[Illustration: “STEADY!” Photos by Mr. Kirkover]
+
+For a day of good sport anyone in the Sandhills will heartily recommend
+Capt’n Evans and his quartet, but the true favorite native son of
+Moore County is a handsome blue belton setter owned by Jim MacDougall.
+“Prince” has a pedigree that fairly bristles with champions. Both his
+parents were winners at the field trials, and he himself was trained
+by Armstrong at High Point. He is the marvel dog of all the Sandhills.
+What stories they tell of him on the post-office steps and ’round the
+stove in MacDougall’s store winter afternoons! From Dr. Adams to the
+youngest black boy who hangs about the freight shed, everyone in town
+takes a keen personal pride in that dog. Of course, he has pointed dead
+quail, and quail in trees and under logs, and he has, as can be proved
+by half the gold watches and every Ingersoll in the township, held a
+point for two hours and sixteen minutes--some say seventeen minutes.
+
+In the midst of his admirers at the store the handsome rascal is as
+bored as a young prig back in his home town after his first term at the
+University, but in the field he is keen sportsmanship personified. With
+his free open stride, he covers the country, head and tail up, his nose
+thrust into the air, sniffing first one side and now the other, eager
+to catch the first faint suggestion of the scent of the little brown
+birds. A short whistle and he stops in his tracks. A wave of the hand
+and he is off again in the opposite direction, quartering the ground
+perfectly. He stops dead on a point. Still as a statue he seems, but as
+you walk closer you see that he trembles with suppressed excitement,
+every muscle taut, every nerve straining, he stands there, a perfect
+picture. Flush the birds and at the command he will retrieve, going
+quickly and surely to each dead quail and returning it without so much
+as a feather dampened. He is a splendid dog wonderfully broken.
+
+[Illustration: DELIVERING QUAIL]
+
+We all applaud the stiff antics of a high school trained horse and wax
+enthusiastic over the trick of the lion tamer’s tawny pupil, but not
+one in fifty of us ever thinks that the quail dog displays intelligence
+and training far beyond these. He ranges over the country as free as
+the winter wind, but always under perfect control. No bit guides him,
+yet he turns right or left at the wave of a hand. No snapping whip
+compels obedience, but he minds the call of a whistle promptly and
+cheerfully. If a savage tiger or a docile brown cow could be trained
+thus, scientific gentlemen would investigate the case in the interest
+of animal psychology. It would be one of the marvels of the world, but
+nobody thinks it at all “abnormal” in a setter or a pointer. Thousands
+of rollicking puppies learn the trick each year.
+
+How much more wonderful even is the subversion of the bird dog’s
+strongest instincts to the will of his master! We have seized upon
+that momentary pause that precedes the wild dog’s spring at his prey
+and developed it into the pointing habit, a habit that, through
+generations of painstaking training and selective breeding, has become
+stronger than the instinct to pounce upon the birds. What self-control
+is demanded to stand staunch when the birds flush right under your
+nose! How many men have the firm hold on their passions that the quail
+dog displays when he picks up a dead bird in his mouth and returns it
+gently to his master? “The dog,” Maeterlinck has said, “is the only
+animal that is the friend of man.” The bird dog has gone even farther:
+he is the friend and the partner of man as well. He curbs his strongest
+instincts for the good of the game that he and his Master play
+together. His is the proud joy of humble service.
+
+Half the sport of quail shooting lies in working and watching the dogs.
+All day long the quail shooter has before him a living example of
+strength, of perseverance, of good faith, of self-restraint, the very
+cardinal virtues of good sportsmanship. It is a spiritual experience
+that is good for any man. And we love our four-footed partner in
+sport not alone because he is a splendid animal, good to look at,
+intelligent, and faithful; not only because he shows us good sport;
+but also because his own good sportsmanship appeals to the best
+sportsmanship in ourselves.
+
+
+
+
+                             The Clay Birds
+
+
+We sat round a blazing pine-knot fire in the big hotel’s cozy smoking
+room, and every man in the group, except the Banker, had been
+hobby-horse riding. Each had enjoyed a glorious day in the outdoors,
+pursuing his favorite sport. Each, tired with that delicious, restful
+tiredness that comes like a benison at the close of every day of keen
+sport, luxuriated in his deep leather chair. The fresh, pine-scented
+winds had swept the cobwebs from our brains, and, as the fire snapped
+and crackled, the bright flashes of friendly repartee, witty thrust and
+ready parry, flew round the circle.
+
+The Collegian and his Father had started it by holding, as golfers
+are so very apt to do, a _post mortem_ over their afternoon round.
+This led the Editor, who had slipped away from the impatient telephone
+and the ever-hungry presses for a couple of weeks’ winter vacation,
+to make some caustic comparisons between golf and his favorite
+tennis. But casualties on this hard and long-fought battlefield were
+tactfully avoided by the Manufacturer, who boldly asserted that both
+these good sports paled into utter insignificance before the most
+glorious sport of quail-shooting. He proved it too--to his own complete
+satisfaction--and then the polo-player championed his hobby, and was
+followed very naturally by a hard-riding fox-hunter. Then we had
+another round of golf, and so back again to the wide-ranging bird-dogs
+and the whirling quail coveys.
+
+[Illustration: SNOW IN THE SANDHILLS]
+
+“I wonder,” put in the Banker, “if you gentlemen have read a poem of
+Whitcomb Riley’s called ‘His Favorite Fruit?’ It’s a little dialect
+sketch in which some Hoosier farmers, gathered ’round the iron stove
+in a little cross-roads grocery, discuss their favorite fruits. Each
+one holds out for his own personal choice--the apple, the peach, the
+pear, the watermelon--and slanders unmercifully the taste of the last
+speaker. But all the time the teller of this story ‘chaws on an’ sez
+nawthin’.’ Finally one of the party asks him point blank, ‘Jim, what’s
+yourn fav’rite fruit?’ He chaws on fer quite a spell an’ then he sez,
+slow an’ solemn-like, ‘Terbaccer,’ an’ you oughter heard ’em roar.”
+
+“You,” continued the Banker, when the laugh had subsided, “have been
+each slandering the other’s favorite sport, while I have been ‘chawin’
+on an’ saying nawthin’,’ and I wonder who of you will laugh at me and
+my favorite sport as at the Hoosier farmer whose favorite fruit was
+tobacco.”
+
+“Speaking for myself,” remarked the Editor, “I laugh at no sport except
+tiddle-de-winks.”
+
+“How about ping-pong?” asked the Collegian.
+
+“That must have been before your day--did you ever play it?”
+
+“No, thank Heaven, but----”
+
+“Ah, I thought not. If you had, you’d not laugh at it, either,” and the
+Editor chuckled to himself reminiscently.
+
+“I came down here to Pinehurst,” continued the Banker, “to get some
+good trap-shooting.”
+
+“Huh!”--a short, sarcastic “Huh!”--came from the depths of the chair
+where the Manufacturer, after a long day tramping over the Sandhills
+behind his brace of pointers, was resting.
+
+“I expected just that from you, Charlie,” laughed the Banker. “Simply
+’huh!’ and nothing more can express your wonder and contempt. For the
+life of you, you cannot understand why on earth a supposedly sensible
+man should come down here into the very heart of one of the best quail
+counties in North Carolina to smash clay birds at the trap, can you?”
+The Manufacturer shook his head vigorously. “Well,” continued the
+Banker again, “I felt just as you do a couple of years ago. I followed
+your favorite sport too many years to start slandering it now. I used
+to come down here quail-shooting before you were out of school, but I
+can tell you that trap-shooting is good sport, too. You are a Doubting
+Thomas, but why don’t you try it sometime? It’s not so simple as it
+looks.”
+
+Before we broke up an hour later, we had made an appointment to visit
+the traps next morning to witness the Banker’s promised conversion of
+the Manufacturer into a trap-shooter. None of us will ever forget that
+skeptic’s immense surprise when he found the little clay birds so very
+“gamey” that he only broke nine out of his first string of twenty-five.
+It was a hard jolt to his pride, but he stuck out his jaw, tucked his
+gun under his cheek, and tackled another string. He did better later,
+and soon he got into the habit of joining the little parties at the
+squatty little gun clubhouse in the center of the big open field over
+against the great red barns of the model dairy. He came sheepishly at
+first, but later with brazen effrontery. In the end, he decided to stay
+over a week longer than he had planned, just to enter in the Mid-Winter
+Handicap Tournament the last of January.
+
+In no very strict historical sense can the adjective “new” be fairly
+applied to trap-shooting, and yet there is a newness in the recent
+vogue of the sport. The live, tame pigeon, thrown into the air,
+frightened and confused, from a collapsible wooden cage, has long since
+been supplanted by a little clay disc, hurled with lightning speed from
+a steel spring trap. This was the starting point of the development
+of trap-shooting as we know it in America today, and this took place
+years ago. It is a harder, more sporty thing to smash a whizzing clay
+bird to smithereens than to knock down a frightened tame pigeon,
+and it is more humane. This change of targets put a keen zest into
+trap-shooting and took out a bitter reproach. But till recently, the
+growth of trap-shooting has been slow. In four short years, however,
+the number of active trap-shooters has increased fourfold; from about
+100,000 to about 425,000. During the same period trap-shooting clubs
+have increased from 1,000 to 4,000, and it is estimated that about
+500,000,000 clay pigeons are thrown into the air each year at the
+shooter’s sharp command, “Pull!” In one short Presidential term,
+trap-shooting has sprung forward from a low place among the so-called
+minor sports to occupy a position second only to baseball in the number
+of its devotees. We are not apt to appreciate what this really means
+without the help of the cold figures above.
+
+There is a world of difference in being a “rooter” and in being a
+“player,” and the one simple little fact that each trap-shooter is
+a player himself, or herself, is just what gives the sport its
+strongest grip upon the interest of its followers. That tense moment
+of “two out and the bases filled”; the jerky, crashing advance of the
+battling human machine carrying a pigskin ball down the field toward
+the goal-posts; the rush of the ponies and the hollow click of mallet
+against polo ball--all these tighten the muscles and quicken the
+heart-beat of any live sportsman, but, as the psychologist says, these
+are all external stimuli.
+
+Let the same man--or the same woman, for many women shoot at the traps
+nowadays--step up to the score, tuck his gun against his shoulder,
+brace himself and draw a deep breath, glance down the long length of
+blued barrels, and call “Pull!” Whizz goes the little black disc,
+hurtling away at a speed that makes the teal and the mallard seem
+lazy laggards. One moment of intensely concentrated effort and keen
+enjoyment till the flying saucer is found just above the forward sight;
+an almost involuntary squeeze of the trigger finger, the thrilling jump
+of the discharge, and puff!--the clay target is knocked into a thousand
+bits.
+
+That tremendously concentrated effort of finding the speeding disc--you
+must find him quick--he will be quite out of range if you stop to say
+quickly--followed by the physical climax of the almost simultaneous
+kick of the gun and the shattering of the clay target; these are
+secrets of the witching spell that lures the shooter back and back
+again to the traps. I must confess to a thoroughly diabolical delight
+in knocking the clay birds to powder. I do not do it always--not even
+often, but when I do I enjoy the keenest pleasure. Other trap-shooters
+confess the same joy. Please, do not say anything about dangerous
+destructive tendencies that ought to be rigidly suppressed, or we shall
+get into an argument, and then I will have to say a lot of things about
+quickness of eye, correlation of senses and muscles, and a great deal
+more that has nothing whatever to do with the sport of shooting the
+clay birds.
+
+Over and above the inherent fascination of knocking the flying clay
+targets into powder, the fact that there is no closed season on
+these clay birds and that even a little hand trap in any open field
+will furnish good game anywhere, goes far towards making “the sport
+alluring” the sport universal. Nor do the changing seasons at all
+handicap the trap shooter. The clay birds are always full grown and
+they have no nesting-time; they are just as plentiful and just as fair
+sport in November as in May. Indeed, when you mount the trap-shooting
+hobby-horse, you can make up your mind to settle yourself in the saddle
+for a long, long gallop over all sorts of country and in all sorts of
+weather.
+
+There seems to be a delicate touch of sarcasm in the fact that the
+most important winter trap-shooting tournament should be held within
+a stone’s throw of grounds so well stocked with quail that they are
+chosen for the running of one of the largest field trials. The pick of
+the blooded setters and pointers are tried out for their bird sense
+and hunting ability almost within hearing of the guns at the Pinehurst
+traps. But the quail-hunter and the trap-shooter are brothers in
+arms. Often, like the Manufacturer, converted at the Pinehurst traps
+last winter, they are sporting Siamese twins. The traps furnish good
+practice to the field shooter and good sport when the closed season
+would otherwise keep the gun in its case.
+
+There is a curious connection between these brother sports. How
+keenly, at the traps, does one miss the tramping over the open fields,
+scrambling up hillsides, fording the streams, hopping over the rail
+fences! All the tireless quest of the hunt, that strange, primitive,
+impelling force that defies physical fatigue and keeps your high boots
+swishing through the coarse, knotted crab grass with a long, eager
+stride from daylight to dark! Most of all, you miss the dogs. That
+to me is the great loss. But there is continual shooting to take the
+place of the joys of the open fields, and there is a cleaner, keener
+satisfaction in smashing a target than in knocking down a quail; but
+what takes the place of the dogs? Nothing. Every shooter loves to
+shoot--if he says he does not, put him down as a hypocrite. No man
+lugs six or eight or ten or even twelve pounds of shotgun all day long
+just for the fun of carrying firearms. He likes to shoot. He may--and
+probably does--thoroughly enjoy the tramp and the pleasure of watching
+the dogs work, but if he went hunting for these alone he would not
+burden himself with a gun. No, the shooter loves to shoot, and at
+the traps he can shoot till his gun barrels get red hot. Only a lame
+shoulder and the price of shells need keep him from shooting his head
+off, as the saying is. To the man who loves action--quick action and
+lots of it--this is a charm that the traps surely, and the live birds
+only uncertainly, offer.
+
+But the very kernel of the sport of trap-shooting comes in smashing
+those flying discs. However keen the hunting instinct there is always
+just the tinge of regret in blotting out the pretty life of little
+brown birds. There are times when one feels just a bit ashamed of that
+fierce pleasure of a good, clean, quick shot. At the traps one can let
+that pleasure run wild. You can grit your teeth and say, “I’m going to
+paste you this time,” without qualm of conscience. You can give rein
+to the passion for destruction without becoming a brute. To do so in
+the field is to degenerate. We hate the “game hog,” not because he is
+selfish and cruel, but because he is not a man. We need the strong,
+elemental passions, and we are in danger of becoming super-refined
+jelly-fishes, incapable of doing wrong because we are incapable of
+doing good. It takes more courage to attack a lie than to storm a
+trench, more passion for destruction to root out a bad habit than to
+raze a city.
+
+
+
+
+                   Through a Jungle to the Old South
+
+
+The first man to whom we spoke about canoeing down the Lumbee was
+not encouraging. The water would be too high for fishing, and what
+with whirlpools and other dire, vaguely hinted-at dangers he did not
+reckon we would even get to Lumberton, to say nothing of going all the
+way through to the sea. But our weather-stained mail held forth no
+inducements to return North to be buffeted about by a blizzard, and our
+dismal friend’s croakings but seemed to us promises of an exciting trip
+and strengthened our determination to go--to go, we secretly hoped,
+despite all hazard. He proved to be a melancholy deceiver; we found
+excitement, but not the kind he foretold. The natives know precious
+little about the Lumbee.
+
+Our first confirmation of this was when we discovered that the
+authority on the river is Dr. John Warren Achorn, who has a winter
+home at Pinebluff. This canoeing enthusiast told us much about the
+river--that till three years ago, barring the natives’ cypress dugouts,
+the Lumbee had never borne a canoe, and that, while he and others
+had been down a hundred and eighty miles, no one had ever gone clear
+through from the headwaters to the sea at Georgetown, S. C. Here was
+an additional fillip--we were going to blaze the way! Dr. Achorn also
+extended to us the courtesies of the Mid-Winter Canoe Club, and, thanks
+to him, we used one of the club canoes. He would have fitted us out
+with a complete kit had we needed it.
+
+“It was a misty, moisty morning, and cloudy was the weather,” when we
+pushed off from Blue’s Bridge and started down the Lumbee. We, by the
+way, were two men and two dogs, Leonard Chester Freeman and I, his
+setter “Belle” and my Scottish terrier “Dixie”. Snugly stowed away
+in our sixteen foot canoe were a shelter tent, blankets and ponchos,
+duffle bags, two shotguns and a .22 rifle with ammunition, a camera,
+cooking kit and food supplies for a week; a two hundred pound outfit,
+but there are no carrys on the Lumbee.
+
+[Illustration: Photo by Dr. Achorn
+BLUE’S BRIDGE, PINE BLUFF, N. C.]
+
+Half a dozen strokes and we were round a bend. The little clubhouse
+under the great pines had vanished. Faintly, through the thickets,
+Dr. Achorn’s cheery voice reached us, calling the Indian’s “_Bon
+Voyage!_”--“Good hunting!” Then, save for the swish of the paddles and
+the buzzing of a couple of precocious dragon-flies all was silent.
