3 The Shadow of the Plant

Harry called the next morning at the office of Christopher Lucas, the President of the First National Bank, who had helped him with money, and who had shrewdly seen from the first that Harry would be a great asset to Groveton. Lucas who looked more like a farmer than a financier, was sitting at ease in an arm chair, placidly smoking a pipe.

“Shall I be glad to see you or shall I not?” asked Christopher Lucas, puckering his eyelids.

“It’s about half and half,” replied Harry, “I haven’t come to settle with you, but I’ve come to tell you that for the last month my books balance exactly.”

“That pays your bills,” said Christopher Lucas, “but it doesn’t pay me.”

“No, but if I’m rising, why can’t I keep on rising? I merely came by to tell you, Mr. Lucas, that you can hope.”

Christopher Lucas mildly winked his left eye. Harry knew that he was pleased.

“When you have another bulletin let me see it,” said the banker.

Harry left the bank and sauntered down the street. A large dark man, heavily bearded, passed him. He was a striking figure and Harry turned to look back at him. Then he was seized with an intense shiver of repulsion, and a vision of a far-off day came back to him. He tried to keep from seeing the man again, but, despite himself, he took a second look. The figure turned a corner and disappeared. The wild Mason blood in Harry was leaping, but he forced himself to go on. When he reached the office he told Jim Steptoe to let no one disturb him, and then locked himself in his own little cubby hole. The big dark form brought back to him a vision, no, not a vision, but a reality, a reality as vivid, as intense, as terrible after all these years as it was on the day it occurred.

Harry had a mind of wonderful sensitiveness. It was like the plate in a camera. An impression once made upon it was never effaced, and this, from its very nature, was put there in indelible hues. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. The little pulses in his temple began to beat, and his nerves were tingling. The office, Groveton slid away, the years turned back, and Harry Beauchamp lived it all over again with a reality that was intense, extraordinary and agonizing.

* * * *

A boy and a man were walking along a road in a hilly part of Kentucky, where the mountains and the lowlands meet. The boy, not more than fourteen, was tall and fair, and the man, about twenty years his senior, was also tall and fair. Their physical resemblance, despite the fact that one was strong and the other weak, indicated the close tie of blood.

Both were in high spirits, and there was much to make them so. It was spring. The wind was fair. The country was green about them, and the sky blue above.

“How far do you say it is now to Groveton, Uncle Dick?” asked the boy.

“Not more than three miles, Harry,” replied the man, “but why do you want to hurry? Isn’t it pleasant enough just to stroll along?”

The boy looked up and smiled. He was already beginning to understand that his good natured Uncle Dick had never done anything in life but “stroll along.”

“I don’t want to hurry” he said, “I merely wished to know.”

“I wouldn’t bother about facts, when they are not needed.”

Dick Mason, the careless, raised his head, and inhaled the odor of young grass and new foliage. It was very grateful to him, body and soul alike. For him there was no future and no past; the present was always enough. He had inherited the love of the hills and forest from primitive ancestors, who were not so very far away. He had something of the voiceless poet in his nature, and a lyrical quality, akin to it, dwelled in the boy.

The light wind grew a little stronger, and the young grass in the fields rippled gently, like the waters of a lake, under a wandering breeze. In the west the hills rolled away, and in the east rose a dim, blue line that marked the crest of low mountains.

The poet in the boy came again to the surface, and, for the time, he was wholly like his uncle. He too lived then in the present, and in the present only. He was the primitive man. The odors that came on the southern wind were so keen and poignant that his very soul was thrilled. He drew deep breaths, and his strong young chin quivered a little. He looked at the broken country in all its spring freshness and he loved it.

The road now left the fields and entered dense forest. The trees grew thick and dark along the crests and rocky slopes, throwing long shadows across their path. But the gloom did not enter the spirits of young Harry Beauchamp. The forest appealed to him as the fields had done.

“I suppose they’ll cut ’em all down some day.” said Dick Mason, looking at the giant trees, “but they stretch away now to the mountains and to the other side too, I suppose. The Burkes have their hole over there among the ridges.”

He spoke contemptuously; but a shadow passed over the youthful face of Harry.

“What is the trouble between the Burkes and ourselves, Uncle Dick?” asked the boy.

Dick Mason laughed light-heartedly.

