Patterson and his wife left the room, but the negro sat in the doorway.
"Ansy," said the captain, "I owe my life to you."
The captain gave him a significant glance and again turned to the girl.
"Yes, you have saved my life, but that is not the cause of my deep--deep (he glanced at the negro)--deep regard for you."
The girl made no reply. The captain could have killed the negro. "I will ignore his black presence," the captain mused. He leaned over and took the girl's hand.
"Ansy," said the negro, "w'en dis yare generman gits through wid yo' han' I wants you ter sew er few buttons on dat ar hickory shirt o' mine."
"You scoundrel," exclaimed the captain, springing to his feet, "how dare you speak in such a manner to this young lady?"
"Why, boss," the negro replied, "what's de use'n makin' sich er great 'miration. Dat 'oman has been my wife fur putty nigh two years."
In nearly every neighborhood of the South, there comes, in the fall of the year, a sort of religious wave. Men, who, during the summer swore at their horses and stopped but little short of blasphemy, in imprecatory remarks addressed to obdurate steers, turn reverently, after fodder-pulling time, to Mt. Zion, Ebeneezer, New Hope and Round Pond, to hear the enthusiastic pleadings of the circuit rider and the begging injunctions of the strolling evangelist. Robert's Cove, in East Tennessee, is a neighborhood typical of this peculiar religious condition. Last autumn, when the katydid shivered on the damp oak leaf and the raccoon cracked the shell of the pinching "crawfish," there suddenly appeared at Ebeneezer meeting-house a young man of most remarkable presence. He was handsome, tall, graceful, and with hair as bright and waving as the locks of the vision that come to _Clarence_ in his awful dream. He said that his name was John Mayberry. He had come to preach the gospel in a simple, child-like way, and hoped that his hearers, for the good of their souls, would pay respectful heed to his words. A materialist would have called him a fanatic, but as there were no materialists in that neighborhood, he soon became known as a devout Christian and a powerful worker in the harvest-field of faith. He read hallowed books written by men who lived when the ungodly sword and the godly pen were at war against each other, and in his fervor his language bore a power which his rude hearers had never felt before.