+Apparently, we were miles from civilization. The strange wildness of
+the Lumbee country strikes you at once. It is all a tangled wilderness,
+wild and rampant. There are no stump pastures, such as one meets along
+the banks of the rivers of the North Woods; no clearings with a squatty
+cabin and a field of scraggly corn; no trace of the hand of man. Except
+for the friends who pursued us in a motor to give us a farewell banquet
+in our first night’s camp, we saw no human being for eighty miles.
+
+Again unlike the northern rivers, the headwaters of the Lumbee do not
+“chatter over stony ways”; they zigzag, silent and swift, over a bed
+of white sand. If every river had its own private trade-mark, surely
+“XXX” would be granted to the Lumbee, for it twists and turns and loops
+about till beside it the proverbial corkscrew seems to be the shortest
+distance between two points. If you are mathematically inclined, you
+can calculate the curves from this data: we paddled twenty-eight miles
+from Blue’s Bridge to McLeod’s Bluff, where we made our first camp, and
+our friends’ speedometer showed they had covered just six miles over
+the road between these two points.
+
+There are no rapids or falls in the upper Lumbee, but the water
+glides along at a merry rate, scooting round the bends--“cow faces”
+the natives call them--in a way that, till you get just the knack of
+cutting the corners, is quite disconcerting. Every once in a while,
+which may mean every three miles or every thirteen, we came to what
+the natives are pleased to call bluffs, rises of ground that stand,
+dry and sheltered, a couple of feet above the swirling high water.
+Between these bluffs the river is literally bankless. The flood flows
+round and through the trees, a floating forest not a swamp, for there
+is no marshy ground and few reeds or water grasses. On the entire trip
+we never slapped at a mosquito or a fly. During the hot summers, this
+tangled jungle must teem with them, but from September to May, though
+the weather is mild enough, they vanish completely.
+
+As it slips quietly to the sea, the Lumbee passes through three
+distinct phases, each different, each with a charm all its own. During
+the first stage, the hundred and thirty miles from the headwaters to
+Lumberton, the river winds its way through the Sandhills. Here the
+bottom land is heavily timbered, but it is hard country to lumber,
+and the woods are almost virgin forest. During the cold weather the
+swirling high water, and in the summer the noxious malaria, have kept
+the lumberman and his swinging axe out of the Lumbee woods, and the
+country is a great natural game preserve. Giant long-leafed pines
+dominate the thickets. These great trees shoot straight up fifty or
+seventy-five feet, their heads crowned by their long needles and huge
+cones, as the palms are crowned. Beneath are great dark clumps of
+mountain laurel, glossy bluegums, and tall bushes of bright holly all
+dotted with scarlet berries. Here and there the strained and twisted
+branches of a black-jack, that curious dwarf oak that seems to have
+been racked by some terrible torture, stand stark and bold among the
+leaves of its fellows, for even in December, the Lumbee woods are
+bright and green.
+
+What capital places for a snug camp the little bluffs are--dry and
+sandy, sheltered by the evergreens, and stocked with great stores of
+the best fire-wood in all the world. Those dry pine sticks, saturated
+with rosin and tar, crackle at a single match’s provocation into a
+bright flame. Some of these Lumbee camps of ours cling in my memory as
+the most glorious camps I have known. I can hear now the happy gurgle
+of the river and the swishing whispers of the wind in the pines. The
+pungent incense of our snapping fire, mixed with the fragrance of the
+pines and damp, cool, woodsy smell of the river bank even now fills my
+nostrils.
+
+From the very first we paddled one at a time, one hour on and one hour
+off; and oh, how much more quickly passed the “sabbatical hour,” when
+you lolled in the bow, than the “paddlatical hour” in the stern. This
+trip ruthlessly destroyed all my faith in copybook maxims about toil
+making the hours pass quickly.
+
+We had left Blue’s Bridge but a few moments when we came suddenly upon
+a great colony of blue herons, giants of the race, standing over five
+feet. Disturbed at our boorish intrusion upon their domestic affairs,
+the great, grey birds flapped laboriously up from their crude nests
+in the tree-tops. They rise as painfully as a gouty old man, but once
+fairly underway they sail gracefully in huge arcs. We grew to know
+them well before our trip was over, for they and the buzzards are both
+plentiful. For their beauty they are protected the year round, and the
+law, for the utilitarian reason that they act as public scavengers, is
+equally kind to the buzzards, who are tame to the point of familiarity.
+One battered old fellow, whose wings and tail lacked several feathers,
+took a keen, morbid interest in us. Soaring just behind us, watching
+with his wicked, hungry eyes, he followed us all one morning, but he
+finally convinced himself that we were going to get through all right,
+and disgusted, he gave up the chase.
+
+In the Lumbee woods are many wild turkeys, and during the fall and
+early winter, before the water has risen so high, if one has a still
+paddle, he can often slip round a bend and surprise a stately old
+gobbler and his hens feeding on the bank. ’Coons and ’possums--African
+pork--are also plentiful. Often a slim brown mink slips silently off a
+log, and sometimes a lusty otter streaks across the stream, leaving a
+wake like a miniature power boat.
+
+The middle of the third afternoon, while I dozed in the bow, Freeman
+shot us through a narrow strip where a fallen tree had all but dammed
+the stream. As we skinned skilfully between the bank and the branches,
+a most unmistakably hog-like grunt woke me thoroughly, and Freeman,
+with a couple of vigorous strokes, brought us about and headed up
+stream. Several times we had come up with wild hogs, great porkers who
+have taken the back-to-nature call too seriously. Years ago--no one
+knows when--they forsook the pen with its three square meals a day to
+roam the woods in search of uncertain livelihood. Nomadic life has
+made them lean and gaunt, and armed them with stubby tusks that stick
+wickedly through their lips. We had some pot shots at these tough
+customers, but they had always rushed away through the flooded woods
+where pursuit was impossible. We were therefore mightily surprised to
+find, when Freeman paddled us back, a great three-hundred pounder,
+black as the ace of spades and ugly as sin, who stood ground on a
+little ribbon of land between the river and the back waters. Cautiously
+we approached, I in the bow with gun ready waiting for the splashing
+rush to cover, Freeman paddling and trying to quiet the dogs who were
+most forcefully expressing their opinions on the subject of wild hogs.
+In vain did we wait for the snort and the splashing rush to cover, and,
+when almost on top of her, we discovered the reason for her determined
+stand. A volley of wild squeals greeted us. We had found a sow with
+twelve day-old piggies. I landed, and “Uff er--r--runt!” she bowled
+at me. I stuck my gun barrel in her face and she stopped, grunting
+and chopping her short, thick tusks. Freeman, having tied the dogs to
+the canoe braces, joined me and staved off her bold attacks while I
+snapped the brave lady’s picture. Then, after a deal of maneuvring,
+we kidnapped one of her offspring. I managed to get a youngster on a
+paddle and flipped him like a pancake over to Freeman, who deposited
+him unceremoniously in the canoe. Off we pushed, delighted with
+visions of roast pigling, and the old lady gave us a parting rush.
+
+[Illustration: THE BRAVE LADY’S PORTRAIT]
+
+Our little piggie was, barring nothing, the most homely beastie ever
+seen. He was black and shiny, like a shaved and varnished puppy, with
+a big, shapeless wedge of a head, topped off with enormous, flappy
+ears. He squealed, and squawked, and snorted, and grunted in every key,
+and every waking minute he kept up his racket. But his comical antics
+and unfailing good nature won our hearts. We did not enjoy roast pig,
+and since he did not prove to be a good canoeist, we sold him, three
+days later, for the munificent sum of “two bits.” His new owner carried
+him off to join him to a family of tame pigs in his pens.
+
+[Illustration: FEEDING THE CAPTIVE]
+
+Just above Alma (Alma is a puffing saw mill surrounded by dirty,
+dilapidated negro shacks), we passed under Gilchrist’s Bridge, where
+Sherman’s army, marching north after taking Charleston, crossed the
+river. Just below Alma is the reservation of the Croatoan Indians, the
+mysterious blue-eyed race descended, so it is said, from Sir Walter
+Raleigh’s Lost Colony, which was planted on Roanoke Island in 1587
+and disappeared as completely as if swallowed by the earth. We met
+several of these Indians--short, thick-set fellows with yellow skins
+and wide-set, blue eyes--and found them so engrossed in planting cotton
+that it was hard to believe they were for years a thorn in the side of
+the Government and the army.
+
+Nearing Lumberton, a busy little town with an attractive Confederate
+Monument, all strangely like a New England village with its shaft “To
+our Soldiers and Sailors,” the country began to change. We were leaving
+the long-leafed pines of the Sandhills. Cypress became more and more
+common, and occasionally we spied a bunch of Spanish moss swaying in
+the branches overhead. Just above Lumberton the river twists itself all
+into knots and then straightens out, so the last couple of miles into
+the town are straight as a canal, between banks that rise steeply from
+each side of the swift, deep stream.
+
+We created a sensation in Lumberton. Khaki clad, in flannel shirts,
+much in need of the barber’s services, traveling in a strange craft
+whose frailty aroused great admiration of our supposed courage, and
+accompanied by two dogs and a young wild pig--it is small wonder we
+disembarked amid a crowd that thought we were crazy, but was too
+polite to say so. The sole and only hotel, so we discovered, had been
+torn down to make room for a bank, but we found a genial savior in an
+energetic gentleman who combines the various duties of proprietor of
+the movies, political boss, reporter for the local paper, and last, but
+not least, husband of the landlady of “th’ best eatin’-house in town.”
+Here we could eat, and our factotum found us a place to sleep with one
+of his neighbors.
+
+Below Lumberton, which we left next morning after stocking our larder
+and purchasing a nursing-bottle for piggie, we came fairly to the
+second stage of the river. The woods of the Sandhills had vanished;
+we were in a semi-tropical jungle. Bottle-neck cypress rose, like
+the columns of a cathedral, right out of the water. When they rise
+in mid-stream, the lumbermen recognize such a phenomenon of Nature
+by calling them “dram trees” and claiming a drink when the logs
+are safely by. There are parts of the river where, if this jovial
+custom is strictly followed, it must take a remarkably hard head to
+bring the lumber to the mill. The undergrowth is a tangle of giant
+ferns and cactus-like palms, all snarled up with twining creepers.
+Overhead every crotch in the trees is a jardiniere of ferns, and every
+branch is coated with lichens, and festooned with Spanish moss and
+vines. Here is fascinating canoeing. The current slips along merrily
+between the banks, and one can whirl along almost without dipping the
+paddle in the water. In other places, the water sprawls out through
+the cypress jungle and there is no more current than in a bath-tub.
+Chattering black birds in whole colonies scolded us roundly; red and
+yellow wood-peckers played tag up and down the tree trunks; scarlet
+tanagers and sapphire kingfishers darted down the stream before us,
+while humming-birds, like great bejewelled moths, hovered about our
+canoe. The trees had burst into leaf as if by magic, and the delicate
+greens of their new foliage made a delightful setting against which to
+show off the brilliant colors of the bright birds. We had canoed right
+into the heart of Fairyland at the first of a glorious spring. Who
+would believe that it was the first of March and that a blizzard was
+throttling the North?
+
+[Illustration: “DRAM TREES”]
+
+Soon we left this Fairyland and came to the great Buzzard Flats, the
+stillest, weirdest waters one ever canoed. After threading our way
+between the decaying bastions of the Old State Line Bridge, once a
+famous thoroughfare, now but a mark to tell the lumbermen they have
+passed from North to South Carolina, we had slipped with the Lumbee
+into the waters of the Little Pee Dee. They slide together these two
+great rivers and except that the banks are now a hundred yards from
+side to side one would hardly know the change. But it is different
+when the Little Pee Dee joins the Great Pee Dee. Here the rush of the
+big river’s muddy floods backs up the slower waters of the smaller
+river. They sprawl over the flat country into a great labyrinth of
+lakes and lagoons, the famous Buzzard Flats of the Pee Dee. It was a
+cool, still, grey afternoon when we paddled through this strange place.
+The sky stretched steely grey above us, and on all sides the still
+water reached away like great sheets of ground glass. The great, grey
+cypress, all hung with grey Spanish moss, rose in straight colonnades.
+Save for the swish-swish of the paddles and the clunk-a-plunk of
+innumerable turtles which dropped dully into the water at our coming,
+all was still as the tomb. Even the birds added to the eerie spell; big
+blue heron swinging in lazy circles; grey cranes streaking across the
+sky; buzzards hanging all but motionless far overhead; and owls bolting
+away in their senseless flight.
+
+But with all their witching spell these Flats are a capital place in
+which to get lost. Forewarned, we kept to the right when in doubt,
+for the Great Pee Dee comes in on the right side. All afternoon we
+paddled through these bewitched lagoons, and the sun, a great, hazy
+red ball, was just sinking when the rush of yellow water told us we
+were in the Great Pee Dee. We both heaved a sigh of relief, and then
+laughed at each other. Neither had spoken of it, but we had both been
+contemplating the prospect of a chilly night, cold and without a warm
+supper, spent in the canoe among the misty reaches of water and cypress.
+
+The river’s swift current carried us along without paddling and
+for half an hour we idly watched the rearguard of the great duck
+army hurrying northwards from their winter quarters among the rice
+islands at the mouth of the Great Pee Dee. They came as if flung
+from catapults, flying high, singly, in couples, trios, and little
+flocks of five or six. Often in the evening stillness we could hear
+the whr-r-r-r-r of their strong wings long before they would burst
+out of the twilight. Then a black streak would be drawn against the
+pink, western sky, and be lost in the hazy distance over the Buzzard
+Flats. We were too late for duck shooting, but just in time for the run
+of spring shad, and we drifted by two rowboats in which some singing
+darkies toiled with a giant’s net loaded with the fish that soon would
+be commanding a fancy price in the Northern markets.
+
+That night we camped our last camp on the river. High up on the right
+bank we pitched our tent under a spreading live oak, and we sat
+silently smoking till our fire had died to a handful of glowing embers.
+Tomorrow we would be back in the world of today again, the bustling,
+busy world of men; but tonight we were still in the great, wild woods,
+close to the heart of Mother Earth. A chugging little flat-bottomed
+steamer awoke us in the morning. She puffed laboriously up stream,
+and threatened to soon tire of being overloaded with bulging cotton
+bales, and drop quietly to the river bottom. We made a late start, and
+slipped reluctantly by the banks of magnolias, wild honeysuckle, and
+yellow jasmines. Here was the third stage of the trip. We had come out
+of the jungle into a bit of the Old South, a bit curiously preserved
+from the hard blows of Fate.
+
+[Illustration: A PEE DEE PLANTATION]
+
+Behind the magnolias we caught glimpses of great colonial mansions,
+many of them in ruins, others we knew in the hands of strangers, for
+the rice islands across the river are now all wild and untilled. These
+rice islands have a strange history. ’Way back in Colonial days they
+were given over to indigo culture, and in Georgetown Indigo Growers’
+Hall, an impressive building, still bears silent testimony to the
+importance of the industry that was destroyed by better communication
+with the East. During the Revolution, these same islands sheltered
+Marion, the Swamp Fox, and his ragged patriots, and Yohahanna’s Ferry
+is still pointed out as their favorite crossing place to and from
+their raids on the British forces. Later these islands became huge
+rice plantations, accounted the most valuable land in the South and
+supporting the flower of southern chivalry. The Civil War laid waste
+this gardenland, but the rice enabled it to regain a shadow of its
+former greatness, till, twenty years ago, it was a fourth time ruined
+by the discovery that rice could be more economically grown in Texas.
+
+[Illustration: YOHANNAHAS FERRY]
+
+Warm-hearted friends greeted us with open hospitality in this country,
+and when we reached Georgetown, after ten glorious days on the river,
+we were feted as if we had discovered both Poles and been on a little
+side trip to the moon.
+
+[Illustration: INDIGO MAKERS HALL, GEORGETOWN, S. C.]
+
+It took us ten days to follow the winding Lumbee down to the ocean. If
+one wishes to break our record it will not be a hard task, for we went
+along at a go-as-you-please pace. Anyone who has only canoed in the
+North will find curious things and new delights along this little-known
+stream. Do not believe it, if some veteran canoeist says “muddy water”
+to you. The last forty miles are muddy water, but, even at flood-time,
+the Lumbee and the Little Pee Dee twisting through the Sandhills are
+clear, or at most stained with juniper. Remember, too, that they glide
+between the green banks when northern streams are frozen hard. January
+in North Carolina is amazingly like October in Maine or Wisconsin. The
+Lumbee is the canoeist’s great excuse to dodge Winter.
+
+
+[Illustration: Photo by Dr. Achorn
+A VISTA OF THE LUMBEE]
+
+
+
+
+                          =Transcriber’s Notes=
+
+ Perceived typographical errors have been silently corrected.
+
+ Illustrations have been moved nearer to the text to which they refer.
