What should she do? She never thought of appeal
to courts, for Colonel Cresswell was Justice of the
Peace and his son was bailiff. Why had they stolen
from her? She knew. She was now penniless,
and in a sense helpless. She was now a peon bound
to a master’s bidding. If Elspeth chose
to sign a contract of work for her to-morrow, it would
mean slavery, jail, or hounded running away.
What would Elspeth do? One never knew. Zora
walked on. An hour ago it seemed that this last
blow must have killed her. But now it was different.
Into her first despair had crept, in one fierce moment,
grim determination. Somewhere in the world sat
a great dim Injustice which had veiled the light before
her young eyes, just as she raised them to the morning.
With the veiling, death had come into her heart.
And yet, they should not kill her; they should not
enslave her. A desperate resolve to find some
way up toward the light, if not to it, formed itself
within her. She would not fall into the pit opening
before her. Somehow, somewhere lay The Way.
She must never fall lower; never be utterly despicable
in the eyes of the man she had loved. There was
no dream of forgiveness, of purification, of re-kindled
love; all these she placed sadly and gently into the
dead past. But in awful earnestness, she turned
toward the future; struggling blindly, groping in half
formed plans for a way.
She came thus into the room where sat Miss Smith,
strangely pallid beneath her dusky skin. But
there lay a light in her eyes.
Eighteen
THE COTTON CORNER
All over the land the cotton had foamed in great white
flakes under the winter sun. The Silver Fleece
lay like a mighty mantle across the earth. Black
men and mules had staggered beneath its burden, while
deep songs welled in the hearts of men; for the Fleece
was goodly and gleaming and soft, and men dreamed
of the gold it would buy. All the roads in the
country had been lined with wagons—a million
wagons speeding to and fro with straining mules and
laughing black men, bearing bubbling masses of piled
white Fleece. The gins were still roaring and
spitting flames and smoke—fifty thousand
of them in town and vale. Then hoarse iron throats
were filled with fifteen billion pounds of white-fleeced,
black-specked cotton, for the whirling saws to tear
out the seed and fling five thousand million pounds
of the silken fibre to the press.
And there again the black men sang, like dark earth-spirits
flitting in twilight; the presses creaked and groaned;
closer and closer they pressed the silken fleece.
It quivered, trembled, and then lay cramped, dead,
and still, in massive, hard, square bundles, tied with
iron strings. Out fell the heavy bales, thousand
upon thousand, million upon million, until they settled
over the South like some vast dull-white swarm of
birds. Colonel Cresswell and his son, in these
days, had a long and earnest conversation perforated
here and there by explosions of the Colonel’s
wrath. The Colonel could not understand some things.
Copyrights
The Quest of the Silver Fleece from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