“I don’t know that you’re in it, Harry,” he replied. “But yes, of course you are. You’re a Mason too. To tell you the honest truth I don’t remember, but it was certainly one of three things—the civil war, a woman, or religion. They’ve caused all the quarrels in Kentucky, and so the Burkes are our enemies, with Cad at the head of ’em.”

A half-formed idea appeared again in the mind of Harry Beauchamp. It seemed to him such a futile thing to carry on a quarrel, the cause of which had been forgotten, but he was very young, and the ties of blood and propinquity are strong. He said nothing, and strolled on with his uncle into the deeper shadows of the forest.

The Groveton Road narrowed, and led up a steep hill. At the crest, huge trees reached out branches that met across the way. Here shadows always hovered, even on the brightest day, and the two stopped a few moments for the sake of the coolness. Harry saw, through a rift in the foliage the dim line of the mountains, and the blue haze that overhung them. A breath of chill air seemed to blow down upon him from those heights, and his spirits sank suddenly into the depths. He did not know why.

They resumed the walk, and Dick Mason began to whistle some gay old tune. The chill wind had not touched him, and his heart was as light as ever. The road still led under over-hanging branches, and each side was dense, with trunk and thicket. Save for Dick Mason’s clear whistling tune there was no sound in the forest. No squirrel rattled the bark, and no bird sang. The wind was dead.

Harry Beauchamp was silent, the chill still at his heart. The bushes on his right rustled suddenly and he looked up. It was a new note in the forest, but it ceased as suddenly as it had come. He was about to speak to his uncle, but he saw a pair of fierce eyes in the thicket, a patch of brown face, and a deadly blue barrel.

A sharp rifle-shot rang far through the silent forest. A ball of fire, leaving a little thin white smoke behind it, seemed to leap from the bushes, and poor, merry idle Dick Mason threw up his hands. Then he uttered a kind of sobbing sigh, and sank prone in the road.

The boy’s heart stopped quite still for a few moments from sheer horror. Then, when he saw his uncle’s white face, and knew that he was dead, he dashed into the thicket. But he found nothing there. The forest had returned to its wonted silence.

When Judge William Braxton rode along, ten minutes later, on his way home from a term of the Circuit Court in one of the hill counties, he found a boy of fourteen, weeping over a still figure that lay in the middle of the Groveton Road.

* * * *

Harry did not know that when Judge Braxton reached home with the boy riding behind him and told of the tragedy, little Cynthia Braxton, noted even then for her wonderfully bright eyes, dark blue or black as the light shone upon them, and her wonderful crown of black hair had said gravely! “When Harry is grown up he will kill Cad Burke.” A year or two later she had repeated the remark to him in the same, grave, matter-of-course manner, and he had been startled, as the Judge had been on the first occasion.

Now Harry was not thinking of Cynthia and her words. He saw only that tragedy on the Groveton Road, and he saw it to the minutest detail. Even the color of woods and fields was just the same. The future was vivid to Cynthia, but to him it was the past. It had been a long time, since he had yielded to this impulse, and he had hoped that the picture would pass away, but it had not been dimmed a particle.

There had been no evidence against Cad Burke, and the Coroner’s Jury had been forced to dismiss him. He had gone deeper into the mountains but here he was again, as baleful and hateful to Harry as ever.

He was aroused by a knock, thundering, and repeated on his door.

“What do you mean by locking yourself in?” shouted a robust voice. “Have you commited any crime? Open up or you’ll have to buy a new door!”

Harry turned the key gladly, and welcomed his friend Tom Kidd, a stalwart young man, square of face and figure, tanned almost to an Indian color by wind, sun and cold. He and Tom had been schoolboys together in Groveton at the academy, conducted by Professor Ross, who looked more like a politician than a teacher, but who knew how to rule boys and make them love learning. Their great friendship had begun in a battle waged upon the question of pronunciation. Harry’s name had been generally called Beechum, until it occured to him that he ought to enforce the proper pronunciation, the first syllable, “B-e-a-u”, to be called as if it were spelled “B-o”, and the “c-h-a-m-p” with the p silent and the “a-m- pronounced almost exactly like the ”o-n“ in tongs, that is ”Bo-shonh.”

It was Tom who was the first offender after this resolution was taken, and a fierce fight over it had occurred in a secluded corner of the school yard. Harry, after receiving a severe pummeling, conquered through sheer courage, and as the story of the combat spread the name became “Bo-shong” in the mouths of most people.

