The Purchase Price by Emerson Hough (ebook reader screen .txt) 📕

unanimity of those signing. At the suggestion of Doctor Franklin and Mr. Gouverneur Morris, there was a clause added which stated that the Constitution was signed 'as by the states actually present,' this leaving the individual signers not personally responsible! I suggest therefore, sir, that we should evade the personal responsibility of this did you put it to the vote of the states represented here."

"I rely upon the loyalty and the unanimity of my family," replied the leader, with more firmness than was wont. "Gentlemen, are we then agreed? Does Massachusetts consent? Is Virginia with us? Is New York agreeable? Does Kentucky also agree?"

There was no murmur of dissent, and the leader, half rising, concluded;

"Gentlemen, we agreed four days ago that the Countess St. Auban should leave Washington not later than that night. We are now agreed that, in case of her return, she shall if possible be placed under the charge, not of any responsible figure of our party, but of a gentleman distinguished in the councils of an opposing party, whose abolitionist beliefs coincide somewhat with her own. Let us hope they will both get them to Missouri, the debating ground, the center of the political battle-field to-day. But, Missouri or Hungary, Kentucky or France, let us hope that one or both of them shall pass from our horizon.

"There remains but one question, as earlier suggested by Kentucky: if we agree upon New York as our agent, who shall be our emissary to New York, and how shall he accomplish our purpose with that gentleman? Shall we decide it by the usual procedure of parliamentary custom? Do you allow the—the Chair—" he smiled as he bowed before them—"to appoint this committee of one? I suppose you agree that the smaller the committee and the more secret the committee's action, the better for us all?"

There was silence to this. A moment's hesitation, and the speaker announced his decision. "The gentleman from Kentucky is appointed to execute this task for the people of the United States. Let us hope he never will have need to serve."

It cost the self-control of some to remain silent at this, and the courage of the remaining member also to preserve the silence which meant his acceptance of a task so difficult and distasteful.

"Sir," hastily went on the original speaker, "our thanks are due to you. We shall limit you with no instructions. All the money required by you as agent, or required by your agent, shall of course be forthcoming, and you shall quietly have also the assistance of all the secret service, if so desired. None of us must know what has become of the Countess St. Auban, now or later. You have heard me. Gentlemen, we adjourn."

He stepped now to the door, and admitted the ancient colored man, with his lights. The curtains were drawn, shutting out even the twilight gloom. And now the lights blazed up, illuminating an historic stage.

The chief of the deliberations now became the host, and motioned his guests to the corner of the apartments where stood a long sideboard of dark mahogany, bearing different crystal decanters. Himself refraining, as did one or two others, he passed glasses, motioned to the ancient colored man, and, raising his own hand, proposed them a toast.

"Gentlemen,—the Union!"

They bowed to him ceremoniously, each in his way, with reverence, touching lips to his glass. As they parted, one for a moment stood alone, the dark man who had sat at the speaker's right. For a moment he paused, as though absorbed, as finally he set down his glass, gazing steadily forward as though striving to read what lay in the future.

"The Union!" he whispered, almost to himself.

It might have been the voice, as it was the thought of all those who, now passing, brought to a close this extraordinary meeting.

The Union!

CHAPTER IX TALLWOODS

Meantime, events which might have held interest in certain circles in Washington had they been known, passed on their course, and toward that very region which had half in jest been named as the storm center of the day—the state of Missouri, anomalous, inchoate, discordant, half North, half South, itself the birth of compromise and sired by political jealousy; whither, against her will, voyaged a woman, herself engine of turbulence, doubt and strife, and in company now of a savage captor who contemplated nothing but establishing her for his own use in his own home.

Tallwoods, the home plantation of the Dunwody family in the West, now the personal property of the surviving son, state senator Warville Dunwody of Missouri, presented one of the contrasts which now and again might have been seen in our early western civilization. It lay somewhat remote from the nearest city of consequence, in a region where the wide acres of the owner blended, unused and uncultivated, with those still more wild, as yet unclaimed under any private title. Yet in pretentiousness, indeed in assuredness, it might have rivaled many of the old estates of Kentucky, the Carolinas, or Virginia; so much did the customs and ambitions of these older states follow their better bred sons out into the newer regions.

These men of better rank, with more than competency at their disposal, not infrequently had few neighbors other than the humble but independent frontiersman who left for new fields when a dog barked within fifty miles of his cabin. There were neighbors within half that distance of Tallwoods, settlers nestled here or there in these enfolding hills and forests; but of neighbors in importance equal to that of the owner of Tallwoods there were few or none in that portion of the state. The time was almost feudal, but wilder and richer than any feudal day, in that fief tribute was unknown. The original landlord of these acres had availed himself of the easy laws and easy ways of the time and place, and taken over to himself from the loose public domain a small realm all his own. Here, almost in seclusion, certainly in privacy, a generation had been spent in a life as baronial as any ever known in old Virginia in earlier days. A day's ride to a court house, two days to a steamer, five hours to get a letter to or from the occasional post—these things seem slight in a lifelong accustomedness; and here few had had closer touch than this with civilization.