+
+ Inconsistencies in hyphenation and compound words have been maintained
+ as printed.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78048 ***
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+      Sandhills Sketches | Project Gutenberg
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+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78048 ***</div>
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp90" id="i002" style="max-width: 156.3125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i002.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>THE LUMBEE TWISTS THROUGH THE SANDHILLS</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</span></p>
+
+
+<h1>
+Sandhills Sketches
+</h1>
+
+
+<p class="center">BY</P>
+<p class="center xlarge">WILLIAMS HAYNES</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Author of “Casco Bay Yarns,” etc.</i><br>
+  <br>
+  <br>
+  ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS<br>
+  BY THE AUTHOR AND OTHERS.<br>
+  <br>
+  <br>
+  NEW YORK<br>
+  D. O. HAYNES &amp; CO. Publishers
+</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</span></p>
+
+
+  <p class="center">
+    <i>COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY WILLIAMS HAYNES</i>
+  </p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap">This</span> little
+book is just what its title implies: pages
+from a note book kept during a winter spent in the
+Piedmont Country of North Carolina. Because the story
+of the Sandhills has not heretofore been told, it has
+seemed worth while to collect them in this form.</p>
+
+<p>With one exception, the following sketches have been
+published in various magazines, and my thanks are due
+the proprietors of “Travel,” “Forecast,” “House and
+Garden,” and “Outing” for their kind permission to reprint
+material that first appeared in their publications.</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+  <span class="smcap">Williams Haynes.</span>
+</p>
+
+
+<p>Northampton, Mass.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="CONTENTS">
+    CONTENTS
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<table class="autotable">
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#Dodging_Winter">Dodging Winter</a></td>
+<td class="tdr">5</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#Them_Huggins_Boys">“Them Huggins Boys”</a></td>
+<td class="tdr">15</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#A_Sandhills_Christmas_Carol">A Sandhills Christmas Carol</a></td>
+<td class="tdr">31</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#Tar_Burnin">“Tar Burnin’”</a></td>
+<td class="tdr">43</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#Some_Quail_Dogs-And_Others">Some Quail Dogs and Others</a></td>
+<td class="tdr">54</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#The_Clay_Birds">The Clay Birds</a></td>
+<td class="tdr">67</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#Through_a_Jungle_to_the_Old_South">Through a Jungle to the Old South</a></td>
+<td class="tdr">79</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="Dodging_Winter">
+    Dodging Winter
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap">A winter</span> vacation
+is as seductive as
+the opium pipe. Slip away to the
+sunny Southland just once during the winter;
+next season you will surely want to do
+it again—one whiff and you are an habitué.</p>
+
+<p>How drear and dismal snow-bound January
+seems! What a torrent of chilly discomfort
+is the sleet and slush of March! The
+golf bag, or the gun case, in the corner by
+the fireplace is a subtle, suggestive temptation,
+and even the cheery open fire itself
+calls up memories of crackling pine knots
+that spluttered and blazed not in deadly
+earnest, so that you should not shiver, but
+lightly and brightly, impregnating the air
+with the pungent frankincense of comradeship.</p>
+
+<p>There is a glorious exultation in dodging
+Winter. You cannot really fight on equal
+terms with the old rascal—a steam heater
+is such a pitiful weapon after all—so there
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</span>is a keen delight in snapping your fingers
+under his frost-bitten nose. When you slip
+out of the freezing grasp of his long, cold
+arms, you have cheated a cruel, inexorable
+Fate. You feel like the hero of a Greek
+tragedy who has gloriously turned the play
+to comedy, and there is a peculiarly delicious
+feeling of freedom. The smelly coolness of
+the mid-summer woods is a respite from the
+burning heat of the city in July; the tingling,
+briny freshness of the wind-swept sea
+rocks is a reprieve—but the southern sun
+in winter gives freely a full pardon to the
+weather prisoner. It is he himself who
+weaves the enticing spell of the winter vacation,
+and the minute you tumble out of the
+Pullman, from whose blackened eaves the
+ghosts of icicles still trickle, you become a
+pagan sun worshipper.</p>
+
+<p>Some winter vacationists carry their sun
+worshipping to a fanatic extreme. They are
+not at all content to bask in the sun, they
+must go way to Florida or Bermuda to be
+fairly baked. This sun gluttony carries its
+own punishments of lazy lassitude and all
+the risks of a sniffling cold or hacking cough
+when one must, as one always must, return
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</span>to the cold North. It is wiser and more
+temperate to slip just far enough into the
+South to find a friendly sun, but not so far
+that he becomes a bore.</p>
+
+<p>Isn’t the ideal winter play-place a country
+where it is warm enough for you to feel the
+sun, so, if you are out-of-doors, you do not
+need mufflers and ear tabs; where you can
+ride or motor, shoot or fish, play golf or
+tennis without a bungling sweater clinging
+to your shoulders and elbows; where you
+can sit under the trees an hour and read a
+favorite book without your fingers being
+numbed to blueness? But don’t you like a
+tang of frost in the morning air? Fifteen
+minutes in that air before breakfast is worth
+a whole month of cold baths and setting
+up exercises for starting the day right. In
+such a country too, the nights will be cool
+and refreshing as spring water, and you will
+sleep a sleep more strengthening than the
+most potent tonic in the whole pharmacopoeia.</p>
+
+<p>Such a winter play-place is the Piedmont
+country of the Carolinas, the Sandhills, as
+the natives who “made cotton and corn on
+the clay” of the lowlands contemptuously
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</span>christened them years ago. This was the
+old sea shore of the continent, and the sandy
+soil is even today, after all these geological
+ages, almost as white as a beach. The Sandhills
+roll away gently, not unlike great
+dunes, and through each little valley trickles
+a little stream—“branches” the natives
+call them—on whose banks crowd great
+clumps of holly bushes, bluegums, and magnolias.
+The dry, sandy soil, like a great
+blotter, keeps the air as dry as cotton, and
+the most soaking rain leaves no puddles or
+mud holes behind it. This, as the Old North
+State’s hearty toast proudly proclaims, is
+indeed</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">“The land of the long leaf pine,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">The southern land where the sun doth shine.”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp90" id="i011" style="max-width: 155.625em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i011.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>
+    Photo by Dr. Achorn
+  </p>
+      <p>GRAPES, PEACHES AND COTTON
+    THE STAPLE PRODUCTS OF THE SANDHILLS ALL GROWING IN ONE FIELD</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+<br>
+<p>Even the golfer on the Pinehurst links,
+who is so strictly admonished “to keep his
+eye on the ball,” carries away with him the
+picture of the towering long-leaf pines with
+their great, foot-long needles and their giant
+cones. The Aiken motorist, as he bowls
+down the hillsides and rattles over the little
+wooden bridge that spans the branch, cannot
+fail to distinguish out of the whirling
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</span>landscape the sandy hilltops and the green
+thickets along the valley bottoms. The fox
+hunter, since Reynard will surely lay a line
+of scent ’way off the beaten tracks into the
+heart of the pine woods and the magnolia
+lowlands, will know the Sandhills better.
+But the one who tramps over the Sandhills
+behind a brace of bird dogs will know them
+best. Up through the valley, skirting the
+branch—over the hillside and across the
+fallow cotton fields—a scramble over the
+rail fence and a plunge through the tangle
+of holly bushes and briars all snarled with
+creepers—splash, splash, through the stream
+and up the other side of the hill. He is
+sure to learn the country first hand, and
+he will meet all sorts of interesting people.
+A lusty negro boy will be perfectly delighted
+to stop chopping at the black-jack
+stumps to tell him, “Dere’s a whalin’ big
+cobey ob birds done feed ober in dat field
+ob cow-peas. Ah hyah ’em whistlin’ ’bout
+half an hour ’go.” On a level hilltop an
+old darky tar burner will be his willing
+instructor in the mysteries of tar making.
+In a little hollow, miles from the high
+road, he will come suddenly upon a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</span>slatternly cabin with a curious chimney of
+clay and crossed sticks. Here a trio of
+putty faced babies will eye him suspiciously
+from behind the pig sty while their mother,
+a drab, timid woman, gives him a dipper
+of water.</p>
+
+<p>The quail shooter cannot wander over
+the Sandhills without sooner or later being
+reminded of the post card with the
+picture of the revenue officers and the score
+of captured blockade whisky stills he sent
+off to his particular friend the first night
+he reached his hotel. I remember very well
+a suspicious old fellow, whose curt answers
+and strange advice sent our imaginations
+weaving tales of the moonshiners. ’Way
+back in the hills the dogs found a big covey
+beside a swamp and the birds flushed over
+the hill. We followed them to pick up the
+scattered singles and found two before we
+noticed this old fellow sitting on a stump
+at the edge of the thicket. We called in
+the dogs and walked over to him. He sat
+there, his elbows on his knees, his hands
+clasped in front of him, quite motionless.
+A rusty, single barrelled shotgun, with a
+hammer as big as a clothes hook, rested in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</span>the crook of his arm, and between his feet
+sat a thin, black and tan foxhound, with a
+meek, sorrowful expression in her dark
+eyes. Neither man nor dog moved as we
+came up to them.</p>
+
+<p>“Hello. Is this your land?” I asked.</p>
+
+<p>He had been peering at us keenly from
+under his heavy brows as we approached,
+but now he dropped his eyes and mumbled
+noncommittally, “Dunno.”</p>
+
+<p>“It isn’t posted, is it?”</p>
+
+<p>“Tain’t posted,” he replied shortly.</p>
+
+<p>“Are you finding many rabbits?” I
+asked him cheerfully.</p>
+
+<p>“Ain’t huntin’ rabbits.”</p>
+
+<p>“’Possums then?” I suggested.</p>
+
+<p>“Ain’t huntin’ ’possum.”</p>
+
+<p>“Does your hound point quail?”</p>
+
+<p>“Nope.”</p>
+
+<p>“Are you running deer? We saw some
+tracks back in the swamp.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ain’t huntin’ deer.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, what are you hunting?”</p>
+
+<p>“Ain’t huntin’ nawthin’.”</p>
+
+<p>I gave up in despair, and my friend asked
+him very politely, “Do you live hereabouts?”</p>
+
+<p>“Ovah yondah,” he answered without a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</span>sign, so whether his home was north, south,
+east, or west, and whether a hundred yards
+or ten miles away, there was no telling.</p>
+
+<p>“Are there many birds about here?”</p>
+
+<p>“Dunno,” he answered shortly.</p>
+
+<p>“Queen” had found another bird and was
+pointing beautifully. We went over to her
+and my friend made a fine shot on a hard
+single. We started on and the old man
+yelled after us. We stopped and turned.
+He was hobbling slowly towards us.</p>
+
+<p>“Is it possible he has found his tongue?”
+I whispered.</p>
+
+<p>“The age of miracles is past,” replied my
+companion.</p>
+
+<p>“Them birds you-all is huntin’,” said the
+old man when he was close beside us, “went
+ovah t’other side o’ the swamp.”</p>
+
+<p>“But,” protested my friend, “we saw them
+come over the hill and we’ve found three
+singles already.”</p>
+
+<p>“Right smart o’ ’em circled ’round.”</p>
+
+<p>“Are you sure?” I persisted.</p>
+
+<p>“Sartin’,” he grunted.</p>
+
+<p>We exchanged glances, both wondering
+whether we were receiving a friendly tip
+from a strange fellow-sportsman or whether
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</span>we were being gently warned away from the
+proximity of an illicit whisky still. We
+accepted his advice and recrossed the
+swamp. We found just one lone bird on
+that hillside where he had indicated, that
+“right smart o’ ’em” had flown.</p>
+
+<p>As we went down the hill on the other
+side my friend asked me in all seriousness,
+“You know something about this Tar Heel
+dialect—would you call one, ’right smart’?”</p>
+
+<p>“Would you?” I asked, and we both
+laughed.</p>
+
+<p>If “the East is East and the West is
+West,” so the North is North and the
+South, South. That, if you really know
+the Sandhills, is one of the best charms of
+a winter vacation in that fascinating
+country. It is a very different country
+with different trees and flowers and birds
+and animals. The people too, are different.
+The Sandhill darky is a type quite distinct,
+and the Tar Heel is as fascinating and
+romantic as his cousin up in the Cumberland
+Mountains. You will not find these
+things at your hotel nor in the shops at
+Southern Pines, or Hamlet, or Aberdeen.
+You will not find them on the golf links
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</span>or the tennis courts. You are very apt to
+ride over them on horseback, and you will
+surely pass them in a motor; but they are
+there, and over and above the good sport
+of winter play, they add a great deal to
+the fun of dodging winter in the Sandhills.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="Them_Huggins_Boys">
+    “Them Huggins Boys”
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap">Everybody</span> in
+the Sandhills, it
+seemed, knew “them Huggins boys”,
+and nobody had a good word to say for
+them. Everywhere I went I heard of them,
+and everything that I heard was ill.</p>
+
+<p>Just after my arrival, as I was superintending
+the loading of my trunk onto a most
+rickety wagon, the station agent touched
+my arm and, pointing across the tracks,
+said, “Thar’s one o’ them Huggins boys,
+suh.”</p>
+
+<p>I caught a fleeting glance of an amazingly
+long and lank youth jogging away astraddle
+a dilapidated mule.</p>
+
+<p>“Looks like Ichabod Crane, doesn’t he?”
+I noted casually.</p>
+
+<p>The station agent was frankly puzzled to
+find the resemblance. He scratched his
+sandy head and spat thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah doan reckon,” he drawled, “Ah
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</span>know What’s-his-name Crane. Is he kin to
+the Cranes over in Scotland County?”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” I laughed, “he’s a school-master
+in a book.”</p>
+
+<p>This information relieved him immensely.
+He would have been touched to the quick in
+his pride had he failed to recognize anyone
+in all the Sandhills, but a character in a
+book was quite a different matter. He
+grinned appreciatively.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” he replied easily, “Ah ain’t much at
+book readin’; but ef What’s-his-name Crane
+looked laik them Huggins boys, Ah bet he
+wasn’t much of a school teacher.”</p>
+
+<p>“Looks are deceiving,” I quoted.</p>
+
+<p>“They shore are—them Huggins boys
+ain’t more’n half as mean lookin’ as they
+is.”</p>
+
+<p>It was my turn to be puzzled, but the
+trunk was loaded now, and by the time I
+had given Uncle Willis his instructions, the
+agent had stepped back into his cubbyhole
+office. I wanted to question him further
+about “them Huggins boys” and find out
+the reason for his venomous words, but
+there were many things to be attended to,
+and, resolving to drop in on him some day
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</span>between train times, I hurried over to the
+store.</p>
+
+<p>Ten minutes later I again heard of “them
+Huggins boys.” The storekeeper, introductions
+having been completed and after he
+had done his duty by the good weather and
+the abundance of quail in the vicinity, remarked
+in his cheerful, talkative way that
+a neighbor of mine had just left.</p>
+
+<p>“Is that so—who was it?” I asked politely.</p>
+
+<p>“One of them Huggins boys.”</p>
+
+<p>I began to be distinctly curious about
+these mysterious youths.</p>
+
+<p>“’Bout a mile away,” the storekeeper replied
+to my question, “but Ah reckon you’ll
+find that close enough.”</p>
+
+<p>“These Huggins boys don’t seem to be
+very popular,” I said, hoping to lead him
+on.</p>
+
+<p>“They ain’t,” he answered shortly, adding
+confidentially, “Doan you lend ’em nawthin’
+you set no value on.”</p>
+
+<p>Another customer interrupted us. I
+thanked him for his advice, and he supplemented
+it with the information. “We-all
+doan give ’em no credit here.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</span></p>
+
+<p>That evening my next door neighbor, who
+lived half a mile away, dropped in to extend
+his welcome. He too, warned me about
+these boys. Later I questioned his overseer,
+who had ordered them off the plantation,
+and he characterized them shortly as
+“the damnedest nuisances in the country”.
+Uncle Willis, after a deal of questioning,
+confessed, “Well, Massa Billie, hit’s disaway,
+dey is jest natcherly meaner dan a
+mad mule”.</p>
+
+<p>Bits like this, a little here and a little
+there, I gathered up everywhere. In little
+scraps too, I collected their history. Their
+father before them had been a notorious
+character, famous as a fighter and a leader
+of moonshiners. All his life he had been a
+hard-drinking, work-hating good-for-nothing,
+and his sons, according to common report,
+were following right in his unsteady
+footsteps. There was not enough energy
+among the four of them to cultivate their
+little farm properly. They raised a little
+cotton and harbored a scrubby cow and half
+a dozen gaunt, half-wild hogs, but land and
+stock, little cabin and dilapidated barn were
+all going to rack and ruin as fast as abuse
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</span>and neglect could drive them. Failing to
+make a living out of what might have been a
+good little plantation, they hired out for
+odd jobs and in the winter burned tar. But
+their services were never greatly in demand,
+and just how they managed to live, and
+their old mother and sister too, was a mystery.
