II

A DAUGHTER OF CANAAN

  One stone the more swings to her place
    In that dread Temple of Thy worth;
  It is enough that through Thy grace
    I saw naught common on Thy earth.

The next morning I was wakened by the soft voice of Aunty Boone, our cook, saying: 

“You better get up!  Revilly blow over at the fort long time ago.  Wonder it didn’t blow your batter-cakes clear away.  Mat and Beverly been up since ’fore sunup.”

Aunty Boone was the biggest woman I have ever seen.  Not the tallest, maybe—­although she measured up to a height of six feet and two inches—­not the fattest, but a woman with the biggest human frame, overlaid with steel-hard muscles.  Yet she was not, in her way, clumsy or awkward.  She walked with a free stride, and her every motion showed a powerful muscular control.  Her face was jet-black, with keen shining eyes, and glittering white teeth.  In my little child-world she was the strangest creature I had ever known.  In the larger world whither the years of my manhood have led me she holds the same place.

She had been born a princess of royal blood, heir to a queenship in her tribe in a far-away African kingdom.  In her young womanhood, so the tale ran, the slave-hunter had found her and driven her aboard a slave-ship bound for the American coast.  He never drove another slave toward any coast.  In Virginia her first purchaser had sold her quickly to a Georgia planter whose heirs sent her on to Mississippi.  Thence she soon found her way to the Louisiana rice-fields.  Nobody came to take her back to any place she had quitted.  “Safety first,” is not a recent practice.  She had enormous strength and capacity for endurance, she learned rapidly, kept her own counsel, obeyed no command unless she chose to do so, and feared nothing in the Lord’s universe.  The people of her own race had little in common with her.  They never understood her and so they feared her.  And being as it were outcast by them, she came to know more of the ways and customs, and even the thoughts, of the white people better than of her own.  Being quick to imitate, she spoke in the correcter language of those whom she knew best, rather than the soft, ungrammatical dialect of the plantation slave or the grunt and mumble of the isolated African.  Realizing that service was to be her lot, she elected to render that service where and to whom she herself might choose.

One day she had walked into New Orleans and boarded a Mississippi steamer bound for St. Louis.  It took three men to eject her bodily from the deck into a deep and dangerous portion of the stream.  She swam ashore, and when the steamer made its next stop she walked aboard again.  The three men being under the care of a physician, and the remainder of the crew burdened with other tasks, she was not again disturbed.  Some time later she appeared at the landing below Fort Leavenworth, and strode up the slope to the deserted square where Esmond Clarenden stood before his little store alone in the deepening twilight.