Philip Nolan's friends; a story of the change of the western empire

Front matter

A

■ V* V

* .

Contents

Chapter Page

I. A Parting. 3

II. A Meeting.16

Chapter I A Parting

“ Oh ! saw ye not fair Inez ?

She has gone into the West,

To dazzle when the sun is down.

And rob the world of rest.”

Thomas Hood.

OOD-BY! ”

“ Good-by, papa; ” and the poor girl waved her handkerchief, and broke into tears, though she had held up perfectly till now.

“ Tirez ! ” cried Sancho, the blackest of all possible black men ; and he shook his fist at his crew of twenty willing rowers, almost as black as he. The men gave way heartily, and in good time; the boat shot out from the levee, and in a few minutes Inez could no longer see her father’s handkerchief, nor he hers. Still he stood watching the receding boat, till it was quite lost among the crowd of flat-boats and other vessels in the river.

The parting, indeed, between father and daughter was such as did not often take place, even in those regions, in those times. Silas Perry, the father of this young girl, was a successful merchant, who had been established near forty years in the French and Spanish colony of Orleans, then a small colonial trad¬ ing-post, which gave little pledge of the great city of New Orleans of to-day. He had gone there — a young New Englander, who had his fortunes to make — in the year 1763, when the King of France first gave Louisiana to his well-beloved cousin, King of Spain. Silas Perry had his fortunes to make —- and he made them. He had been loyal to the cause of his own country, so soon as he heard of tea thrown over, of stamps burned in King Street, and of effigies hanging on Liberty Tree. He had wrought gallantly with his friend and fellow-countryman, Oliver Pollock, in forwarding Spanish gunpowder from the king’s stores to Washington’s army, by the unsuspected route of the Mississippi and Ohio. He had wrought his way into the regards of successive Spanish governors, and had earned the respect of the more important of the French planters.

At this time the greater part of the handful of white people who made the ruling class in Orleans were French; and a brilliant “ society ” did the little col¬ ony maintain. But it had happened to Silas Perry, whose business had often called him to the Havana, that he had there wooed, won, and married a Spanish lady; and about the times of tea-parties, stamp-acts, English troops recalled from the Mississippi, and other such matters, Silas Perry had busied himself largely in establishing his new home in Orleans, and in bringing his bride there. Here the Spanish lady was cordially made welcome by the ladies of the little court, in which governor and commandant and the rest were of Spanish appointment, though their sub¬ jects were of French blood. Here she lived quietly; and here, after ten years, she died, leaving to her husband but two children. One of them had been sent to Paris for his education, nine years before the time when the reader sees his sister. For it is his sister, who was an infant when her mother died, whom we now see, sixteen years after, waving her handker¬ chief to her father as the barge recedes from the levee. Other children had died in infancy. This little Inez herself was but six months old when her mother died; and she had passed through infancy and girlhood without a mother’s care.

But her father had risen to the emergency in a New Englander’s fashion. Not that he looked round to find a French lady to take the place of the Spanish donna. Not he. He did write home to Squam Bay, and stated to his sister Eunice the needs of the little child. He did not tell Eunice that if she came to be the child’s second mother she would exchange calls with marchionesses, would dress in silks, and ride in car¬ riages. He knew very well that none of these things would move her. He did tell her that, if she did not watch over the little thing in her growth, nobody else would but himself. He knew what he relied upon in saying this; and on the return of Captain Tucker in the schooner “ Dolores,” sure enough, the aunt of the little orphaned baby had appeared, with a very droll assortment of trunks and other baggage, in the most approved style of Squam Bay. She was herself scarcely seventeen years old when she thus changed her home; but she had the conscientious decision to which years of struggle had trained her before her time. She loved her brother, and she was determined to do her ducy by his child. To that child she had ever since been faithful with all a mother’s care.

And so Miss Inez had grown up in a French town, under Spanish government, but with her every-day life directed under the simplest traditions of New England. With her little friends and on any visit, she saw from day to day the habits, so utterly differ¬ ent from those of home, of a French colony well disposed to exaggerate the customs of France. For language, she spoke English at home, after the fashion of the New Englanders; but in the society of her playmates and friends she spoke French, after the not debased fashion of the Creole French of Louisiana. Through all her life, however, Louisiana had been under the Spanish rule. Silas Perry himself spoke and read Spanish perfectly well, and he had taught Inez to use it with ease. The girl had, indeed, read no little of the masterpieces of Spanish literature, so far as, in a life not very often thwarted at home, she had found what pleased her among her father’s books.