Out of that controversy had arisen a staunch and enduring friendship, and now Tom, a, practical man, with a wonderful mathematical mind, was seeking capital to undertake the building of a railroad from Groveton to Pleasantville in the mountains, where wonderful wells of the purest, high grade oil were flowing, and coal also, was promised.

Harry shook his friend’s hand with warmth. He missed Tom who had quietly slipped out of Groveton two or three months before, and of whom he had not heard since. He noticed now that Tom looked stronger, squarer, and more mathematical than ever. “What have you been doing all this time!” he asked.

“Doing!” replied Tom Kidd joyously. “Why I’ve been doing the very thing that I ought to do, and that I want to do. We’re going to get the capital for that railroad into the hills, to tap the oil regions, and I’ve been helping survey the route. It’ll be a piece of work to thrill a man’s soul. What curves! what grades! I tell you Harry Beauchamp I’ve got every one figured out!”

Tom’s quiet and usually somewhat heavy face glowed. Harry could see his mathematical soul shining with joy through it.

“Tom” he said, “You’re a happy man. I congratulate you. The road will be built?”

“As sure as you and I are standing here, and it will soon double the size of Groveton.”

“I thought I saw one of your mountaineer friends on the street a while ago—Cad Burke.”

Tom’s blue eyes snapped with anger.

“It’s likely that you did,” he said. “He’s come down here to gouge our company. Don’t talk to me about the innocence of the mountaineer. He can be a regular hold-up man when he tries, and often he tries. Our road is to run across a piece of his poor old mountain land, and he’s trying to make us pay five prices for it. It’s an old field,that’s had nothing but scrub sassafras on it for the last, twenty years.”

The two strolled out of the office together, and Tom continued to pour out his anger against the mountaineers. Led by Cad Burke and a few others like him they were everywhere obstructing the right of way.

They parted two or three blocks farther on, and Harry returned to his office. Much was to be done that day, and, sitting down again in his little cubby hole, he bent over his desk.

“Is this Mr. Boshong!”

The words were spoken in a mountain accent and, in a flash a deep shiver of repulsion ran through Harry. He looked up, and saw Cad Burke standing before him. The mountaineer was a man of about forty now, very large and very dark. All his features except his eyes were hidden by thick black beard, but it seemed to Harry’s excited imagination that the eyes were sardonic. What could Cad Burke want there and with him? He felt a sudden fierce scorn of himself, because his uncle’s death had gone unavenged. But while the mental struggle passed, the big dark man stood before him, unmoving, his sardonic look unchanged. It was quickly over, and Harry, though he still felt those inward tremors of anger and hate, replied in a voice that he forced to be steady.

“I’m Mr. Beauchamp.”

“The boss o’ this paper.”

“The editor and proprietor.”

“I want to subscribe for six months. They’re talkin’ about runnin’ a railroad from here out into Van Buren County, an’ I want all the news about it. You mean to watch over the honest farmer don’t you, an’ protect him from all them railroad an’ corporation sharks?”

Harry looked up at Cad Burke again. It was unexampled impudence for the man to come there and sneer at him. He stared straight into the mountaineer’s eyes, and presently Burke was forced to turn his gaze away.

“I’m for that railroad,” Harry said. “We need it here, the mountains need it and the oil field needs it. The farmer isn’t always honest, and you know it.”

Cad Burke laughed, a low, irritating laugh, sent between the teeth, and every nerve in Harry Beauchamp tingled with anger.

“I jest wanted to know how you stood,” said the mountaineer. “I see you ain’t no friend of the common people. But I’ll take the paper all the same.”

“Pay at the desk then,” said Harry—he was anxious to get rid of the man as soon as possible.

Cad Burke, without another word, stalked over to the clerk, paid and stalked out, his heavy boots sending back an echo from the stair. Harry closed the door of his cubby hole. He wished to be absolutely alone again for at least five minutes. He was tempted to take his revolver from his desk, follow the man, and accuse him of that old but unforgotten crime. His hand crept toward the drawer, but he pulled it back with a jerk, and then held himself perfectly still. Five minutes passed and the singing blood was quiet again. Then he opened the door of his cubby hole, and went quietly to work.

He wrote an editorial, warmly endorsing the proposed Groveton and Pleasantville railroad. Its chief engineer, Mr. Thomas Kidd, although very young was a mathematical and constructive genius, and the road would develop resources dormant much too long. There was no sense in opposing it, or in trying to rob the men who were going to build it. It was a heated editorial, and Judge Braxton spoke to him of it the next day.

