Baby Rue, by Charles M. Clay (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PART III. BOUIE'S HILL. CHAPTER X. Then he will talk?good gods ! how he will talk ! Nathaniel Lee. At Bouie's Hill, two miles from Fort Gibson, on a hot, cloudless day in June, sat Uncle Abram, on a mossy bank at the foot of the hill, looking with justifiable pride at the work he had that morning completed. It was a handsome new gate, opening into the hillside orchard where the road wound back and forth in its gradual ascent to the house,?a gate easily opened by the driver of any conveyance without descending from his seat. The weights and pulleys worked perfectly, as Solomon, who had just brought his grandfather's dinner, proved by repeated trials. The old gate had been a sore grievance to Uncle Abram ever since his arrival at Bouie's Hill. Brown Bess had been left in Virginia to end her days in the home paddock; so the mount of the patriarch was a fractious mule,?a mule capable of a resistance to persuasion equalled only by its disregard of blows. Mules and negroes, in their perfect adaptability to one another, do somehow arrive at an understanding by which they measure the necessary duration of their contests. They learn to gauge perfectly the length of time a well- bred mule demands before consenting to do the will of an irate African. But this mule and Uncle Abram were either too new to each other or else ill-matched in the ordinary mule-and-negro requirements. Under no stressof compulsion would this hybrid come near the gate without backing at every effort to open it made by the luckless rider. In these daily contests Uncle Abram had never been conqueror. To escape the humiliation of repeated defeat, he had now made a gate the successful working of which was to bring him trinmph. Solomon skilfully won permission for each new trial of the chef d'auwe by comp...