She was now parted from him for the first time, if we except short visits on one plantation or another on the coast. The occasion of the parting was an unrelenting storm of letters and messages from her mother’s only sister, Donna Maria Dolores, the wife of a Spanish officer of high rank, named Barelo. For some years now this husband had been stationed at the frontier post of San Antonio, in the province which was beginning to take the name of Texas; and in this little settlement Donna Maria, lonely enough herself, was making such sunshine as she could for those around her. Forlorn as such a position seems, perhaps, to people with fixed homes, it was anything but forlorn to Donna Maria. She had lived, she said, “ the life of an Arab ” till now; and now to know that her husband was really stationed here, though the station were a frontier garrison, was to know that for the first time since her girlhood she was to have the luxury of a home.

No sooner were her household gods established, than she began, by the very infrequent “ opportuni¬ ties ” for writing which the frontier permitted, to hurl the storm of letters on Silas Perry’s defenceless head. Fortunately for him, indeed, “opportunities” were few. This word, in the use we now make of it, is taken from the older vocabulary of New England, in whose language it implied a method of sending a letter out¬ side of any mail. Just as in English novels you find people speaking of “ franks ” for letters, these older New Englanders spoke of “ opportunities.” Mail be¬ tween Texas and Orleans there was not, never had been, and, with the blessing of God, never would be. “ Had I the power,” said the Governor Salcedo, “ I would not let a bird cross from Louisiana to Texas.” But sometimes a stray priest going to confer with the bishop of Orleans, sometimes a government messen¬ ger from Mexico, sometimes a concealed horse-trader, and always camps of Indians, passed the frontier east¬ ward, on one pretext or another; and, with proper license given, there was no reason left why they should not, after Louisiana became in name a Span¬ ish province. No such stray traveller came to the city without finding Silas Perry; and inevitably he brought a double letter, — an affectionate note to Inez, begging her to write to her mother’s sister, and an urgent and persuasive one to her father, begging him, by all that was sacred, not to let the child grow up without knowing her mother’s only relations.

Silas Perry’s heart was still tender. If he had lived to be a thousand, he would never have forgotten the happy days in the Havana, when he wooed and won his Spanish bride, nor the loyal help that her sister Dolores gave to the wooing and to the winning. But till now he had the advantage of possession; and the priests and soldiers and traders always carried back affectionate letters, explaining how much Inez loved her aunt, but how impossible it was for her to come. The concocting of these letters had become almost a family joke at home.

It may help the reader’s chronology if we say that our story begins in the first year which bore the number of “ eighteen hundred ; ” he may call it the last year of the eighteenth century, or the first of the nineteenth, as he likes to be accurate or inac¬ curate. At this time business required that Silas Perry should go to Paris, and leave his home for many months, perhaps for a year. Silas would gladly have taken his sister Eunice and his daughter with him; but travel was not what it is now, nor was Paris what it is now. And although he did not think his daughter’s head would be cut off, still he doubted so far what he might find in Paris, that he shrank from taking her thither. As it happened, at this moment there came a particularly well-aimed shaft from Aunt Dolores’s armory; and fortune added an “ opportunity,” not only for reply, but for per¬ mitting Inez and her aunt to make the journey into Texas under competent escort if they chose to sub¬ mit themselves to all the hardships of travel across prairies and through a wilderness. True, the enter¬ prise was utterly unheard of: this did not make it less agreeable in Silas Perry’s eyes. It was not such an enterprise as Donna Maria Dolores had proposed. She had arranged that the girl should be sent with proper companionship, on one of Silas’s vessels, to Corpus Christi on the Gulf. She had promised to go down herself to meet her, with an escort of lancers whom their friend Governor Herrera had promised her. But Silas Perry had not liked this plan. He said boldly, that, if the girl were to ride a hundred miles, she might ride three hundred. Mr. Nolan would take better care of her than any Governor Herrera of them all. “ Women always supposed you were sending schooners into mud-holes, where there was nothing to buy, and nothing to sell.” And so the most improbable of all possible events took place. By way of preparation for going to Paris, Silas Perry sent his precious daughter, and his sister only less precious, on a long land-journey of adventure, to make a visit as long, at least, as his own was. It need not be said, if the reader apprehends what man¬ ner of man he was, that he had provided for her comfort, so far as forethought, lavish expenditure, io Philip Nolan’s Friends;

and a wide acquaintance with the country could provide for it. If he had not come to this sudden and improbable determination, this story would not have to be written.

Inez, as has been said, fairly broke down as the rowers gave way. Her Aunt Eunice kept up the pretence of flying her handkerchief till they had wholly lost sight of the point of their embarkation. And then the first words of comfort which came to the sobbing girl were not from her aunt.

