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Title: Sandhills sketches

Author: Williams Haynes

Release date: February 26, 2026 [eBook #78048]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: D. O. Haynes & Co, 1916

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78048

Credits: Steve Mattern and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SANDHILLS SKETCHES ***

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.”

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.

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.

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.

AT THE PINEHURST FARM

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

“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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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Table of Contents

Sandhills Sketches

CONTENTS

Dodging Winter

“Them Huggins Boys”

A Sandhills Christmas Carol

“Tar Burnin’”

Some Quail Dogs—And Others

The Clay Birds

Through a Jungle to the Old South

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