“A good article that of yours Harry” he said, “good and strong, yes it’s strong.”

Harry looked at him when he noticed the peculiar emphasis on the “strong.”

“The mountaineers will hear of it,” continued the Judge meditatively. “They’ll hear of it, even if they don’t read. You’ll stir ’em up, yes you’ll stir ’em up. That part about robbing the railroad will get right inside of them. So long Harry, I think a client is waiting for me at my office, and I can’t let him escape. People have been too peaceful and amiable to suit me.”

Harry read the editorial again when he returned to the office. He had expressed himself forcibly, and the mountaineers might not like it. Yet he must tell the truth. Harry Beauchamp did not like a middle course. Slow and conciliatory methods wearied him. He followed up the editorial with others in the same vein, and received some ill-spelled and threatening letters from the hills. They called him a plutocrat, an enemy of the common people, and they warned him that he had better not come up in the high country where honest men lived. He laughed, threw the letters in the waste-basket and forgot them.

Meanwhile he never neglected his campaign against crimes of violence in Kentucky. No issue of the Herald appeared without something, whether long or short, on the subject, and the reputation of the Herald as an organ of distinct and original character increased. He had a swift, attractive style that could on occasion be light and humorous, with a deft and delicate touch, and the sayings of “The Groveton Herald Man” began to be known rather widely. This growth in popular reputation meant also a growth in circulation and advertising, and a famous week came when the accounts showed a surplus of $10.42.

Harry looked at the figures with a keen and penetrating pleasure. It was the biggest $10.42 that he had ever seen, and that surplus was one of the most famous mile-stones of his life. He went to the First National Bank, and gravely announced the fact to Christopher Lucas. The banker puckered his eyebrows in his familiar fashion.

Maybe Harry, my money isn’t sunk as deep in the well as I thought,“ he said.

“At any rate I believe it’s rising to the surface again,” said Harry.

He went forth a few weeks later for a ride in the country with Charlie Wentworth and Tom Kidd who had returned from another absence in the hills.

“The road’s coming along” said Tom. “The right of way is practically secured now though, it was almost like blazing it with cannon. It’s queer how some people fight against improvement. It’s like forcing a tramp to take a bath. We’ll begin on the roadbed in the spring.”

But Tom’s troubles melted away, as the three rode past the suburbs of Groveton and into the open country. The wonderful Indian summer had come. A fine silky haze floated over the far line of blue hills, and the forests on the slopes, burned in the deepest tints of red and blue and yellow. The air, crisp and fresh, was life itself, and these three who were very young, and, as they thought on the steps of success, felt a great bound of the spirits. They whipped up their horses and rode at a gallop, the hoofs ringing on the hard road.

“What could beat this?” said Harry in enthusiasm. “It’s fine to be in Old Kentucky!”

“Yes,” said practical Tom Kidd, “to be galloping along a good road on a good horse. But you wouldn’t like to be doing that sort of thing over there. You wouldn’t be enjoying yourself so much in old Kentucky, if you had to do it.”

He pointed to one of the empty fields, where tobacco had grown. The plant had “been cut and gathered, but the stalks, where the knife had passed, stood up in ugly rows.

“You’re right,” said Harry, “That would be too hard work for me. Too many back-breaking processes. It’s a long distance from plant bed to pipe.”

They passed many other fields of the same kind, all showing the long rows of ugly amputated stalks that told little of the immense amount of labor put upon those fields. To the west and south the great dark tobacco region rolled away from Groveton. Over a wide area, many counties, tobacco of the dark, heavy, rich waxy kind was the staple product. It meant everything to the farmer. Grain and hay he raised too, but he mostly consumed these himself. Tobacco was his one great money crop, because he sold it all. It built his house, it bought his furniture, it clothed his family, it sent his sons and daughters to school, it was almost the sole basis of his circulating medium. His fortunes went up an down with the price of it. All his life he was chained to the plant, whose dark green leaves earlier in the season waved over countless fields from the Ohio to Tennessee.

The Nation was the world’s greatest producer of tobacco, and nearly half of it came from Kentucky. It made Louisville the greatest tobacco market, by far, in the world, and it also fed numerous smaller markets, of which Groveton was one. It went not only to every state in the Union, but to every country on every continent, it fed huge factories in Louisville, St. Louis and other cities, and it made some huge fortunes in New York and abroad. All the world came for this tobacco.