“Take one o’ them Boston crackers; they say they’s dreadful good when you go on the water. Can’t git none all along the coast; they don’t know how to keep ’em. So soon as ye father said you was to go, I told old Tucker to bring me some from home; told him where to git ’em. Got ’em at Rich¬ ardson’s in School Street. Don’t have ’em good nowhere else.”

Inez, poor child, could as easily have eaten a horseshoe as the biscuit which was thus tendered her. But she took it with a pleasant smile; and the words answered a better purpose than Dr. Flavel’s homilies on contentment could have served.

The speaker was a short-set, rugged New Eng¬ lander, of about sixty years of age, whose dress and appointments were in every respect curiously, not to say sedulously, different from those of the Creole French, or the Spanish seamen, or the Western flatboatmen, all around him. Regardless of treaties, of nationalities, or of birthright privileges, Seth Ransom regarded all these people as “ furriners,” and so designated them, even in the animated and indignant

II conversations which he held with them. He was himself a Yankee of the purest blood, who had, how¬ ever, no one of the restless or adventurous traits attributed to the Yankee of fiction or of the stage. He had, it is true, followed the sea in early life. But, having fallen in with Silas Perry in Havana, he had attached himself to his service with a certain feudal loyalty. The institution of feudalism, as phil¬ osophical students have observed, made the vassal quite as much the master of his lord as the master was of his vassal, if not more. That this was the reason why Seth Ransom served Silas Perry, it would be wrong to say. But it is true that he served him in a masterful way, as a master serves.. It is also true that he idolized Inez, as he had idolized her mother before her. Of each, he was the most faith¬ ful henchman and the most loyal admirer. Yet he would address Inez personally with the intimate terms in which he spoke to her when she was a baby in his arms, when perhaps she had been left for an hour in his happy and perfect charge. If no one else were present, he would call her “ Een,” or “ Inez,” as if she had been his own granddaughter. In the presence of others, on the other hand, no don of the Governor’s staff could have found fault with the precision of his etiquette.

The necessities of Mr. Perry’s business often sent Seth Ransom back to New England, so that he could drink again from the waters of the pump in King Street, as he still called the State Street of to-day. It was as Hercules sometimes'let Antaeus put his foot to the ground. Ransom returned from each such visit with new contempt for everything which he found upon other shores, excepting for the house¬ hold of Silas Perry, and perhaps a modified toleration for that of Oliver Pollock. For Silas Perry himself, for Miss Eunice, and Miss Inez, his chivalrous de¬ votion blazed out afresh on each return.

He was athletic, strong, and practical. Nobody had ever found anything he could not do, excepting that he read and wrote with such difficulty that in practice he never descended to these arts except in the most trying emergency. When, therefore, Silas Perry determined on his rash project of sending his daughter and sister under Mr. Nolan’s escort to San Antonio, he determined, of course, to send Seth Ransom with them as their body-guard. The fact that he sent him, in truth, really relieved the enterprise from its rash¬ ness; for, though Seth Ransom had never crossed the prairies, any one who knew him, and the relation in which he stood to Miss Inez, knew that, if it were necessary, he would carry her from Natchez to the Alamo in his arms.

The boat was soon free from the little flotilla which then made all the commerce of the little port; and the steady stroke of the well-trained crew hurried her up stream with a speed that exacted the admiration of the lazy lookers-on of whatever nation.

Inez thanked her old cavalier for his attention, made him happy by asking him to find something for her in a bag which he had stowed away, and then kept him by her side.

“ Do they row as well as this in Boston Harbor, Ransom?” she said. For some reason unknown, or, Show your Passports i 3

Ransom was never addressed by his baptismal name.

“ Don’t have to. Ain’t many niggers there, no way. What they is lives on Nigger Hill; that’s all on one side. Yes: some niggers goes to sea, but them’s all cooks. Don’t have to row much there. Have sail-boats; don’t have no rivers.”

The girl loved to hear his dialect, and was not averse to stir up his resentment against all men who had not been born under her father’s roof, and all nations but those which ate codfish salted on Saturday.

“ I don’t see where they get their ducks, if they have no rivers,” she said artfully, as if she were thinking aloud.

“Ducks! thousands on ’em. Big ducks too; not little critters like these. Go into Faneuil Hall Market any day, and have more ducks than you can ask for. Ducks is nothin’.” And a grim smile stole over his face, as if he were pleased that Inez had selected ducks as the precise point on which her comparison should be made.