+Some people, with a great show of
+pretended knowledge, hinted at a blockade
+still and raw corn liquor sold to the darkies
+for two bits a quart. Others pointed
+out that whatever ready money they
+scraped together was invested in the cheapest
+and most virulent whisky, which argued
+against any home-made intoxicants. All
+this I learned before I made their acquaintance,
+and our first meeting did not tend to
+improve the opinion I had formed of them.</p>
+
+<p>One Sunday morning, as I was sitting on
+the verandah pretending to read, but really
+luxuriating in the January sun, the Sabbath
+peace was rudely broken by a quavering
+falsetto voice whining out a darky song:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">“De Lord he thought he’d mak’ a man.</div>
+      <div class="verse indent4">Dese bones gwine t’ rise again!</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Lil’ bit o’ earth an’ lil’ bit o’ sand.</div>
+      <div class="verse indent4">Dese bones gwine t’ rise again!</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Ah knows it: de-ed Ah do know: Ah knows it,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent4">Dese bones gwine t’ rise again!</div>
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</span>    </div>
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">Thought He’d mak’ a ’ooman too.</div>
+      <div class="verse indent4">Dese bones gwine t’ rise again!</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Cast about see what He’d do.</div>
+      <div class="verse indent4">Dese bones gwine rise again!</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Ah knows it: de-ed Ah do know: Ah knows it,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent4">Dese bones gwine t’ rise again!”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The mournful sound was getting louder
+and louder. Evidently the singer was coming
+up the driveway. I laid aside my book
+and walked around the house to see who it
+was.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">“Took a rib from Adam’s side.</div>
+      <div class="verse indent4">Dese bones gwine t’ rise again!</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Made Miss Eve t’ be his bride.</div>
+      <div class="verse indent4">Dese bones gwine rise again!</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Ah knows it: de-ed Ah——”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>I stepped around the corner and the song
+stopped abruptly. A most remarkable vehicle,
+an ancient phaeton, all besplattered
+with red clay mud and held together with
+odd bits of rope, twine, and wire, was approaching
+at a slow and dignified pace. It
+was drawn by a little moth-eaten mule who
+dragged his hoofs through the sand and
+flopped his big ears in a distressingly spiritless
+manner. In violent contrast to their
+melancholy equipage two cheerful figures
+sprawled in the carriage. The driver, his
+great feet thrust over the wobbly dashboard
+his head resting on the back of the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</span>seat, was paying much more attention to
+the wisps of white clouds overhead than
+to his steed. His companion, the singer, sat
+sideways, swinging his legs over the side
+in time with his song. He broke off in the
+middle of a word when he caught sight of
+me, and giving the driver a violent nudge,
+switched himself around into the carriage.
+The driver slipped his feet off the dashboard
+and hunched up into an almost sitting
+position. The mule just stopped and, for
+all the world with the Dormouse at the
+mad tea-party, immediately went to sleep.
+The singer, too, might have posed for the
+drawings of the Mad Hatter himself. He
+had the same lean face with high cheek
+bones; the same bulging eyes and prominent
+nose; the same protruding teeth and receding
+chin. Nor was the driver unlike the
+March Hare. There was a strange mixture
+of brazen effrontery and extreme timidity
+in his manner. His shifting eyes and shuffling
+feet belied his bold speech.</p>
+
+<p>“Good morning,” I said.</p>
+
+<p>The singer nodded embarrassedly, and the
+driver, his eyes scanning the landscape,
+grunted, “Mawnin’”.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</span></p>
+
+<p>“What can I do for you?” I asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Is you the gemmen’s rented dis place?”
+asked the driver bluntly.</p>
+
+<p>I told them I had and they exchanged
+glances.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah’m Jim Huggins,” the driver replied
+to my question, “an’ he’s mah brother
+Tom,” indicating the singer with a side-wise
+jerk of his head. “We live ovah yondah.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” I exclaimed, “two of the Huggins
+boys. I’m glad to meet you. I’ve heard
+of you.”</p>
+
+<p>They shook hands doubtfully, and Jim
+questioned me with open suspicion.
+“What’d you heah ’bout us?”</p>
+
+<p>Tom, who had not spoken till now, shifted
+uneasily, and before I could reply asked
+if I didn’t want to buy some eggs.</p>
+
+<p>“MacDougall’s sellin’ ’em at the store,”
+he added, “fo’ fo’ty cents a dozen, but we-all’l
+let you have ’em for thirty-five.”</p>
+
+<p>I had bought eggs from MacDougall just
+the day before for thirty-five cents.</p>
+
+<p>“You say,” I said, “that you’ll sell me
+eggs for five cents less than the store price?”</p>
+
+<p>He nodded eagerly.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Well, then. I’ll give you thirty cents a
+dozen for them—if Sally wants some.”</p>
+
+<p>Again they exchanged glances.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah reckon that’ll be alright,” said Jim,
+looking everywhere but at me.</p>
+
+<p>I called Sally out of her kitchen, and she
+explained that “’deed, Massa Billie, we-all
+has all de aiggs we kin use till ’bout Wednesday,”
+so I told the Huggins boys to
+come back then. Their almost proverbial
+meanness flared up at this. They considered
+my refusal to buy of them an insult
+and a great injustice, and muttered threats
+and abuse.</p>
+
+<p>“Here,” I said, “stop your grumbling and
+clear out. I didn’t ask you to bring me
+eggs, and I’ve ordered some for next Wednesday
+though you lied about the price.
+Stop your grumbling and get along with
+you. And next time you come round here
+leave that home.”</p>
+
+<p>I pointed to an empty flask that lay neglected
+on the floor of the carriage. Jim
+kicked it under the seat, jerked at the reins
+to wake up the mule, and with something
+about “Jest’s you say, boss,” drove slowly
+off.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</span></p>
+
+<p>So these were the far-famed Huggins
+boys. I watched them half way down the
+driveway, and then went back to my sunny
+seat and the book. As I settled myself, the
+quavering tones of Tom’s high voice, taking
+up again his interrupted song, came floating
+to me.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">‘Put ’em in a gardin fair.</div>
+      <div class="verse indent4">Dese bones gwine t’ rise again!</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Tole ’em eat what they see there.</div>
+      <div class="verse indent4">Dese bones gwine rise again!</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Ah knows it: de-ed Ah do know: Ah knows it,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent4">Dese bones gwine ’t rise again.</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">“Sarpint wound around a trunk.</div>
+      <div class="verse indent4">Dese bones gwine t’ rise again.</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">At Miss Eve his eye he wunk.</div>
+      <div class="verse indent4">Dese bones gwine rise again.</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Ah knows it: de-ed Ah——”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The words faded gradually in the distance
+into a thin minor wail.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp60" id="i031" style="max-width: 94.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i031.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>THIS IS A “FRUIT-STAND &amp; PORK”</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+<br>
+
+<p>The very next morning I had another
+visit from “them Huggins boys”. I was
+out riding at the time, and when I came
+back I noticed someone had driven in and
+out of the driveway. It had rained during
+the night and the fresh tracks were plain in
+the sandy road. The hoof prints were long
+and narrow, evidently of a mule, and I wondered
+idly who my visitor could have been.
+Sally told me.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Hit’s dose shiftless Huggins boys again.
+They was trying t’ sell mo’ eggs, an’ they
+got out an’ cum right in de libin’ room. Ah
+couldn’t stop ’em nohow.”</p>
+
+<p>Evidently they were going to make themselves
+a first-class nuisance unless I put
+my foot down firmly. Resolving to read
+them the riot act next time they came
+around, I tied the pony and went into the
+house, Sally protesting all the while against
+“all dese heah pore white trash”. I went
+to the mantlepiece to fill my pipe. There
+was the tobacco pouch, but my pipe, my
+favorite briar, which I was sure I had put
+there just before I went out, was not there.
+Sally remembered seeing it, but had not
+touched it.</p>
+
+<p>“Hit mus’ a been them Huggins boys tuk
+hit,” she suggested.</p>
+
+<p>I hurried out and jumped on the pony.</p>
+
+<p>“Ef dey’s been drinkin’ look out fo’ ’em,”
+Sally called after me. “Dey’s pow’rful
+mean in liquah.”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t worry about me, Sally,” I called
+back. “They wouldn’t hurt anybody.”</p>
+
+<p>By riding ’cross lots I came out on the
+road to their farm ahead of them. The telltale
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</span>tracks in the sand told they had driven
+out, but had not yet returned. I rode back
+to meet them. Half way to the main road
+I came up with them. They were coming
+along at their usual funeral pace, and the
+musical Tom was whistling a jolly jig tune.
+I rode up and stopped their mule.</p>
+
+<p>“Good mawnin’, suh,” they chorused.</p>
+
+<p>“Which of you boys smokes a pipe?” I
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>They were surprised and outdid each
+other in looking as innocent as lambs.</p>
+
+<p>“Whichever it is, hand over my pipe.”</p>
+
+<p>They shifted uneasily, but neither made
+a move to restore my property.</p>
+
+<p>“Come, be quick,” I said, moving the
+pony in closer to their carriage.</p>
+
+<p>Tom slowly reached in his pocket and
+drew out my pipe. He reached it out to me
+silently.</p>
+
+<p>“Thanks,” I said. “Now understand this:
+the next time I catch or hear of one of you
+boys on my place except on business I am
+coming after him with this.”</p>
+
+<p>I shook my riding crop and they nodded
+solemnly. The pony was dancing about and
+I rode off, leaving them looking after me
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</span>surprised and disgusted, a little mad, but
+properly scared. After that we became
+friends.</p>
+
+<p>Till recently the country where “them
+Huggins boys” live has been known all over
+North Carolina as “poor old Moore
+County”. It lies in the very heart of the
+Sandhills, and the farmers who “make
+corn and cotton on the clay” have long
+scoffed at the sandy slopes where, so the
+joke runs, “you can hear the cotton grunting
+trying to make a living in the poor soil”.
+Too poor even to give a decent stand of
+grass—except the coarse, useless crab grass—the
+Sandhills supported a fine growth of
+long leafed pine, and years ago the Huggins
+boys’ grandfather and his neighbors eked
+out their thin crops with the tall, straight
+timber and with turpentine. Their sons,
+the best of the timber gone, hewed out railroad
+ties and burned tar. They were poor
+farmers on poor soil, a ruinous combination.
+The roads were bad, and the Sandhills’
+natives, having little to sell and nothing
+with which to buy, lived sufficient unto
+themselves. Theirs was a narrow life and
+a hard one, a life of few pleasures and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</span>almost no advantages, of much labor and
+little reward.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="i021" style="max-width: 156.0625em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i021.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>
+    Photo by Dr. Achorn
+    </p>
+      <p>DESERTED TURPENTINE STILL</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+<br>
+
+<p>A score of years ago new factors entered
+into the life of the Sandhills. Inspired by
+the few passengers and little freight on this
+division of the road, railroad men turned
+their attention to this country. They sent
+agricultural and industrial experts who reported
+back that all the Sandhills had was
+a glorious winter climate. So the general
+passenger agent and the traffic manager
+consulted physicians, and the Sandhills became
+famous as a resort for tubercular patients.
+But wiser men nipped the growing
+sanitoriums in the bud and planted in their
+stead great winter resorts, big hotels, golf
+courses, hunting preserves.</p>
+
+<p>Men and women came from all over the
+country to slip away from Jack Frost and
+play in the open, and the mysterious spell
+of the Sandhills was thrown over them.</p>
+
+<p>Under this spell a little group of Northern
+men, fresh from college, ambitious and
+full of energy, decided the Sandhills should
+be good for other things besides golf and
+quail shooting. Agricultural experts from
+Raleigh and Washington said things that
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</span>confirmed this belief, and these young men
+turned Sandhills farmers. The Huggins
+boys’ father and his neighbors in poor old
+Moore County laughed at these soft-handed
+agriculturists; but they fattened cattle with
+great profit over at Jackson Springs; they
+grew tobacco at Samarcand which brought
+top price in the open market, and their big
+dairy near Hoffman sold cream to the railroad
+and fed hogs on the skimmed milk.
+The pioneers have been followed by others,
+and most of the Huggins boys’ neighbors
+from good examples have learned to get
+bigger crops and sell them for higher prices.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp90" id="i032b" style="max-width: 95.5em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i032b.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>AT THE PINEHURST FARM</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+<br>
+<figure class="figcenter illowp90" id="i032a" style="max-width: 95.1875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i032a.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>LORD OF THE PINEHURST DAIRY</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+<br>
+<p>But in among the hills, a little way back
+from the railroad and the new automobile
+highways the old life, the hard, narrow life,
+is still lived. “Them Huggins boys” and
+their poor, old mother and drab sister are
+still drudging along in the old way. That,
+after I knew them, was the only real fault
+I found. They are not vicious or mean:
+they are frightened and suspicious. They
+are not clever and they are very lazy, so
+they have no confidence in themselves to
+cope with the keener competition that the
+new life has brought. They have neither
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</span>the speed nor the stamina to stand the
+swifter pace, and they balk. Underneath
+their diffidence and sham effrontery they
+are helpless and hopeless. They are the
+tattered remnants of an out-worn age.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="i092a" style="max-width: 96.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i092a.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>OLD SLAVE QUARTERS</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+<br>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="A_Sandhills_Christmas_Carol">
+    A Sandhills Christmas Carol
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap">“Chris’mas</span> gift,
+Massa Billie, Chris’mas
+gift!”</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Sally, black and beaming stood at
+the door of my room, trying at once to
+waken me and arouse my Christmas spirit.
+I opened one eye and she redoubled her efforts,
+laughing.</p>
+
+<p>“Merry Christmas, Sally! What time is
+it?”</p>
+
+<p>“Merry Chris’mas, yo’self, Massa Billie—’deed
+hit’s ’most aight o’clock.”</p>
+
+<p>“The dickens it is!” I cried sitting bolt
+upright in bed, “didn’t I tell you to call
+me at six?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yassah, yo’ shore did, but Ah jest
+knowed you’d not want to go shootin’ dis
+mawnin’. Hit’s rainin’.”</p>
+
+<p>Sally was right; it was raining, a steady,
+soaking, most un-Christmas-like rain. Out
+of the little windows I could see the Sandhills
+drenched and dripping. The great
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</span>long-leafed pines, so proud and stately in
+the bright sunlight, stood dejected and
+tawdry. Even the jovial little holly bush
+at the corner of the porch had quite lost its
+gay, holiday air. Down in the valley, at the
+head of the branch, the rich, warm greens
+and olives of the magnolias and bluegums
+seemed grey and melancholy in the fine mist
+that spread over the lowlands. “Sam,” the
+most sedate and dignified of pointers,
+strolled into my room and put his head on
+the side of the bed.</p>
+
+<p>“No hunting for us today, old man,” I
+said to him, and he sniffed sympathetically
+and blinked his yellow eyes as much as to
+say, “I know it—ain’t it the devil?” He was
+so very sad about it that I could not help
+laughing at the old sportsman.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed it was not a pleasing prospect. A
+rainy Christmas—no shooting—and stuck
+off in a tiny bungalow, several miles from
+anywhere, with only the remnants of another
+man’s library for company—Ugh! I dragged
+on my clothes without any enthusiasm
+for the day. But Aunt Sally’s breakfast—golden
+scrambled eggs heaped up in the center
+of a fringe of crisp bacon, with corn
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</span>bread, and steaming cakes smothered in
+molasses—cheered me wonderfully; and
+then, after breakfast, Uncle Willis, her husband,
+came shuffling up from his cabin for
+his “Chris’mas gift.”</p>
+
+<p>He inspected his present thoughtfully,
+and thanked me with verbose formality for
+it. Then he began talking. Willis is always
+an entertaining conversationalist,
+though I fear he is not a thoroughly reliable
+source of exact information. As Toby
+confided to me one day, “Dat nigger’s de
+wo’st liar in de Sandhills, ef not on de
+whol’ state of No’th Carolina, an’ thar’s
+some tol’ably good liars down disaways.”
+His vivid imagination made penniless, ragged
+Willis a Midas. He knew more about
+cotton than the whole of the Department of
+Agriculture, and as for tar burning, he
+could sweat more black, sticky stuff out of
+a cord of pine wood than any nigger in
+Moore County, though he would begrudgingly
+acknowledge that Jim Watson could go
+him one better in this. There was a wonderful,
+childlike simplicity in his optimism, but
+his absolute faith in your belief of his yarns
+was irritating till you recognized the artist
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</span>in him. I remember how out of patience I
+was with him when he solemnly informed
+me one day “dat ’bout fo’ y’ars ago he’d
+been huntin’ b’ar wif Massa Teddy Roos’velt
+down in Drownin’ Creek Swamp.”</p>
+
+<p>“Willis,” I said to him sharply, “you are
+an unmitigated liar!”</p>
+
+<p>“’Deed I is, Massa Billie, but Ah jest
+thought you’d like t’ heah ’bout hit.”</p>
+
+<p>So I did, but this Christmas morning
+I was in no humor to listen to his prattle,
+and until he got on the subject of “hants
+and conjurin’,” I gave him but scant attention.