But the dark tobacco farmer himself knew no release from slavery. His was a back-breaking occupation that made him old long before his time.

The economic writers with their usual airy ignoring of circumstances, told him to give up tobacco and, instead raise grain, grass and cattle which entailed less labor. He could not. There was the constant pressure of his increasing family for money, and tobacco meant money; it brought it with more quickness and certainty than anything else, so far as he was concerned. Moreover the farm had been bought on a credit, when he started out in life, and it must be paid for. It was tobacco that enabled him to meet the notes. If he was able, at last, to stock his farm with blooded horses and cattle it, was because he had raised enough tobacco to get the money. If he had a brick house and fine stables it was because he was especially skillful and energetic in the production of tobacco. All began with tobacco, and not more than one in a hundred ever got beyond it.

The dark tobacco farmer tended his product with a care that he was never compelled to bestow upon anything else. When all the infinite processes connected with one crop were finished it was time to begin that of next year. There was the choice of a plant-bed and its preparation, then the sowing of the plants and their daily and nightly protection from cold, bugs, and other forms of destruction. Then every tiny plant had to be drawn, and set out in the field in a hole specially made for it, with the water poured in, and the soil pressed down around it by the farmer’s own hands. Even then the work was only begun. Many of the plants perished from the hardness of the earth, and others, after the same elaborate process had to be set out in their place. Then throughout all the summer and autumn the tobacco must be watched over and tended. It must be hoed and “suckered” and “topped” and “wormed,” and guarded day and night like a sick child. Not until the stalk had grown to a considerable height, shooting forth its dark green leaves, could the farmer stand upright. All things until then must be done with the back bent, and the back that is bent perpetually can seldom straighten itself again.

With the autumn came the dread of too-early frosts, and then the process of cutting and of hanging in the fields. Afterward it was transferred to the barns and after that followed the curing. This took all the winter, and there the skill of the farmer counted most. Whether it was “smoke” or “fire” or “dry air” the result depended upon his knowledge and vigilance. According to what he did the product was worth five cents a pound or twenty.

His labors were not yet over. After the tobacco was cured he must strip it from the stalk, leaf by leaf, tie the requisite number of leaves into a “hand”, assort the different qualities and “bulk” each. Then when the different “bulks” had reached the requisite degree of moisture he took them “hand” by “hand” and packed them into hogsheads, prizing each to a weight of a thousand or fifteen hundred pounds or more. Then it was sent to the warehouse in some city, and when the warehouseman thought the time was best it was sold at auction. Long before then the farmer had been compelled to begin the preparations for a new crop. Year after year he bent further, his hands grew more knobby, and the seams on his face deepened. At forty he looked and felt as old as the city man of sixty.

Harry knew all these things, and they were running through his sympathetic mind as they rode between the bare tobacco fields.

“I wish our farmers could give up tobacco altogether,” he said. “It’s too hard a crop.”

“But they’ll never do it,” said Wentworth. “The writers and speakers lecture them and tell them to turn to other things, but all the nations want tobacco, and this is the best tobacco field in the world. While the writers are writing and the speakers speaking the tobacco production grows heavier and heavier every year.”

“And the chief profits are at the end of the process,” said Tom Kidd. “There’s lots of money in tobacco, but the manufacturer gets the greater share. We are suffering here from the primeval curse, and that’s the old system of slavery which prevented all development except the agricultural. When the Civil War wiped out what little capital the South had we had to begin again on credit, and a borrower is always at the mercy of other people. We are in that stage yet, and a man in debt is a slave. The Dark Tobacco people can never control their product, until they get money ahead, and don’t have to sell unless they feel like it.”

Harry laughed.

“Enter the science of mathematics,” he said. “Tom has figured out to a nicety the average price per pound every farmer in the Dark Tobacco district receives for his product.”

“You’d better pay attention to what I say” replied Tom Kidd stoutly. “It’s a question with which the editor of the Herald and Members of the House from Groveton will have to deal sooner or later.”

“My chief problem now is to earn money enough to buy a new press,” said Harry. “Must I dream about tobacco too?”

Charlie Wentworth leaned over and gave Harry’s horse a smart cut with his whip. Then he served Tom’s in the same manner, and the three plunged into a gallop.

“We’re out today for a ride, not for trouble” he said, “and let us do what we undertook to do.”

Their hoofbeats rang on the hard road, and they sped on, the cool wind rushing past them.

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