“ Well, surely, Ransom, they have no sugar-cane,” said she; and, by her eye, he saw that she was watch¬ ing Sancho, the boatswain as he might be called, who, as he nodded to his men, solaced himself by chewing and sucking at a bit of fresh cane from a little heap at his side.

“Sugar-cane! Guess not. Don’t want’em. Won’t touch ’em. Oceans of white sugar, all done up in sugar-loaves, jest when they want it. Them as makes sugar makes it in the woods, makes it out of trees;

don’t have to have them dirty niggers make it. Oceans of sugar-loaves all the time! ” And again that severe smile stole over his face, and he looked up into the sky, almost as if he saw celestial beings carrying purple-papered sugar-loaves to Boston, and as if—next to ducks — the supply of sugar to that town was its marked characteristic.

Eunice Perry was glad to follow the lead which Ransom had given, sagaciously or unconsciously. Anything was better for the voyage than a homesick brooding on what they had left behind.

“ We must not make Inez discontented with Orleans and the coast, Ransom. Poor child! she has nothing but roses and orange-blossoms, figs and bananas; we must not tell her too much about russet apples, or she will be discontented.”

“ I do like russet apples, aunty darling, quite as well as I like figs; but I shall not be discontented while I have you on one side of me, and Ransom on the other, and dear old Sancho beating time in front.” This, with a proud expression, as if she knew they were trying to lead her out from herself, and that she did not need to be cosseted. Old Sancho caught the glance, and started his rowers to new energy. To maintain a crack crew of oarsmen was one of the boasts of the “coast” at that time; and, although Silas Perry was in no sort a large planter, yet he maintained the communication between his plantation above the city and his home in the city,—which, for himself, he preferred at any season to any place of refuge, — by a crew as stalwart and as well trained as any planter of them all.

The boat on which the two ladies and their com¬ panions were embarked was not the elegant barge in which they usually made the little voyage from the plantation to their city home. It was a more business¬ like craft which Silas Perry had provided to carry his daughter as far as Natchitoches on the Red River, where she and her companions were to join the land expedition of Philip Nolan and his friends. The after-part of the boat was protected from sun or rain by an awning or light roof, generally made of sails, or sometimes of skins, but, in Inez’s boat, of light wood¬ work ; it had among the habitants the name of tendelet. Under the tendelet a little deck, with the privi¬ leges of all quarter-decks, belonged to the master of the boat and his company. Here he ate his meals by day; here, if he slept on board, he spread his mat¬ tress at night. It was high enough to give a good view of the river and the low shores, of any approach¬ ing boat, or any other object of interest in the some¬ what limited catalogue of river experiences. In the preparations for the voyage of the ladies, curtains had been arranged, which would screen them from either side, from the sun, from wind, or even from a shower.

A long tarpaulin, called the pittat, was stretched over the whole length of the boat, to protect the stores, the trunks, and other cargo, from the weather. The rowers sat at the sides, old Sancho watching them from the rear; while a man in the bow, called the bosman} who generally wielded a sort of boat-

1 Was this word once “boatswain,” perhaps?

hook, watched the course, and -fended off any floating log, or watched for snag or sawyer.

The voyage this afternoon was not long. It was, as Inez said, only a “ taste-piece.” Eunice said it was as the caravans at the East go a mile out of town on the first night, so that they may the more easily send back for anything that is forgotten.

“ All nonsense ! ” said Ransom. “ I told ye father might as well start afore sunrise, and be at the Cross to-night: would n’t hear a word on it, and so lost all day.”

In truth, Inez was to spend her last night at the plantation, which had been her favorite summer home for years, to bid farewell to the servants there, and to gather up such of her special possessions as could be carried on the packhorses, on this pilgrimage to her Spanish aunt. Her father would gladly have come with her, but for the possibility that his ship might sail for Bordeaux early the next morning.

Chapter II A Meeting

“ Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.”

Alexander Pope.

Before sunrise the next morning the final embarka¬ tion was to take place. The whole house was in an uproar. The steady determination of old Chloe, chief of the kitchen, that Miss Inez should eat the very best breakfast she ever saw, before she went ofl

“ to the wild Indians,” dominated the whole establish¬ ment. In this determination Chloe was steadily up¬ held by Ransom, who knew, by many conflicts from which he had retreated worsted, that it was idle to try to dictate to her, while at the same time he had views as decided as ever on the inferiority of French cookery to that of New England. The preparation of this master breakfast had called upon Chloe and her allies long before light. Caesar and his allies, also preparing for a voyage which would take them from home for many days, were as early and as noisy. The only wonder, indeed, was that the girl, who was the centre of the idolatry of them all, or her aunt, who was hardly less a favorite, could either of them sleep a wink, in the neighborhood of such clamors, after midnight passed. When they did meet at breakfast, they found the table lighted with bougies, and prepa¬ rations for such a repast as if the governor and his staff, the commandant with his, and half the mer¬ chants of Orleans, had been invited. Besides Fran¬ cois and Laurent, who were in regular attendance on the table, Ransom was hovering round, somewhat as a chief butler might have done in another form of luxurious civilization.

