"But why are you in Egypt? You must be very old. My father, who is younger than you, is old--bowed down--"
"Poor boy," said Mr. Tompkins, with a sigh, "he has been a close student, and perhaps that was what turned his head."
"Does he ever git rantankerous?" asked Uncle Dan.
"Have you seen my father?" Joe now asked. "He has long white hair and snowy beard."
"No, youngster; I ain't got a sight o' the old man fur some time," said Uncle Dan.
"Potiphar resembles my father, but my father must be dead," and he sank into a chair, with a sad look of despair, and, burying his face in his hands, groaned as if in pain.
"He does that way a dozen times a day," Abner whispered to Uncle Dan.
"It's maughty strange," said Uncle Dan, shaking his head in a puzzled manner.
The next day, when the mountaineer was about to return to his lonely cabin, Crazy Joe asked permission to accompany his Uncle Esau. Consent was given, and he went and stayed several weeks. For years afterward he stayed alternate on Mr. Tompkins' plantation and at the home of the mountaineer.
Sixteen years, with all their joys and sorrows, all their pleasures and pains, have been numbered with the dead past. Boys have grown to be men, men in the full vigor of their prime have grown old, and creep about with bent forms and heads whitening, while men who were old before now slumber with the dead. Girls are women, and women have grown gray, yet father Time has touched gently some of his children.
Abner and Oleah Tompkins are no longer boys. Only the memory is left them of their childhood joys, when they played in the dark, cool woods, or by the brook in the wide, smooth lawn. Happy childhood days, when neither care nor anxiety weighed on their young hearts, or shadowed their bright faces.
Abner is twenty-five--a tall, powerful man, with dark-blue, fearless eyes, light-haired, broad-chested and muscular.
Oleah, two years younger, and not quite so tall, is yet in physical strength his brother's equal. He has the dark hair and large, dark, lustrous eyes of his Southern mother.
The brothers were alike and yet dissimilar. They had shared equally the same advantages; they had played together and studied together. Playmates in their childhood, friends as well as brothers in their young manhood, no one could question a doubt of their brotherly love. Where one had been, the other had always been at his side. No slightest difference had ever yet ruffled the smooth surface of their existence. Yet they were dissimilar in temperament. Abner was slow and cool, but perhaps more determined than his brother, and his reason predominated over his prejudice. Oleah was rash, impetuous and bold, and more liable to be moved by prejudice or passion than by reason. Abner was the exact counterpart of his Northern father, Oleah of his Southern mother.