+The sly rascal knows this way of
+arousing my flagging interest, and employs
+it very effectively.</p>
+
+<p>“Massa Billie,” he said, “Ah doan’ su’pose
+yo’ done heah dat sumbuddy’s been conjurin’
+Lee Gordon, has yo’?”</p>
+
+<p>“I haven’t, no—who is Lee Gordon?”</p>
+
+<p>“He’s a cousin of mah Sally’s over at
+Cognac. He’s been a-workin’ on de railroad
+wid de section gang, but he done move to
+Hoffman las’ night.”</p>
+
+<p>“In all the rain? On Christmas eve?” I
+asked skeptically.</p>
+
+<p>“Yassah, right in de rain an’ on Chris’mas
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</span>eve. When he come home last evenin’
+he done found a conjure layin’ right on de
+front do’-step. Ah doan’ jest ’actly know
+what kind ob a conjure, but hit war shore
+a mighty pow’ful one.” And sure of his
+audience he launched forth in full details
+of how the darky had moved his wife and
+numerous children, all his goods and chattels,
+right over to Hoffman and was staying
+with his wife’s brother, Noah Wilson.</p>
+
+<p>“Why did he move last night?” I asked
+to egg him on.</p>
+
+<p>“But yo’ shore doan’ ’spect him t’ stay in
+dat cabin wid a conjure layin’ on de front
+do’-step, does yo’, Massa Billie?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why not?” I replied, New England
+fashion, to draw him out.</p>
+
+<p>“Eff yo’ steps ober a conjure,” he replied
+earnestly, “yo’ is laik t’ die, an’ eben eff yo’
+doan’ step ober it, yo’ is laik t’ die anyway.
+But dey all moved out de back do’,” he
+added reassuringly. He digressed to tell
+how all the household goods had been taken
+out the back way, stopping to recount the
+history of a certain bed, a family heirloom
+of slavery days. Finally, however, he got
+back to conjuring, and, expressing in the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</span>same breath his most abject fear and his
+utter contempt for all Black Art, he told
+me considerable about this mysterious matter.
+“Eff yo’ has de conjurin’ pow’rs,” so
+I learned, you can kill your enemies by
+placing a conjure where they will walk over
+it. If, however, you are not so terribly vindictive,
+you can merely drive them crazy by
+placing a hair of their head in the tough
+bark of a little, twisted black-jack oak.
+Should you be very merciful indeed, and if
+you merely wish to get some objectionable
+person out of your path, you can pick up
+a bit of dirt out of his footprint in the high-road
+and throw it, accompanied by proper
+chants and incantations, into running
+water. Henceforth that person will be a
+hapless wanderer over the face of the earth.
+There are, I gather, other awful powers that
+obey the commands of the conjurer, and his
+poor victims can only be freed from his spell
+by applying to a witch doctor. He, his palm
+having been duly crossed, will first determine
+the exact nature of the spell. He takes
+a little iron kettle about the size of your
+two fists, and mounts this upon a little
+pyramid of dry pine sticks. In the kettle
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</span>he places cold water from a running stream
+and into it he throws salt, herbs, and sundry
+mysterious powders. Then he kindles
+the fire. While the little blaze crackles, he
+chants, and then, if the kettle falls off the
+sticks before the kettle boils it means “yo’
+is shore conjured”—a thing that must assuredly
+happen if the doctor is careful to
+use dry wood that is fairly steeped with
+rosin. Then you must cross his palm again,
+and he will throw about you a counter-charm.</p>
+
+<p>At this point my lesson in Black Art was
+interrupted.</p>
+
+<p>Jerry, a half-grown negro who lived over
+by the Tower, knocked on the door, and I
+could never get Willis to resume his course
+of instruction. Jerry, grinning and bobbing,
+delivered a formal invitation from the
+switch operator over at the signal tower on
+the railroad, half a mile away, to come and
+share with him a Christmas box he had received
+from his wife. I accepted, and we
+set off, the boy and I, through the warm
+drizzle that enveloped you and soaked
+through your clothes as if they had been
+tissue paper.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</span></p>
+
+<p>The Christmas box was not a perfect success.
+It had been packed in cardboard and
+had been sadly damaged in transit, so that
+you would bite into a crumpled piece of
+capital, homemade cake to find the frosting—and
+maybe a brick-like gum drop—embedded
+in the center. But my host, the operator,
+is a communicative, ingenuous soul
+whose spirits no amount of Christmas rain
+could dampen. On Christmas Eve he had
+spent two hours of his spare time ploughing
+through swamps to pick a great bunch of
+holly. He had even found a mistletoe, a
+sprig of which dangled at the end of a silver
+cord, relic of a box of candy, over the levers
+of his switches. The day was close and
+muggy, but in honor of the occasion his little,
+pot-bellied, iron stove glowed ruddy with
+heat. Over his telegraph instruments was
+strung a line of garish Christmas post cards,
+flaming with scarlet and emerald green
+daubs of color, besprinkled with tinsel, declaring,
+as through a megaphone, “Peace on
+Earth—Good Will to Men.” The stuffy
+little signal tower fairly reeked with the
+Christmas spirit, and as we sat munching
+fruit cake I looked over at my happy host
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</span>and was ashamed that a little rain should
+wash all the warm, generous Christmas out
+of me.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, this was decidedly better than moping
+alone in the bungalow. With every freight
+that came to a screeching, bumpy stop beneath,
+a burly brakeman would thrump up
+the steps of the signal tower for train
+orders. Dripping rain water from his rubber
+coat, he would throw open the door with
+a “Merry Christmas! Say, ain’t this a
+peach of a Christmas day?” If his train
+must wait on the switch for another to pass,
+he would sit down by the fire and between
+enormous mouthfuls of cake and candy, tell
+a railroad yarn or retail a bit of railroad
+gossip. For hours I perched on the telegraph
+table watching this strange procession.
+After a short nod they paid little attention
+to me, for my host never bothered
+with introductions, and I sat there with the
+curious feeling that I was at the theatre.
+Certainly these men were of another world,
+each so different and yet each so true to the
+type. A thick-set, square-faced little fellow
+with the sharp twang of Down East in his
+voice would be followed by a tall, light stripling
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</span>whose low drawl betrayed him long before
+he casually mentioned that he wished
+he could have been home in Savannah this
+day. They talked only of railroading. They
+whirled up and down the length of the
+country from New York to Florida and back
+again, many times during the year and saw
+nothing but switches and roundhouses; they
+passed nothing but expresses and other
+freights; they met no one save engineers,
+conductors, and brakemen like themselves.
+They lived a life divided into miles and
+minutes, bounded by the glistening rails,
+but within this life they found complete
+absorption, for it is a complicated, dangerous
+life in which exact knowledge is at a
+premium.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="i051a" style="max-width: 93.875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i051a.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>ON THE SWITCH BY THE TOWER</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+<br>
+<p>About three o’clock in the afternoon,
+“Shorty” thrumped in from Cognac. He
+was working the “second trick,” or as we
+out of the signal towers would say, the
+second shift, and he came over on a freight
+to be ready to take up his duties at four.</p>
+
+<p>“Say,” he exclaimed gleefully, after the
+season’s greetings had been exchanged and
+he had sampled the now nearly demolished
+Christmas box, “McNab sure did play some
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</span>good trick on some of his niggers last
+night.”</p>
+
+<p>“He’s like to play one too many tricks on
+them niggers of his,” said our host. “D’you
+remember ’bout that section boss over on
+the L. &amp; N. that was found with his skull
+stove in with a sledge?”</p>
+
+<p>“Aw, shucks! McNab treats his niggers
+good, but there was a family of them livin’
+in a shack right behind his house, an’ they’d
+sing an’ howl half the night, so McNab’s
+been ’bout crazy to get shut of them someway.
+He tried fifty ways to close them up,
+but yesterday he took a bit of rabbit skin
+and rolled it up in a little ball and wrapped
+it round with a strip of red flannel, and tied
+it all ’round with a horse hair. Then he went
+an’ left it on the nigger’s front door step.
+When the nigger comes home, he starts hollerin’
+bloody murder about somebody tryin’
+to conjure him. He and his whole tribe
+moves out last night, an’ every bit of their
+studdings went out the back door to dodge
+that conjure of McNab’s.”</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp90" id="i041" style="max-width: 155.8125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i041.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>
+    Photo by Dr. Achorn
+   </p>
+      <p>NEGRO FAMILY AT HOME</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+<br>
+<p>Shorty broke off laughing, and I asked,
+“Was the nigger’s name Lee Gordon?”</p>
+
+<p>“’Deed I don’t know, but they moved to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</span>Hoffman. Say, I’ll bet there ain’t a nigger
+in the whole Sandhills will live in that
+cabin now,” and Shorty chuckled to himself.</p>
+
+<p>I told Uncle Willis all about it later. All
+that he would say was, “H’m! Those railroad
+men am mighty smart, ain’t dey?” He
+did not, however, mean to be sarcastic, for
+a couple of weeks later when I suggested
+that his brother Henry move into Lee Gordon’s
+old cabin in Cognac he was horrified
+at the thought. Yet Henry lived in Hoffman
+and worked in Cognac and was always
+complaining of the length and expense of
+his commuting. Although the cabin in Cognac
+would have solved this problem and
+was really a first-class house in good condition,
+Willis could only answer with a
+shrug and a shuffle, and a “Ah doan’ ’spect
+Henry’ll care none ’bout livin’ in dat dere
+shack.”</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp88" id="i051b" style="max-width: 94.5625em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i051b.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>SANDHILLS RAPID TRANSIT</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+<br>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="Tar_Burnin">
+    “Tar Burnin’”
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap">When</span> first
+I went to North Carolina
+to spend the winter in the Sandhills,
+my knowledge of tar was limited to schoolboy
+memories of tar-balls made from material
+purloined from the contractors who
+paved New York’s streets and a rather indirect
+connection through a cousin who had
+once put a tar roof on his stables and cordially
+regretted it. Down in the Sandhills,
+old Uncle Willis Baldwin, by verbose precept
+and halting example, taught me just
+how the black, sticky stuff is wrung from
+the dried wood of the long-leaf pine, barreled
+up, and brought to market.</p>
+
+<p>Soon the good old-fashioned way that
+Uncle Willis burns his tar will be replaced
+by a very efficient, but thoroughly uninteresting
+machine, a great still, with a gigantic
+metal retort in a brick oven as big as Willis’
+little shanty. The old darky tar burner
+who considers himself lucky to get a barrel
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</span>of crude tar from a cord of dry pine is but
+a faltering competitor of the machine that
+from the same wood can wring two barrels
+of tar, valuable creosote, and other important
+wood oils. Squeezing out fifteen dollars
+where before but three or four were
+extracted is all in strict accord with economic
+progress, and plainly it is very much
+more profitable—for those who own the
+stills—but this fine machine is costly beyond
+the dreams even of Willis’ vivid imagination,
+and it is but a question of time
+when the negro tar burner and his handmade
+tar kilns will be another vanished bit
+of the Old South.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp90" id="i052b" style="max-width: 95.0625em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i052b.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>THE BURNING TAR KILN</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+<br>
+
+<p>Willis had made a tar-burning agreement—the
+usual one in such cases—with Massa
+Ralph. Massa Ralph supplied the dry pine
+wood—“light ’ud” Willis calls it—and he
+further agreed to furnish the barrels to hold
+the tar. Uncle Willis, on his part, undertook
+to collect the wood on Massa Ralph’s
+land, to build and burn the tar-kiln, to fill
+the barrels and deliver them to the railroad
+at Hoffman. Each was to receive a half of
+the receipts from the sale of the tar.</p>
+
+<p>On a piece of level ground, down in the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</span>valley beside the little trickling branch, just
+behind my bungalow, Willis “done built
+hisself a whalin’ big tar-kil’.” First he dug
+out a slight hollow, like a great wash basin
+full twenty feet across, with a trench leading
+from the center to a deep pit dug just
+outside the outer edge. Then he and his
+brother Henry hitched up their old grey
+mule and scoured all over the land, piling
+the dilapidated wagon with the dry wood
+they picked up everywhere and hauling load
+after load to the site of the kiln. After a
+great store had been collected, Henry fell
+to work chopping up the knotty stumps and
+splitting the long logs, while Willis painstakingly
+constructed the kiln. This must
+be carefully and neatly done, for the quantity
+of the tar yielded depends most directly
+upon the close and proper building of the
+kiln. Around the outer edge Uncle Willis
+laid row upon row of the long, straight,
+split rails, each pointing due to the center
+and each one fitted with scrupulous nicety
+into its place. In the center of the kiln he
+stowed away the little twisted knots and
+gnarled bits of root, all so rich in tar. This
+is rough work too, and were not old Willis’
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</span>black hands as tough as sole leather, they
+would be filled with splinters.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp90" id="i052a" style="max-width: 94.4375em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i052a.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>THE TAR BURNER’S WAGON</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+<br>
+
+<p>After the kiln had slowly risen till it was
+full seven feet high at its outer rim, it was
+topped off with a roof made of the split
+rails. Aunt Sally and “de chilluns” were
+now pressed into service flagging the kiln.
+On the roof they laid a covering of long-leaf
+pine boughs, and then they stuck similar
+branches into the crevices of the sides until
+the whole looked like a great, regular mound
+of giant pine needles. Uncle Willis and
+Henry again took up the work. They now
+banked the kiln. Starting at the ground,
+and building up tier on tier, they laid long
+logs of green wood round the kiln. In between
+the long logs and the kiln itself they
+packed sod and dirt, transforming the great
+heap of pine needles into an octagonal, log
+block house in miniature. Sand and clay
+piled six inches deep on the top and then
+packed down finished the job. Willis was
+now ready to burn his kiln.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp70" id="i062b" style="max-width: 95.6875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i062b.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>FLAGGING</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+<br>
+
+<p>So far everything had gone swimmingly,
+but now a long series of troubles began to
+fall with distressing regularity on Willis’
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</span>woolly head. A dozen times a day he would
+come shuffling up for my consolation and
+advice. Off would come his battered hat
+and he would begin, “’Deed, Massa Billie,
+Ah doan’ know——”, till, had I not felt so
+sorry for the old man, I would have been
+driven crazy by these woeful consultations.</p>
+
+<p>In this big tar-kiln he had planned and
+executed his <i>magnum opus</i>, which should
+not only re-establish his shaky credit at the
+store in Hoffman, but must also supply the
+necessary capital for cotton seed and fertilizer
+against the fast approaching planting
+season. He was staking more than his
+little all on this kiln; he was gambling in
+futures, futures of slab-side pork and corn
+meal; a promised dress for the Xantippean
+Sally and much needed shoes for Carolina,
+Liza, Sally II, Robert Lee, and a couple of
+the other children whose names I forget.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp90" id="i061a_2" style="max-width: 94.4375em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i061a.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>BUILDING THE TAR KILN</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+<br>
+
+<p>His great tar-kiln, built so patiently and
+with such great expectations, contained
+about seventy cords of good wood and
+should, according to all expert calculation,
+yield about seventy barrels of tar. Massa
+Ralph’s overseer, deputized to get these
+seventy barrels, had only been able to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</span>collect forty. He scoured the country, mills,
+cross-road stores, freight offices, but every
+available source of supply that usually had
+barrels almost to give away had no barrels
+now, even at fancy prices. And Willis, because
+once the kiln was started there would
+be no stopping nor turning back, was afraid
+to fire the kiln until he had on hand enough
+containers to hold his expected quantity of
+tar. Moreover, poor Willis had agreed to
+pay Henry fifty cents a day till the tar was
+all run, and he saw the wages of his helper
+daily eating deeper and deeper into his
+profits. To cap the climax, the market
+price of tar was tumbling down at an amazing
+rate, and every no-’count nigger that
+passed along the road took a diabolical delight
+in stopping at Willis’s cabin and giving
+him the very latest and most discouraging
+market quotations. Poor old Willis!
+Whenever he saw me he implored help in
+getting him some barrels, and I never rode
+over to Hoffman without bearing an urgent
+message to the freight agent—“Fo’ de
+Lawd’s sake, Massa Billie, tell him t’ hurry
+hup dat lot ob bar’ls what Massa Ralph
+done order in Wilmington.”</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp60" id="i061b" style="max-width: 95.1875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i061b.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>FILLING THE BARRELS</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+<br>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</span></p>
+
+<p>At last the long-expected barrels came,
+and one evening about dusk Jim Watson
+scraped the dirt and boughs off the roof of
+Willis’ kiln for a couple of square feet and
+applied a match to the dry lightwood underneath.
+As the red flames darted through
+the black smoke, Willis heaved a great sigh
+of relief. Had everything gone smoothly,
+Willis would have run the kiln himself. So
+many things had gone wrong and so very
+much depended on this kiln that he called
+in Jim Watson, who plays the part of tar
+burning efficiency expert throughout the
+Sandhills, in the hope, I believe, of his being
+able to break the spell of bad luck. In
+the back of his brain there was some notion
+that the fee he paid to Jim Watson hired
+not only his supposedly superior experience,
+but also bought a charm against further
+misfortune.</p>
+
+<p>All night long the ruddy glow of the burning
+kiln lighted up the little valley, and the
+pungent, piney smell of the black smoke
+filled the air. Up at the bungalow, two
+hundred yards away, we could hear the snap
+and crackle of the burning knots and the
+thick scent of the pitch penetrated the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</span>house. Early in the morning, Willis covered
+the hole in the banking of the roof under
+the direction of Jim Watson who, perched
+on an up-turned barrel, gave directions with
+a thoroughly expert and professional air.