“ Eat a bit of breast, Miss Inez? and here’s the second j’int; try that. Don’t know nothin’, — nig¬ gers, — but I see to this myself. Miss Eunice, them eggs is fresh: took ’em myself from four different nests. Niggers don’t know nothin’ about eggs. Made a fire in the barn chamber, and biled ’em right myself, jest as your father likes ’em, Miss Inez. Them others is as hard as rocks.”

Inez was in the frolic of a new expedition now; and the traces of parting, if indeed they existed, could not be discerned. She balanced Ransom’s attentions against the equal attention of the two boys, pretended to eat from more dishes and to drink from more cups than would have served Cleopatra for a month, amused herself in urging Aunt Eunice to do the same, and pretended to wrap in napkins, for the “ smoking halt,” the viands upon which her aunt would not try experiments. The meal, on the whole, was not un¬ satisfactory to Aunt Chloe’s pride, to Ransom’s pre¬ vision, or to the public opinion of the household. All who were left behind were, in private, unanimous on one point, — namely, that Miss Eunice and Miss Inez were both to be roasted alive within a week by the Caddo Indians; to be torn limb from limb, and eaten, even as they were now eating the spring chickens before them. But as this view was somewhat discouraging, and as Aunt Chloe, after having once solemnly im¬ pressed it upon Eunice, had been told by Silas Perry that she should be locked up for a day in the lockhouse if she ever said another such word to anybody, it was less publicly expressed in the farewells of the morning, though not held any the less implicitly.

In truth, the bougies were a wholly unnecessary elegance or precaution; for the noisy party did not, in fact, get under way till the sun had well risen, and every sign of early exhalation had passed from the river. Such had been Mr. Perry’s private orders to his sister; and, although the general custom of a start at sunrise was too well fixed to be broken in upon in form, Eunice and Ransom had no lack of methods of delaying the final embarkation, even at the risk of a little longer pull before the “ smoke.”

The glory of the morning, as seen from the ele¬ vated quarter-deck, was a new delight to Inez. She watched at first for a handkerchief or some other token of farewell from one or another veranda as they passed plantations which were within the range of a ride or sail from her own home. Afterward, even as the settlement became rather more sparse, there was still the matchless beauty of heavy clumps of green, and of the long shadows of early morning. Even in the autumn colors, nothing can tame the richness of the foliage; and the contrast rendered by patches of ripening sugar-cane or other harvests is only the more striking from the loyal and determined verdure of trees which will not change, but always speak, not of spring, but of perennial summer.

The crew felt all the importance of the expedition. Often as they had gone down the river with one or another cargo to Orleans, few of them had ever voy¬ aged for any considerable distance up the stream. This was terra incognita into which they were coming. Not but they had heard many a story, extravagant enough too, of the marvels of the river, from one or another flat-boatman who had availed himself of the hospitalities of the plantation for his last night before arriving at the city. But these stories were not very consistent with each other; and, while the negroes half believed them, they half dis¬ believed at the same time. To go bodily into the presence of these unknown marvels was an experi¬ ence wholly unexpected by each of them. Even

Caesar the old cook, Sancho, and Paul the bosman, were shaken from their balance or propriety by an adventure so strange; and the preparations they had made for the voyage, and the orders they had given to the men who were to leave home for a period so unusual, all showed that they regarded this event as by far the most important of their lives.

All the same the bosman gave out a familiar and sonorous song, and all the same the rowers joined heartily in the words. And when he cunningly in¬ serted some new words, with an allusion to the adventures before them, and to the treasures of silver which all parties would bring back from the Caddo mines, a guffaw of satisfaction showed that all parties were well pleased. And the readiness with which they caught up such of the words as came into the refrain showed that they were in no sort dispirited, either by the fatigue or the danger of the undertaking before them.

The song was in the crudest French dialect used by the plantation slaves. The air was that of a little German marching song, which the quick-eared negroes had caught from German neighbors on the coast; old veterans of Frederick’s, very likely. In the more polished rendering into which Inez and her aunt reduced it, before their long voyage was over, still crude enough to give some idea of the simplicity of the original, it reappeared in these words:—