them. The
man's thoughts went back to the Mississippi, to cane-brakes and bayous
and long levees; and the boy's mind perused the road before him.

"When I get to Richmond," he suddenly announced, "I am going to find a
place where they sell books. I have a dollar."

The hunter put his hand in his pouch, drew out a shining coin, and
tossed it across the fire. "There's another," he said. "Good Spanish!
Buy your _Caesars_ and your _Pompeys_, and when you are a lawyer like Mr.
Jefferson, come West--come West!"

Men and beasts slumbered through the autumn night, waked at dawn, and,
breakfast eaten, took again the road. Revolving cask, horses, dogs, and
men, they crossed the wet sedge and entered the pine wood, left that
behind and traversed a waste of scrub and vine, low hills, and
rain-washed gullies. Chinquapin bushes edged the road, the polished nut
dark in the centre of each open burr; the persimmon trees showed their
fruit, red-gold from the first frosts; the black haw and cedar overhung
the ravines; there was much sassafras, and along the plashy streams the
mint grew thick and pungent-sweet. In the deep and pure blue sky above
them, fleecy clouds went past like galleons in a trade-wind.

The tobacco-roller was a taciturn man, and the boy, his son, never
thought of disburdening his soul to his father. Each had the power to
change for the other the aspect of the world, but they themselves were
strangers. Gideon Rand, as he rode, thought of the bright leaf in the
cask, of the Richmond warehouse, and fixed the price in his mind. His
mind was in a state of sober jubilation. His only brother, a lonely,
unloved, and avaricious merchant in a small way, had lately died, and
had left him money. The hundred acres upon the Three-Notched Road that
Gideon had tilled for another were in the market. The money would buy
the land and the small, dilapidated house already occupied by the
Rands. The purchase was in train, and in its own fashion Gideon's
sluggish nature rejoiced. He was as land-mad as any other Virginian, but
he had neither a lavish hand nor a climbing eye. What he loved was the
black earth beneath the tobacco, and to walk between the rows and feel
the thick leaves. For him it sufficed to rise at dawn and spend the day
in the fields overseeing the hands, to come home at dusk to a supper of
corn bread and bacon, to go to bed within the hour and sleep without a
dream until cockcrow, to walk the fields again till dusk and