+Now the kiln began to smoulder, and the
+pair sat down, only getting up to patch with
+great shovelsful of earth any cracks that
+appeared in the banking.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp90" id="i062a" style="max-width: 94.125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i062a.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>BANKING</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+<br>
+
+<p>About the middle of the afternoon, the
+tar, sweated out of the pine wood by the
+intense heat, began to ooze out of the trench.
+Slowly at first, drop by drop; soon in a
+little trickle that grew in size, till by nightfall,
+it was pouring out so that one of the
+workers must busily ply the bucket all the
+time. This bucket Willis had fastened on
+the end of a long pole, and with it he
+scooped the black, sticky mess out of the
+pit, pouring it into a rough wooden trough
+through which it flowed into the waiting
+barrel. This work must go on day and
+night, and the kiln must also be carefully
+watched lest it catch fire; so Willis had
+built a crude hut for shelter, and here, when
+not on duty, the burners rested on a great
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</span>heap of filthy blankets. Sally brought them
+their meals, and they slept by turns in
+snatches.</p>
+
+<p>Jim Watson had not brought good luck
+with him, for just as the tar began to run,
+it started to rain. A chilly northwest wind
+sent the shivers chasing each other down
+old Willis’ sun-loving back, and the water
+soon came pouring through the chinks in
+the imperfect shelter. The wet and cold
+could, at worst, mean a heavy cold or a
+sharp twinge of the rheumatism; a heavier
+blow of misfortune awaited Willis.</p>
+
+<p>The great kiln behaved itself very properly
+indeed for a day and a half, and twenty
+good barrels were filled with tar. In spite of
+the bad weather old Willis was jubilant, but
+his joy was untimely, for despite his expert
+help, things went wrong with the kiln. Air
+sneaked in somewhere through some unnoticed
+crack in the banking, and then the
+lightwood, instead of smouldering, burst into
+flame, burning up both wood and tar. What
+a blaze the tar-soaked pine made! It roared
+and it snapped. Great jets of red fire, followed
+by puffs of inky smoke, thrust themselves
+through the banking. Every now
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</span>and then a blazing knot, accompanied by a
+whole train of bright sparks, would be
+hurled through the roof and shot ten feet
+into the air. Fifty feet from the kiln I had
+to hold my hands over my face to keep off
+the intense heat, but like a great black
+Satan stoking the brimstone fires, Willis
+slaved, patching the shattered banking,
+throwing dirt on the roof in the hope of
+smothering the fierce fire and saving the
+remnant of the tar. And Jim Watson
+worked too, like a Trojan, for the blame and
+disgrace of the accident were his.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, they succeeded in choking the
+flames under control, but the seventy barrels
+of tar for which Willis had worked so
+hard and waited so long had shrunk to
+thirty-one. Over at Hoffman he received
+just four dollars and a quarter a barrel for
+his tar, and but ten days before the price
+had been five dollars. He paid off his high-priced
+expert and settled up with his
+brother Henry. Then he came over to consult
+with me. He took the crumpled, little
+wad of dirty bank notes out of his pocket
+and looked at it ruefully.</p>
+
+<p>“Hit doan’ mak’ much ob ah show fo’ all
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</span>dat work an’ all dat time, does hit, Massa
+Billie?” and then he added earnestly, his
+black face seamed with doubt and apprehension,
+“Mebbe so—Ah doan’ know—but
+hit do ’most seem as eff thar’s sumbuddy
+conjured dat ole tar kil’.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="Some_Quail_Dogs-And_Others">
+    Some Quail Dogs—And Others
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap">“Old Joe”</span> and
+his daughter “Queen”
+are as ill-assorted a brace of pointers
+as ever hunted a covey along the edge of
+a field of cow peas. In the first place, nobody,
+to look at them, would ever suspect
+their relationship.</p>
+
+<p>“Joe” is a strapping, lemon marked dog,
+with a heavy head and a tail like a couple
+of feet of garden hose. He has too much
+“lumber” to please any bench show judge,
+but no sportsman can look at him without
+recognizing a sturdy, capable workman.
+He is one of the stolid, old-time type of
+“Mainspring,” “Rip Rap,” “Bow,” “Faust”
+and the other heroes of his race imported
+in the early days from England. Despite
+his coarseness, he shows his breeding, but
+his daughter, on the other hand, is a common
+looking rat of a pointer, light and
+racy, thin as a match stick and as nervous
+as the needle of a pocket compass. She is
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</span>a thickly ticked liver all splotched over with
+great patches of solid color. Her nose is
+snipy, her skull is domed, her tail curls provokingly
+upwards, and her thin ears are
+long and pendulous, so that one suspects
+that somewhere in her mother’s family
+there may have been a <i>mesalliance</i> with a
+foxhound. This suspicion is emphatically
+denied by her owner. Perversely, he worships
+this ugly duckling of his.</p>
+
+<p>The old dog is a mighty hunter and quail
+are his favorite sport, but he takes his
+pleasures sadly. He is as sedate as a senior
+deacon and as serious as the professor of
+Sanskrit in a German University. Even
+when his beloved Master appears in his battered
+felt hat and stained and faded hunting
+coat, “Joe,” though he trembles with excitement,
+never allows his feelings to get
+the better of him. His self control is marvelous.
+’Round and ’round he walks, stiff
+legged like a terrier boiling for a fight, his
+tail as straight and stiff as a broom handle,
+his big nose quivering, his yellow eyes flashing.
+But “Queen” skips about, barking
+short, yappy barks, wagging her tail and
+wriggling her slender body. She is always
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</span>as flighty as a giggling schoolgirl. Last
+winter was her first hunting season, and she
+threw herself into the good sport of finding
+quail as a giddy debutante abandons herself
+to the social whirl. She was out for a good
+time, and she had it. So did we who followed
+her mad racings over the Sandhills.</p>
+
+<p>In the field, this strange pair carry with
+them all their differences, but by a system
+of hunting that the trifling “Queen”
+invented herself, they managed between
+them to find an amazing number of birds.
+“Joe” is blessed with a truly wonderful
+power of scent and cursed with an excess of
+caution. Not in the memory of man has he
+ever been known to over-run his birds.
+Time and again his fine nose catches the
+scent of the covey twenty or more yards
+off. Then he takes so long creeping up to
+them that they run merrily off, leaving
+a confusing and exasperatingly tempting
+foot scent for him to snuffle over. Poor
+old “Joe”—there is no more snap to
+his work than there is to pea soup, but
+“Queen”—she hunts, as a Bobby Watson
+says, “laik ah bunch o’ fiah-crackers.” She
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</span>loves to run. Over the Sandhills she races,
+head up, tail waving.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp60" id="i072b" style="max-width: 96.0em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i072b.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>
+    Photo by Mr. Kirkover
+   </p>
+      <p>A COVEY IN THE LONG-LEAF PINE</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+<br>
+
+<p>At first she often ran plumb into a covey
+before she had the slightest idea that there
+was such a thing as a quail within a hundred
+miles of her. Startled and disgusted
+she would stand stock still for a moment,
+and then, as much as to say, “O well, no
+matter—better luck next time,” she would
+be off again.</p>
+
+<p>But this was only at first. She soon got
+the hang of the game, and, while she continued
+to range far afield, she learned not
+to flush. “Joe” is too old a dog to learn
+any new tricks, but the versatile “Queen”
+has devised an unscrupulous hunting system
+of her own that is absolutely unorthodox
+but which fits in admirably with his
+slow methods. As she prances over the
+hills, she keeps one eye on her steady sire.
+When she sees him acting “birdy” she will
+rush in, dart in front of him, and hold the
+birds till he comes up. It is, of course, very
+wrong of her indulgent owner to allow her
+to ravish points in this high handed manner.
+He knows it, and will sheepishly excuse her,
+by saying he hadn’t the heart to leave the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</span>old dog home, but he is such a potterer, we
+should never find birds unless he let
+“Queen” have her way. In this way of hers
+she has a splendid good time. Without giving
+up the sport of running riot, she has
+the sport of pointing with the warm scent
+in her quivering nostrils, all the excitement
+of the shooting, and the pleasant duty of
+retrieving.</p>
+
+<p>Poor old “Joe” regards this erratic system
+of hunting with the greatest disfavor.
+Whenever “Queen” darts in front of him to
+point the covey he has found, he stops and
+looks at her, saying, just as plain as English,
+“Impudent puppy!” Then he turns
+and looks at his Master, “It’s a disgrace, sir,
+the disrespect of the younger generation—a
+disgrace. Whatever are we coming to?”
+He sniffs an emphatically contemptuous
+sniff and walks in very dignifiedly to back
+up her point. How annoyed he is if she
+breaks ever so little at the sound of the guns,
+and with what a perfect holier-than-thou
+air he will wait patiently for the command,
+“Fetch!” His self-righteousness knows no
+bounds if, when “Queen” is seeking busily
+about, he can, as he often does, go straight
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</span>to the dead bird, pick it up, toss it into
+his mouth, and walk off, saying, “There,
+little girl, that’s the proper way to do it.”
+What a splendid conservative he is! Poor
+old chap, his hunting days are nearly over
+now. Though he stoutly refuses to acknowledge
+it, he has outlived his generation. I
+don’t suppose that even as a puppy he was
+a dashing performer, and now, on the verge
+of his dotage, he has become unbearably
+deliberate. Yet for all his provoking faults
+one cannot but admire his stout heart and
+his passion for hunting. He is the very pattern
+of the good sportsman of the Old
+School, kindly, keen, and a bit old fashioned
+in his ways. He is thoroughly game and
+will go hunting till he drops. Even now,
+old as he is, he will face a swamp thicket
+bristling with briars, at five in the afternoon
+that many a younger dog would not
+hunt the first thing in the morning.</p>
+
+<p>There is “Gypsy,” for example—she never
+will hunt any but the easiest places. She
+is a little picture setter who comes down
+to the Sandhills from Connecticut every
+winter for the quail season. She is clever as
+an urchin and dainty as a princess. She has
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</span>a capital nose and all the speed in the world—when
+it pleases her ladyship to use her
+gifts. She knows just where to hunt for
+the birds and she handles them in a truly
+masterful way, but she has no more real
+love of hunting than a Berkshire hog and
+not half the spunk of a cottontail. She is
+as different from “Joe” as “Queen,” yet I
+know a very nice old lady whose sons, she
+says, keep her “horse and dog poor,” who
+finds all their hunting dogs uninteresting,
+because forsooth they lack individuality.</p>
+
+<p>I wish that she might know Capt’n Jack
+Evans’s four dogs. They are all half brothers
+and sisters, but nobody could fail to note
+their marked, distinct personalities. The
+rollicking “Bob” and the timid “Dot” are
+full brother and sister; brilliant “Bessie”
+and plodding “Sport” have the same daddy
+as the others, but different mothers.</p>
+
+<p>The privilege of going hunting with
+Capt’n Jack and this quartet may be purchased
+at reasonable rates by the day or the
+week, but the honor of accompanying him
+when he himself goes hunting for sport is
+bestowed upon very few. I was delighted
+then when one morning he took me aside,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</span>as we were waiting for the mail at the post
+office, and whispered that had found a piece
+of country back in the hills “whar Ah reckon,
+suh, thar’s more’n a million quail t’
+the acre.” Capt’n Jack knows the Sandhills,
+and he is not given to making promises he
+cannot keep. I was sure we should find
+plenty of good sport.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp90" id="i072a" style="max-width: 94.5em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i072a.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>“HUNTER’S HOME”</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+<br>
+
+<p>Bright and early next morning, while the
+snap of the night frost was still in the air,
+we set off to hunt this quail metropolis. The
+four dogs tumbled about in the tonneau
+over the gun cases and lunch basket. “Bob”
+jumped from side to side, critically inspecting
+the country, while “Dot” and “Sport”
+lay on the floor, and “Bess” bounced about
+on the rear seat. We left the main road
+soon and burrowed for five or six miles
+along a twisting, sandy trail through the
+pine woods. We stopped on the flat top of
+a hill, a miniature plateau over the edge of
+which stood the tree tops of the valley.
+Right in the middle of the deserted tote
+road we left the car, and, leaving coats,
+lunch, extra shells, all, walked off across
+the hilltop. Through a grove of long-leafed
+pines we went into the valley and worked
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</span>forward, skirting the edge of thick growth
+that marked the course of the winding
+stream. “Bob” scoured the hilltop. “Dot”
+and “Sport” hunted carefully along close to
+the swamp thickets. “Bess” beat up and
+down the southern side of the hill just under
+the brow.</p>
+
+<p>“‘Bess’ shore does know what t’ hunt fo’
+ah covey on ah cold mawnin’, don’t she”—and
+the words had hardly slipped lazily
+from the Capt’n’s lips before she came to
+a stiff point. A high, shrill whistle and the
+other dogs came and backed. We walked
+in; the birds flushed; and the sport began.
+On up over the crest of the hill, hunting
+the scattered singles. “Steady thar, you
+‘Bob’!” The young dog had found one and
+was trembling with suppressed eagerness.
+Before we could get to him, “Sport” was
+pointing another bird over to the left, and,
+as we watched, both “Dot” and “Bess”
+suddenly froze stiff on points. “Ah swear!
+all fo’ o’ ’em on points on singles.” We
+separated and flushed our birds at the same
+moment. Whur-r-r-r, whur-r-r-r-r, whur-r-r-r-r-r!
+To the right, the left, on in front
+scattered quail got up on all sides of us.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</span>“Bess” broke excitedly, and had to be properly
+reprimanded, and then, a hundred yards
+further on, she redeemed herself by finding
+a second covey. After this we did not hunt
+singles at all. During the day we got up
+twenty-seven coveys, which is a pretty good
+true quail story.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="i071a" style="max-width: 50.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i071a.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>“STEADY!”</p>
+      <p>
+    Photos by Mr. Kirkover
+    </p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+<br>
+
+<p>For a day of good sport anyone in the
+Sandhills will heartily recommend Capt’n
+Evans and his quartet, but the true favorite
+native son of Moore County is a handsome
+blue belton setter owned by Jim MacDougall.
+“Prince” has a pedigree that fairly
+bristles with champions. Both his parents
+were winners at the field trials, and he himself
+was trained by Armstrong at High
+Point. He is the marvel dog of all the Sandhills.
+What stories they tell of him on the
+post-office steps and ’round the stove in MacDougall’s
+store winter afternoons! From
+Dr. Adams to the youngest black boy who
+hangs about the freight shed, everyone in
+town takes a keen personal pride in that
+dog. Of course, he has pointed dead quail,
+and quail in trees and under logs, and he
+has, as can be proved by half the gold
+watches and every Ingersoll in the township,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</span>held a point for two hours and sixteen
+minutes—some say seventeen minutes.</p>
+
+<p>In the midst of his admirers at the store
+the handsome rascal is as bored as a young
+prig back in his home town after his first
+term at the University, but in the field he
+is keen sportsmanship personified. With
+his free open stride, he covers the country,
+head and tail up, his nose thrust into the
+air, sniffing first one side and now the other,
+eager to catch the first faint suggestion of
+the scent of the little brown birds. A short
+whistle and he stops in his tracks. A wave
+of the hand and he is off again in the opposite
+direction, quartering the ground perfectly.
+He stops dead on a point. Still as
+a statue he seems, but as you walk closer
+you see that he trembles with suppressed
+excitement, every muscle taut, every nerve
+straining, he stands there, a perfect picture.
+Flush the birds and at the command he will
+retrieve, going quickly and surely to each
+dead quail and returning it without so
+much as a feather dampened. He is a
+splendid dog wonderfully broken.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp70" id="i071b" style="max-width: 95.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i071b.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>DELIVERING QUAIL</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+<br>
+
+<p>We all applaud the stiff antics of a high
+school trained horse and wax enthusiastic
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</span>over the trick of the lion tamer’s tawny
+pupil, but not one in fifty of us ever thinks
+that the quail dog displays intelligence and
+training far beyond these. He ranges over
+the country as free as the winter wind, but
+always under perfect control. No bit guides
+him, yet he turns right or left at the wave
+of a hand. No snapping whip compels obedience,
+but he minds the call of a whistle
+promptly and cheerfully. If a savage tiger
+or a docile brown cow could be trained thus,
+scientific gentlemen would investigate the
+case in the interest of animal psychology.