[Illustration: Tallwoods]

The plantation itself was a little kingdom, and largely supplied its own wants. Mills, looms, shops,—all these were part of the careless system, easy and opulent, which found support and gained arrogance from a rich and generous environment. The old house itself, if it might be called old, built as it had been scarce thirty years before, lay in the center of a singular valley, at the edge of the Ozark Hills. The lands here were not so rich as the wide acres thirty miles or more below, where on the fat bottom soil, black and deep, the negroes raised in abundance the wealth-making crop of the country. On the contrary, this, although it was the capital of the vast Dunwody holdings thereabout, was chosen not for its agricultural richness so much as for its healthfulness and natural beauty.

In regard to these matters, the site could not better have been selected. The valley, some three or four miles across, lay like a deep saucer pressed down into the crest of the last rise of the Ozarks. The sides of the depression were as regular as though created by the hands of man. Into its upper extremity there ran a little stream of clear and unfailing water, which made its entrance at an angle, so that the rim of the hills seemed scarcely nicked by its ingress. This stream crossed the floor of the valley, serving to water the farms, and, making its way out of the lower end by a similar curious angle, broke off sharply and hid itself among the rocks on its way out and down from the mountains—last trace of a giant geology which once dealt in continental terms, rivers once seas, valleys a thousand miles in length. Thus, at first sight, one set down in the valley might have felt that it had neither inlet nor outlet, but had been created, panoplied and peopled by some Titanic power, and owned by those who neither knew nor desired any other world. As a matter of fact, the road up through the lower Ozarks from the great Mississippi, which entered along the bed of the little stream, ended at Tallwoods farm. Beyond it, along the little river which led back into the remote hills, it was no more than a horse path, and used rarely except by negroes or whites in hunting expeditions back into the mountains, where the deer, the wild turkey, the bear and the panther still roamed in considerable numbers at no great distance from the home plantation.

Tallwoods itself needed no other fence than the vast wall of hills, and had none save where here and there the native stone had been heaped up roughly into walls, along some orchard side. The fruits of the apple, the pear and the peach grew here handsomely, and the original owner had planted such trees in abundance. The soil, though at first it might have been, called inhospitable, showed itself productive. The corn stood tall and strong, and here and there the brown stalks of the cotton plant itself might have been seen; proof of the wish of the average Southerner to cultivate that plant, even in an environment not wholly suitable. All about, upon the mountain sides, stood a heavy growth of deciduous trees, at this time of the year lining the slopes in flaming reds and golds. Beyond the valley's rim, tier on tier, stately and slow, the mountains rose back for yet a way—mountains rich in their means of frontier independence, later to be discovered rich also in minerals, in woods, in all the things required by an advancing civilization.

Corn, swine and cotton,—these made the wealth of the owner of Tallwoods' plantation and of the richer lands in the river bottoms below. These products brought the owner all the wealth he needed. Here, like a feudal lord, master of all about him, he had lived all his life and had, as do all created beings, taken on the color and the savor of the environment about him. Rich, he was generous; strong, he was merciful; independent, he was arrogant; used to his own way, he was fierce and cruel when crossed in that way. Not much difference, then, lay between this master of Tallwoods and the owner of yonder castle along the embattled Rhine, or the towered stronghold of some old lord located along an easy, wandering, English stream; with this to be said in favor of this solitary lord of the wilderness, that his was a place removed and little known. It had been passed by in some manner through its lack of appeal to those seeking cotton lands or hunting grounds, so that it lay wholly out of the ken and the understanding of most folk of the older states.

If in Tallwoods the owner might do as he liked, certainly he had elected first of all to live somewhat as a gentleman. The mansion house was modeled after the somewhat stereotyped pattern of the great country places of the South. Originally planned to consist of the one large central edifice of brick, with a wing on each side of somewhat lesser height, it had never been entirely completed, one wing only having been fully erected. The main portion of the house was of two stories, its immediate front occupied by the inevitable facade with its four white pillars, which rose from the level of the ground to the edge of the roof, shading the front entrance to the middle rooms. Under this tall gallery roof, whose front showed high, white and striking all across the valley, lay four windows, and at each side of the great double doors lay yet other two windows. On either side of the pillars and in each story, yet other two admitted light to the great rooms; and in the completed wing which lay at one side of the main building, deep embrasures came down almost to the level of the ground, well hidden by the grouped shrubbery which grew close to the walls. The visitor approaching up the straight gravel walk might not have noticed the heavy iron bars which covered these, giving the place something the look of a