s horses because they would not take the water at
the lower ford. Tike had been stilling more pine-top whisky, and had
been to town with some jugs hidden under the cornstalks in his
wagon-bed. When he did that, he always came back with his eyes red like
a squirrel's, and everybody gave him all the road.

But this time the Major had happened along, and when Tike would not stop
beating the horses for a shouted cursing-out from the bank, the Major
had spurred his Hambletonian into the creek and knocked Tike winding.
More than that, he had made him lead his team out of the ford and go
back to the bridge crossing.

Being himself committed to the theory of turning the other cheek, Thomas
Jefferson could not question the acute sinfulness of all this; yet it
did not sufficiently account for the Major as a Man of Sin. Had not
Peter, stirred, no doubt, by some such generous rage as the Major's,
snatched out his sword and smitten off a man's ear?

In the other field, that of overlordship, the subtleties were still more
elusive. That the negroes, many of whom were the sons and daughters of
the Major's former slaves, should pass the old-time "Mawstuh" on the
pike with uncovered heads and respectful heel-scrapings, was a matter of
course. Thomas Jefferson was white, free, and Southern born. But why his
own father and mother should betray something of the same deference was
not so readily apparent.

On rare occasions the Major, riding to or from the cross-roads
post-office in Hargis's store, would rein in his horse at the Gordon
gate and ask for a drink of water from the Gordon well. At such times
Thomas Jefferson remarked that his mother always hastened to serve the
Major with her own hands; this notwithstanding her own and Uncle Silas's
oft-repeated asseveration touching the Major's unenviable preeminence as
a Man of Sin. Also, he remarked that the Major's manner at such moments
was a thing to dazzle the eye, like the reflection of the summer sun on
the surface of burnished metal. But beneath the polished exterior, the
groping perceptions of the boy would touch a thing repellent; a thing to
stir a slow current of resentment in his blood.

It was Thomas Jefferson's first collision with the law of caste; a law
Draconian in the Old South. Before the war, when Deer Trace Manor had
been a seigniory with its six score black thralls, there had been no
visiting between the great house on the inner knoll and the overgrown
log homestead