+It would be one of the marvels of the world,
+but nobody thinks it at all “abnormal” in a
+setter or a pointer. Thousands of rollicking
+puppies learn the trick each year.</p>
+
+<p>How much more wonderful even is the
+subversion of the bird dog’s strongest instincts
+to the will of his master! We have
+seized upon that momentary pause that precedes
+the wild dog’s spring at his prey and
+developed it into the pointing habit, a habit
+that, through generations of painstaking
+training and selective breeding, has become
+stronger than the instinct to pounce upon
+the birds. What self-control is demanded
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</span>to stand staunch when the birds flush right
+under your nose! How many men have the
+firm hold on their passions that the quail
+dog displays when he picks up a dead bird
+in his mouth and returns it gently to his
+master? “The dog,” Maeterlinck has said,
+“is the only animal that is the friend of
+man.” The bird dog has gone even farther:
+he is the friend and the partner of man as
+well. He curbs his strongest instincts for
+the good of the game that he and his
+Master play together. His is the proud joy
+of humble service.</p>
+
+<p>Half the sport of quail shooting lies in
+working and watching the dogs. All day
+long the quail shooter has before him a living
+example of strength, of perseverance, of
+good faith, of self-restraint, the very cardinal
+virtues of good sportsmanship. It is
+a spiritual experience that is good for any
+man. And we love our four-footed partner
+in sport not alone because he is a splendid
+animal, good to look at, intelligent, and
+faithful; not only because he shows us good
+sport; but also because his own good sportsmanship
+appeals to the best sportsmanship
+in ourselves.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="The_Clay_Birds">
+    The Clay Birds
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap">We</span> sat
+round a blazing pine-knot fire
+in the big hotel’s cozy smoking room,
+and every man in the group, except the
+Banker, had been hobby-horse riding. Each
+had enjoyed a glorious day in the outdoors,
+pursuing his favorite sport. Each, tired
+with that delicious, restful tiredness that
+comes like a benison at the close of every
+day of keen sport, luxuriated in his deep
+leather chair. The fresh, pine-scented winds
+had swept the cobwebs from our brains, and,
+as the fire snapped and crackled, the bright
+flashes of friendly repartee, witty thrust
+and ready parry, flew round the circle.</p>
+
+<p>The Collegian and his Father had started
+it by holding, as golfers are so very apt to
+do, a <i>post mortem</i> over their afternoon
+round. This led the Editor, who had
+slipped away from the impatient telephone
+and the ever-hungry presses for a couple
+of weeks’ winter vacation, to make some
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</span>caustic comparisons between golf and his
+favorite tennis. But casualties on this hard
+and long-fought battlefield were tactfully
+avoided by the Manufacturer, who boldly
+asserted that both these good sports paled
+into utter insignificance before the most
+glorious sport of quail-shooting. He proved
+it too—to his own complete satisfaction—and
+then the polo-player championed his
+hobby, and was followed very naturally by
+a hard-riding fox-hunter. Then we had
+another round of golf, and so back again
+to the wide-ranging bird-dogs and the whirling
+quail coveys.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="i091" style="max-width: 95.0625em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i091.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>SNOW IN THE SANDHILLS</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+<br>
+
+<p>“I wonder,” put in the Banker, “if you
+gentlemen have read a poem of Whitcomb
+Riley’s called ‘His Favorite Fruit?’ It’s
+a little dialect sketch in which some Hoosier
+farmers, gathered ’round the iron stove in
+a little cross-roads grocery, discuss their
+favorite fruits. Each one holds out for his
+own personal choice—the apple, the peach,
+the pear, the watermelon—and slanders unmercifully
+the taste of the last speaker.
+But all the time the teller of this story
+‘chaws on an’ sez nawthin’.’ Finally one
+of the party asks him point blank, ‘Jim,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</span>what’s yourn fav’rite fruit?’ He chaws on
+fer quite a spell an’ then he sez, slow an’
+solemn-like, ‘Terbaccer,’ an’ you oughter
+heard ’em roar.”</p>
+
+<p>“You,” continued the Banker, when the
+laugh had subsided, “have been each slandering
+the other’s favorite sport, while I
+have been ‘chawin’ on an’ saying nawthin’,’
+and I wonder who of you will laugh at me
+and my favorite sport as at the Hoosier
+farmer whose favorite fruit was tobacco.”</p>
+
+<p>“Speaking for myself,” remarked the Editor,
+“I laugh at no sport except tiddle-de-winks.”</p>
+
+<p>“How about ping-pong?” asked the Collegian.</p>
+
+<p>“That must have been before your day—did
+you ever play it?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, thank Heaven, but——”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, I thought not. If you had, you’d
+not laugh at it, either,” and the Editor
+chuckled to himself reminiscently.</p>
+
+<p>“I came down here to Pinehurst,” continued
+the Banker, “to get some good trap-shooting.”</p>
+
+<p>“Huh!”—a short, sarcastic “Huh!”—came
+from the depths of the chair where the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</span>Manufacturer, after a long day tramping
+over the Sandhills behind his brace of
+pointers, was resting.</p>
+
+<p>“I expected just that from you, Charlie,”
+laughed the Banker. “Simply ’huh!’ and
+nothing more can express your wonder and
+contempt. For the life of you, you cannot
+understand why on earth a supposedly sensible
+man should come down here into the
+very heart of one of the best quail counties
+in North Carolina to smash clay birds at the
+trap, can you?” The Manufacturer shook
+his head vigorously. “Well,” continued the
+Banker again, “I felt just as you do a couple
+of years ago. I followed your favorite sport
+too many years to start slandering it now.
+I used to come down here quail-shooting
+before you were out of school, but I can
+tell you that trap-shooting is good sport,
+too. You are a Doubting Thomas, but why
+don’t you try it sometime? It’s not so simple
+as it looks.”</p>
+
+<p>Before we broke up an hour later, we had
+made an appointment to visit the traps next
+morning to witness the Banker’s promised
+conversion of the Manufacturer into a trap-shooter.
+None of us will ever forget that
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</span>skeptic’s immense surprise when he found
+the little clay birds so very “gamey” that he
+only broke nine out of his first string of
+twenty-five. It was a hard jolt to his pride,
+but he stuck out his jaw, tucked his gun
+under his cheek, and tackled another string.
+He did better later, and soon he got into
+the habit of joining the little parties at the
+squatty little gun clubhouse in the center of
+the big open field over against the great red
+barns of the model dairy. He came sheepishly
+at first, but later with brazen effrontery.
+In the end, he decided to stay over a
+week longer than he had planned, just to
+enter in the Mid-Winter Handicap Tournament
+the last of January.</p>
+
+<p>In no very strict historical sense can the
+adjective “new” be fairly applied to trap-shooting,
+and yet there is a newness in the
+recent vogue of the sport. The live, tame
+pigeon, thrown into the air, frightened and
+confused, from a collapsible wooden cage,
+has long since been supplanted by a little
+clay disc, hurled with lightning speed from
+a steel spring trap. This was the starting
+point of the development of trap-shooting
+as we know it in America today, and this
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</span>took place years ago. It is a harder, more
+sporty thing to smash a whizzing clay bird
+to smithereens than to knock down a frightened
+tame pigeon, and it is more humane.
+This change of targets put a keen zest into
+trap-shooting and took out a bitter reproach.
+But till recently, the growth of trap-shooting
+has been slow. In four short years,
+however, the number of active trap-shooters
+has increased fourfold; from about 100,000
+to about 425,000. During the same period
+trap-shooting clubs have increased from
+1,000 to 4,000, and it is estimated that about
+500,000,000 clay pigeons are thrown into
+the air each year at the shooter’s sharp command,
+“Pull!” In one short Presidential
+term, trap-shooting has sprung forward
+from a low place among the so-called minor
+sports to occupy a position second only to
+baseball in the number of its devotees. We
+are not apt to appreciate what this really
+means without the help of the cold figures
+above.</p>
+
+<p>There is a world of difference in being a
+“rooter” and in being a “player,” and the
+one simple little fact that each trap-shooter
+is a player himself, or herself, is just what
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</span>gives the sport its strongest grip upon the
+interest of its followers. That tense moment
+of “two out and the bases filled”; the
+jerky, crashing advance of the battling
+human machine carrying a pigskin ball
+down the field toward the goal-posts; the
+rush of the ponies and the hollow click of
+mallet against polo ball—all these tighten
+the muscles and quicken the heart-beat of
+any live sportsman, but, as the psychologist
+says, these are all external stimuli.</p>
+
+<p>Let the same man—or the same woman,
+for many women shoot at the traps nowadays—step
+up to the score, tuck his gun
+against his shoulder, brace himself and
+draw a deep breath, glance down the long
+length of blued barrels, and call “Pull!”
+Whizz goes the little black disc, hurtling
+away at a speed that makes the teal and the
+mallard seem lazy laggards. One moment
+of intensely concentrated effort and keen
+enjoyment till the flying saucer is found
+just above the forward sight; an almost involuntary
+squeeze of the trigger finger, the
+thrilling jump of the discharge, and puff!—the
+clay target is knocked into a thousand
+bits.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</span></p>
+
+<p>That tremendously concentrated effort of
+finding the speeding disc—you must find
+him quick—he will be quite out of range if
+you stop to say quickly—followed by the
+physical climax of the almost simultaneous
+kick of the gun and the shattering of the
+clay target; these are secrets of the witching
+spell that lures the shooter back and back
+again to the traps. I must confess to a
+thoroughly diabolical delight in knocking
+the clay birds to powder. I do not do it
+always—not even often, but when I do I
+enjoy the keenest pleasure. Other trap-shooters
+confess the same joy. Please, do
+not say anything about dangerous destructive
+tendencies that ought to be rigidly suppressed,
+or we shall get into an argument,
+and then I will have to say a lot of things
+about quickness of eye, correlation of senses
+and muscles, and a great deal more that has
+nothing whatever to do with the sport of
+shooting the clay birds.</p>
+
+<p>Over and above the inherent fascination
+of knocking the flying clay targets into
+powder, the fact that there is no closed season
+on these clay birds and that even a
+little hand trap in any open field will
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</span>furnish good game anywhere, goes far towards
+making “the sport alluring” the sport universal.
+Nor do the changing seasons at all
+handicap the trap shooter. The clay birds
+are always full grown and they have no
+nesting-time; they are just as plentiful and
+just as fair sport in November as in May.
+Indeed, when you mount the trap-shooting
+hobby-horse, you can make up your mind to
+settle yourself in the saddle for a long, long
+gallop over all sorts of country and in all
+sorts of weather.</p>
+
+<p>There seems to be a delicate touch of sarcasm
+in the fact that the most important
+winter trap-shooting tournament should be
+held within a stone’s throw of grounds so
+well stocked with quail that they are chosen
+for the running of one of the largest field
+trials. The pick of the blooded setters and
+pointers are tried out for their bird sense
+and hunting ability almost within hearing
+of the guns at the Pinehurst traps. But the
+quail-hunter and the trap-shooter are
+brothers in arms. Often, like the Manufacturer,
+converted at the Pinehurst traps last
+winter, they are sporting Siamese twins.
+The traps furnish good practice to the field
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</span>shooter and good sport when the closed season
+would otherwise keep the gun in its case.</p>
+
+<p>There is a curious connection between
+these brother sports. How keenly, at the
+traps, does one miss the tramping over the
+open fields, scrambling up hillsides, fording
+the streams, hopping over the rail fences!
+All the tireless quest of the hunt, that
+strange, primitive, impelling force that defies
+physical fatigue and keeps your high
+boots swishing through the coarse, knotted
+crab grass with a long, eager stride from
+daylight to dark! Most of all, you miss the
+dogs. That to me is the great loss. But
+there is continual shooting to take the place
+of the joys of the open fields, and there is a
+cleaner, keener satisfaction in smashing a
+target than in knocking down a quail; but
+what takes the place of the dogs? Nothing.
+Every shooter loves to shoot—if he says he
+does not, put him down as a hypocrite. No
+man lugs six or eight or ten or even twelve
+pounds of shotgun all day long just for the
+fun of carrying firearms. He likes to shoot.
+He may—and probably does—thoroughly
+enjoy the tramp and the pleasure of watching
+the dogs work, but if he went hunting
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</span>for these alone he would not burden himself
+with a gun. No, the shooter loves to shoot,
+and at the traps he can shoot till his gun
+barrels get red hot. Only a lame shoulder
+and the price of shells need keep him from
+shooting his head off, as the saying is. To
+the man who loves action—quick action and
+lots of it—this is a charm that the traps
+surely, and the live birds only uncertainly,
+offer.</p>
+
+<p>But the very kernel of the sport of trap-shooting
+comes in smashing those flying
+discs. However keen the hunting instinct
+there is always just the tinge of regret in
+blotting out the pretty life of little brown
+birds. There are times when one feels just
+a bit ashamed of that fierce pleasure of a
+good, clean, quick shot. At the traps one
+can let that pleasure run wild. You can
+grit your teeth and say, “I’m going to paste
+you this time,” without qualm of conscience.
+You can give rein to the passion for destruction
+without becoming a brute. To do so in
+the field is to degenerate. We hate the
+“game hog,” not because he is selfish and
+cruel, but because he is not a man. We
+need the strong, elemental passions, and we
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</span>are in danger of becoming super-refined
+jelly-fishes, incapable of doing wrong because
+we are incapable of doing good. It
+takes more courage to attack a lie than to
+storm a trench, more passion for destruction
+to root out a bad habit than to raze a city.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="Through_a_Jungle_to_the_Old_South">
+    Through a Jungle to the Old South
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap">The</span> first
+man to whom we spoke about
+canoeing down the Lumbee was not
+encouraging. The water would be too high
+for fishing, and what with whirlpools and
+other dire, vaguely hinted-at dangers he did
+not reckon we would even get to Lumberton,
+to say nothing of going all the way
+through to the sea. But our weather-stained
+mail held forth no inducements to return
+North to be buffeted about by a blizzard,
+and our dismal friend’s croakings but
+seemed to us promises of an exciting trip
+and strengthened our determination to go—to
+go, we secretly hoped, despite all hazard.
+He proved to be a melancholy deceiver;
+we found excitement, but not the kind he
+foretold. The natives know precious little
+about the Lumbee.</p>
+
+<p>Our first confirmation of this was when
+we discovered that the authority on the
+river is Dr. John Warren Achorn, who has
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</span>a winter home at Pinebluff. This canoeing
+enthusiast told us much about the river—that
+till three years ago, barring the natives’
+cypress dugouts, the Lumbee had never
+borne a canoe, and that, while he and others
+had been down a hundred and eighty miles,
+no one had ever gone clear through from the
+headwaters to the sea at Georgetown, S. C.
+Here was an additional fillip—we were going
+to blaze the way! Dr. Achorn also extended
+to us the courtesies of the Mid-Winter
+Canoe Club, and, thanks to him, we used
+one of the club canoes. He would have
+fitted us out with a complete kit had we
+needed it.</p>
+
+<p>“It was a misty, moisty morning, and
+cloudy was the weather,” when we pushed
+off from Blue’s Bridge and started down
+the Lumbee. We, by the way, were two
+men and two dogs, Leonard Chester Freeman
+and I, his setter “Belle” and my Scottish
+terrier “Dixie”. Snugly stowed away
+in our sixteen foot canoe were a shelter tent,
+blankets and ponchos, duffle bags, two shotguns
+and a .22 rifle with ammunition, a
+camera, cooking kit and food supplies for a
+week; a two hundred pound outfit, but there
+are no carrys on the Lumbee.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="i101" style="max-width: 95.1875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i101.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>
+    Photo by Dr. Achorn
+    </p>
+      <p>BLUE’S BRIDGE, PINE BLUFF, N. C.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+<br>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</span></p>
+
+<p>Half a dozen strokes and we were round
+a bend. The little clubhouse under the great
+pines had vanished. Faintly, through the
+thickets, Dr. Achorn’s cheery voice reached
+us, calling the Indian’s “<i>Bon Voyage!</i>”—“Good
+hunting!” Then, save for the swish
+of the paddles and the buzzing of a couple
+of precocious dragon-flies all was silent.
+Apparently, we were miles from civilization.
+The strange wildness of the Lumbee country
+strikes you at once. It is all a tangled wilderness,
+wild and rampant. There are no
+stump pastures, such as one meets along
+the banks of the rivers of the North Woods;
+no clearings with a squatty cabin and a
+field of scraggly corn; no trace of the hand
+of man. Except for the friends who pursued
+us in a motor to give us a farewell
+banquet in our first night’s camp, we saw
+no human being for eighty miles.</p>
+
+<p>Again unlike the northern rivers, the
+headwaters of the Lumbee do not “chatter
+over stony ways”; they zigzag, silent and
+swift, over a bed of white sand. If every
+river had its own private trade-mark, surely
+“XXX” would be granted to the Lumbee,
+for it twists and turns and loops about till
+beside it the proverbial corkscrew seems to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</span>be the shortest distance between two points.
+If you are mathematically inclined, you can
+calculate the curves from this data: we paddled
+twenty-eight miles from Blue’s Bridge
+to McLeod’s Bluff, where we made our first
+camp, and our friends’ speedometer showed
+they had covered just six miles over the road
+between these two points.</p>
+
+<p>There are no rapids or falls in the upper
+Lumbee, but the water glides along at a
+merry rate, scooting round the bends—“cow
+faces” the natives call them—in a way that,
+till you get just the knack of cutting the
+corners, is quite disconcerting. Every once
+in a while, which may mean every three
+miles or every thirteen, we came to what
+the natives are pleased to call bluffs, rises
+of ground that stand, dry and sheltered, a
+couple of feet above the swirling high water.
