on with
Adam Gaudylock. Lewis, returning at supper-time to the Bird in Hand,
found the hunter altered no whit from his habitual tawny lightness, but
his father in a mood that he knew, sullen and silent. "Adam's been
talking to him," thought the boy. "And it's just the same as when Mrs.
Selden talks to him. Let me go--not he!"

In the morning, at six of the clock, the two Rands, the negro Joab, the
horses, and the dogs took the homeward road to Albemarle. Adam Gaudylock
was not returning with them; he had trader's business with the merchants
in Main Street, hunter's business with certain cronies at the Indian
Queen, able scout and man-of-information business in Governor Street,
and business of his own upon the elm-shaded walk above the river. Over
level autumn fields and up and down the wooded hills, father and son and
the slave travelled briskly toward the west. As the twilight fell, they
came up with three white wagons, Staunton bound, and convoyed by
mountaineers. That night they camped with these men in an expanse of
scrub and sassafras, but left them at dawn and went on toward Albemarle.
A day of coloured woods, of infrequent clearings, and of streams to
ford, ended in an evening of cool wind and rosy sky. They descended a
hill, halted, and built their fire in a grassy space beside a river.
Joab tethered the horses and made the fire, and fried the bacon and
baked the hoecake. As he worked he sang:--

"David an' Cephas, an' ole brer Mingo,
Saul an' Paul, an' de w'ite folk sinners--
Oh, my chillern, follow de Lawd!"

Supper was eaten in silence. When it was over, Gideon Rand sat with his
back against a pine and smoked his pipe. His son went down to the river
and stretched his length upon a mossed and lichened boulder. The deep
water below the stone did not give him back himself as had done the
streamlet five days before. This was a river, marred with eddies and
with drifting wood, and red with the soil. The evening wind was blowing,
and the sycamore above him cast its bronze leaves into the flood which
sucked them under, or bore them with it on its way to the larger river
and the ultimate sea. This stream had no babbling voice; its note was
low and grave. Youth and mountain sources forgotten, it hearkened before
the time to ocean voices. The boy, idle upon the lichened stone,
listened too, to distant utterances, to the sirens singing beyond the
shadowy cape. The earth soothed him; he lay with h