+Between these bluffs the river is literally
+bankless. The flood flows round and
+through the trees, a floating forest not a
+swamp, for there is no marshy ground and
+few reeds or water grasses. On the entire
+trip we never slapped at a mosquito or a
+fly. During the hot summers, this tangled
+jungle must teem with them, but from
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</span>September to May, though the weather is mild
+enough, they vanish completely.</p>
+
+<p>As it slips quietly to the sea, the Lumbee
+passes through three distinct phases, each
+different, each with a charm all its own.
+During the first stage, the hundred and
+thirty miles from the headwaters to Lumberton,
+the river winds its way through the
+Sandhills. Here the bottom land is heavily
+timbered, but it is hard country to lumber,
+and the woods are almost virgin forest.
+During the cold weather the swirling high
+water, and in the summer the noxious malaria,
+have kept the lumberman and his
+swinging axe out of the Lumbee woods, and
+the country is a great natural game preserve.
+Giant long-leafed pines dominate the
+thickets. These great trees shoot straight
+up fifty or seventy-five feet, their heads
+crowned by their long needles and huge
+cones, as the palms are crowned. Beneath
+are great dark clumps of mountain laurel,
+glossy bluegums, and tall bushes of bright
+holly all dotted with scarlet berries. Here
+and there the strained and twisted branches
+of a black-jack, that curious dwarf oak that
+seems to have been racked by some terrible
+torture, stand stark and bold among the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</span>leaves of its fellows, for even in December,
+the Lumbee woods are bright and green.</p>
+
+<p>What capital places for a snug camp the
+little bluffs are—dry and sandy, sheltered
+by the evergreens, and stocked with great
+stores of the best fire-wood in all the world.
+Those dry pine sticks, saturated with rosin
+and tar, crackle at a single match’s provocation
+into a bright flame. Some of these
+Lumbee camps of ours cling in my memory
+as the most glorious camps I have known.
+I can hear now the happy gurgle of the river
+and the swishing whispers of the wind in
+the pines. The pungent incense of our snapping
+fire, mixed with the fragrance of the
+pines and damp, cool, woodsy smell of the
+river bank even now fills my nostrils.</p>
+
+<p>From the very first we paddled one at a
+time, one hour on and one hour off; and oh,
+how much more quickly passed the “sabbatical
+hour,” when you lolled in the bow,
+than the “paddlatical hour” in the stern.
+This trip ruthlessly destroyed all my faith
+in copybook maxims about toil making the
+hours pass quickly.</p>
+
+<p>We had left Blue’s Bridge but a few moments
+when we came suddenly upon a great
+colony of blue herons, giants of the race,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</span>standing over five feet. Disturbed at our
+boorish intrusion upon their domestic affairs,
+the great, grey birds flapped laboriously
+up from their crude nests in the tree-tops.
+They rise as painfully as a gouty
+old man, but once fairly underway they sail
+gracefully in huge arcs. We grew to know
+them well before our trip was over, for they
+and the buzzards are both plentiful. For
+their beauty they are protected the year
+round, and the law, for the utilitarian reason
+that they act as public scavengers, is
+equally kind to the buzzards, who are tame
+to the point of familiarity. One battered
+old fellow, whose wings and tail lacked several
+feathers, took a keen, morbid interest
+in us. Soaring just behind us, watching
+with his wicked, hungry eyes, he followed
+us all one morning, but he finally convinced
+himself that we were going to get through
+all right, and disgusted, he gave up the
+chase.</p>
+
+<p>In the Lumbee woods are many wild turkeys,
+and during the fall and early winter,
+before the water has risen so high, if one
+has a still paddle, he can often slip round
+a bend and surprise a stately old gobbler
+and his hens feeding on the bank. ’Coons
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</span>and ’possums—African pork—are also plentiful.
+Often a slim brown mink slips silently
+off a log, and sometimes a lusty otter
+streaks across the stream, leaving a wake
+like a miniature power boat.</p>
+
+<p>The middle of the third afternoon, while
+I dozed in the bow, Freeman shot us through
+a narrow strip where a fallen tree had all
+but dammed the stream. As we skinned
+skilfully between the bank and the branches,
+a most unmistakably hog-like grunt woke
+me thoroughly, and Freeman, with a couple
+of vigorous strokes, brought us about and
+headed up stream. Several times we had
+come up with wild hogs, great porkers who
+have taken the back-to-nature call too seriously.
+Years ago—no one knows when—they
+forsook the pen with its three square
+meals a day to roam the woods in search of
+uncertain livelihood. Nomadic life has
+made them lean and gaunt, and armed them
+with stubby tusks that stick wickedly
+through their lips. We had some pot shots
+at these tough customers, but they had always
+rushed away through the flooded
+woods where pursuit was impossible. We
+were therefore mightily surprised to find,
+when Freeman paddled us back, a great
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</span>three-hundred pounder, black as the ace of
+spades and ugly as sin, who stood ground
+on a little ribbon of land between the river
+and the back waters. Cautiously we approached,
+I in the bow with gun ready
+waiting for the splashing rush to cover,
+Freeman paddling and trying to quiet the
+dogs who were most forcefully expressing
+their opinions on the subject of wild hogs.
+In vain did we wait for the snort and the
+splashing rush to cover, and, when almost
+on top of her, we discovered the reason for
+her determined stand. A volley of wild
+squeals greeted us. We had found a sow
+with twelve day-old piggies. I landed, and
+“Uff er—r—runt!” she bowled at me. I
+stuck my gun barrel in her face and she
+stopped, grunting and chopping her short,
+thick tusks. Freeman, having tied the dogs
+to the canoe braces, joined me and staved
+off her bold attacks while I snapped the
+brave lady’s picture. Then, after a deal of
+maneuvring, we kidnapped one of her offspring.
+I managed to get a youngster on a
+paddle and flipped him like a pancake over
+to Freeman, who deposited him unceremoniously
+in the canoe. Off we pushed,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</span>delighted with visions of roast pigling, and
+the old lady gave us a parting rush.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp90" id="i102b" style="max-width: 96.125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i102b.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>THE BRAVE LADY’S PORTRAIT</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+<br>
+
+<p>Our little piggie was, barring nothing,
+the most homely beastie ever seen. He was
+black and shiny, like a shaved and varnished
+puppy, with a big, shapeless wedge of
+a head, topped off with enormous, flappy
+ears. He squealed, and squawked, and
+snorted, and grunted in every key, and every
+waking minute he kept up his racket. But
+his comical antics and unfailing good nature
+won our hearts. We did not enjoy roast
+pig, and since he did not prove to be a good
+canoeist, we sold him, three days later, for
+the munificent sum of “two bits.” His new
+owner carried him off to join him to a family
+of tame pigs in his pens.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="i102a" style="max-width: 49.4375em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i102a.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>FEEDING THE CAPTIVE</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+<br>
+
+<p>Just above Alma (Alma is a puffing saw
+mill surrounded by dirty, dilapidated negro
+shacks), we passed under Gilchrist’s Bridge,
+where Sherman’s army, marching north
+after taking Charleston, crossed the river.
+Just below Alma is the reservation of the
+Croatoan Indians, the mysterious blue-eyed
+race descended, so it is said, from Sir Walter
+Raleigh’s Lost Colony, which was planted
+on Roanoke Island in 1587 and disappeared
+as completely as if swallowed by the earth.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</span>We met several of these Indians—short,
+thick-set fellows with yellow skins and wide-set,
+blue eyes—and found them so engrossed
+in planting cotton that it was hard to believe
+they were for years a thorn in the side
+of the Government and the army.</p>
+
+<p>Nearing Lumberton, a busy little town
+with an attractive Confederate Monument,
+all strangely like a New England village
+with its shaft “To our Soldiers and Sailors,”
+the country began to change. We were leaving
+the long-leafed pines of the Sandhills.
+Cypress became more and more common,
+and occasionally we spied a bunch of Spanish
+moss swaying in the branches overhead.
+Just above Lumberton the river twists itself
+all into knots and then straightens out,
+so the last couple of miles into the town are
+straight as a canal, between banks that rise
+steeply from each side of the swift, deep
+stream.</p>
+
+<p>We created a sensation in Lumberton.
+Khaki clad, in flannel shirts, much in need
+of the barber’s services, traveling in a
+strange craft whose frailty aroused great
+admiration of our supposed courage, and
+accompanied by two dogs and a young wild
+pig—it is small wonder we disembarked
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</span>amid a crowd that thought we were crazy,
+but was too polite to say so. The sole and
+only hotel, so we discovered, had been torn
+down to make room for a bank, but we
+found a genial savior in an energetic gentleman
+who combines the various duties of
+proprietor of the movies, political boss, reporter
+for the local paper, and last, but not
+least, husband of the landlady of “th’ best
+eatin’-house in town.” Here we could eat,
+and our factotum found us a place to sleep
+with one of his neighbors.</p>
+
+<p>Below Lumberton, which we left next
+morning after stocking our larder and purchasing
+a nursing-bottle for piggie, we came
+fairly to the second stage of the river. The
+woods of the Sandhills had vanished; we
+were in a semi-tropical jungle. Bottle-neck
+cypress rose, like the columns of a cathedral,
+right out of the water. When they rise in
+mid-stream, the lumbermen recognize such
+a phenomenon of Nature by calling them
+“dram trees” and claiming a drink when the
+logs are safely by. There are parts of the
+river where, if this jovial custom is strictly
+followed, it must take a remarkably hard
+head to bring the lumber to the mill. The
+undergrowth is a tangle of giant ferns and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</span>cactus-like palms, all snarled up with twining
+creepers. Overhead every crotch in the
+trees is a jardiniere of ferns, and every
+branch is coated with lichens, and festooned
+with Spanish moss and vines. Here is fascinating
+canoeing. The current slips along
+merrily between the banks, and one can
+whirl along almost without dipping the
+paddle in the water. In other places, the
+water sprawls out through the cypress jungle
+and there is no more current than in a
+bath-tub. Chattering black birds in whole
+colonies scolded us roundly; red and yellow
+wood-peckers played tag up and down the
+tree trunks; scarlet tanagers and sapphire
+kingfishers darted down the stream before
+us, while humming-birds, like great bejewelled
+moths, hovered about our canoe.
+The trees had burst into leaf as if by magic,
+and the delicate greens of their new foliage
+made a delightful setting against which to
+show off the brilliant colors of the bright
+birds. We had canoed right into the heart
+of Fairyland at the first of a glorious spring.
+Who would believe that it was the first of
+March and that a blizzard was throttling
+the North?</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp90" id="i111b" style="max-width: 95.9375em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i111b.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>“DRAM TREES”</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+<br>
+
+<p>Soon we left this Fairyland and came to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</span>the great Buzzard Flats, the stillest, weirdest
+waters one ever canoed. After threading
+our way between the decaying bastions
+of the Old State Line Bridge, once a famous
+thoroughfare, now but a mark to tell the
+lumbermen they have passed from North to
+South Carolina, we had slipped with the
+Lumbee into the waters of the Little Pee
+Dee. They slide together these two great
+rivers and except that the banks are now
+a hundred yards from side to side one would
+hardly know the change. But it is different
+when the Little Pee Dee joins the Great
+Pee Dee. Here the rush of the big river’s
+muddy floods backs up the slower waters
+of the smaller river. They sprawl over the
+flat country into a great labyrinth of lakes
+and lagoons, the famous Buzzard Flats of
+the Pee Dee. It was a cool, still, grey afternoon
+when we paddled through this strange
+place. The sky stretched steely grey above
+us, and on all sides the still water reached
+away like great sheets of ground glass. The
+great, grey cypress, all hung with grey
+Spanish moss, rose in straight colonnades.
+Save for the swish-swish of the paddles and
+the clunk-a-plunk of innumerable turtles
+which dropped dully into the water at our
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</span>coming, all was still as the tomb. Even the
+birds added to the eerie spell; big blue heron
+swinging in lazy circles; grey cranes streaking
+across the sky; buzzards hanging all
+but motionless far overhead; and owls bolting
+away in their senseless flight.</p>
+
+<p>But with all their witching spell these
+Flats are a capital place in which to get
+lost. Forewarned, we kept to the right
+when in doubt, for the Great Pee Dee comes
+in on the right side. All afternoon we paddled
+through these bewitched lagoons, and
+the sun, a great, hazy red ball, was just
+sinking when the rush of yellow water told
+us we were in the Great Pee Dee. We both
+heaved a sigh of relief, and then laughed at
+each other. Neither had spoken of it, but
+we had both been contemplating the prospect
+of a chilly night, cold and without a
+warm supper, spent in the canoe among the
+misty reaches of water and cypress.</p>
+
+<p>The river’s swift current carried us along
+without paddling and for half an hour we
+idly watched the rearguard of the great
+duck army hurrying northwards from their
+winter quarters among the rice islands at
+the mouth of the Great Pee Dee. They
+came as if flung from catapults, flying high,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</span>singly, in couples, trios, and little flocks of
+five or six. Often in the evening stillness
+we could hear the whr-r-r-r-r of their strong
+wings long before they would burst out of
+the twilight. Then a black streak would be
+drawn against the pink, western sky, and
+be lost in the hazy distance over the Buzzard
+Flats. We were too late for duck
+shooting, but just in time for the run of
+spring shad, and we drifted by two rowboats
+in which some singing darkies toiled
+with a giant’s net loaded with the fish that
+soon would be commanding a fancy price in
+the Northern markets.</p>
+
+<p>That night we camped our last camp on
+the river. High up on the right bank we
+pitched our tent under a spreading live oak,
+and we sat silently smoking till our fire had
+died to a handful of glowing embers. Tomorrow
+we would be back in the world of
+today again, the bustling, busy world of
+men; but tonight we were still in the great,
+wild woods, close to the heart of Mother
+Earth. A chugging little flat-bottomed
+steamer awoke us in the morning. She
+puffed laboriously up stream, and threatened
+to soon tire of being overloaded with
+bulging cotton bales, and drop quietly to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</span>the river bottom. We made a late start,
+and slipped reluctantly by the banks of
+magnolias, wild honeysuckle, and yellow
+jasmines. Here was the third stage of the
+trip. We had come out of the jungle into
+a bit of the Old South, a bit curiously preserved
+from the hard blows of Fate.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp90" id="i111a" style="max-width: 95.0em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i111a.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>A PEE DEE PLANTATION</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+<br>
+
+<p>Behind the magnolias we caught glimpses
+of great colonial mansions, many of them
+in ruins, others we knew in the hands of
+strangers, for the rice islands across the
+river are now all wild and untilled. These
+rice islands have a strange history. ’Way
+back in Colonial days they were given over
+to indigo culture, and in Georgetown Indigo
+Growers’ Hall, an impressive building, still
+bears silent testimony to the importance of
+the industry that was destroyed by better
+communication with the East. During the
+Revolution, these same islands sheltered
+Marion, the Swamp Fox, and his ragged
+patriots, and Yohahanna’s Ferry is still
+pointed out as their favorite crossing place
+to and from their raids on the British forces.
+Later these islands became huge rice plantations,
+accounted the most valuable land
+in the South and supporting the flower of
+southern chivalry. The Civil War laid
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</span>waste this gardenland, but the rice enabled
+it to regain a shadow of its former greatness,
+till, twenty years ago, it was a fourth
+time ruined by the discovery that rice could
+be more economically grown in Texas.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp90" id="i092b" style="max-width: 94.6875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i092b.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>YOHANNAHAS FERRY</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+<br>
+
+<p>Warm-hearted friends greeted us with
+open hospitality in this country, and when
+we reached Georgetown, after ten glorious
+days on the river, we were feted as if we
+had discovered both Poles and been on a
+little side trip to the moon.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp60" id="i112" style="max-width: 95.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i112.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>INDIGO MAKERS HALL, GEORGETOWN, S. C.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+<br>
+
+<p>It took us ten days to follow the winding
+Lumbee down to the ocean. If one wishes
+to break our record it will not be a hard
+task, for we went along at a go-as-you-please
+pace. Anyone who has only canoed in
+the North will find curious things and new
+delights along this little-known stream. Do
+not believe it, if some veteran canoeist says
+“muddy water” to you. The last forty miles
+are muddy water, but, even at flood-time, the
+Lumbee and the Little Pee Dee twisting
+through the Sandhills are clear, or at most
+stained with juniper. Remember, too, that
+they glide between the green banks when
+northern streams are frozen hard. January
+in North Carolina is amazingly like October
+in Maine or Wisconsin. The Lumbee is the
+canoeist’s great excuse to dodge Winter.</p>
+
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp90" id="i081" style="max-width: 156.9375em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i081.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>
+    Photo by Dr. Achorn
+    </p>
+      <p>A VISTA OF THE LUMBEE</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<div class="transnote">
+<p class="center"><b>Transcriber’s Notes</b></p>
+<p>Perceived typographical errors have been silently corrected.</p>
+<p>Illustrations have been moved nearer to the text to which they refer.</p>
+<p>Inconsistencies in hyphenation and compound words have been maintained
+as printed.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78048 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+This book, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
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+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for eBook #78048
+(https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78048)