“Don’t you know it’s very bad for little boys to drink and chew?”

“No, sir.”

“Did nobody ever tell you it was very bad for little boys to drink and chew?”

“No, sir”—­not once had Chad forgotten that.

“Well, it is.”

Chad thought for a minute.  “Will it keep me from gittin’ to be a big man?”

“Yes.”

Chad quietly threw his quid into the fire.

“Well, I be damned,” said the Major under his breath.  “Are you goin’ to quit?”

“Yes, sir.”

Meanwhile, the old driver, whose wife lived on the next farm, was telling the servants over there about the queer little stranger whom his master had picked up on the road that day, and after Chad was gone to bed, the Major got out some old letters from a chest and read them over again.  Chadwick Buford was his great-grandfather’s twin brother, and not a word had been heard of him since the two had parted that morning on the old Wilderness Road, away back in the earliest pioneer days.  So, the Major thought and thought suppose—­suppose?  And at last he got up and with an uplifted candle, looked a long while at the portrait of his grandfather that hung on the southern wall.  Then, with a sudden humor, he carried the light to the room where the boy was in sound sleep, with his head on one sturdy arm, his hair loose on the pillow, and his lips slightly parted and showing his white, even teeth; he looked at the boy a long time and fancied he could see some resemblance to the portrait in the set of the mouth and the nose and the brow, and he went back smiling at his fancies and thinking—­for the Major was sensitive to the claim of any drop of the blood in his own veins—­no matter how diluted.  He was a handsome little chap.

“How strange!  How strange!”

And he smiled when he thought of the boy’s last question.

“Where’s yo’ mammy?”

It had stirred the Major.

“I am like you, Chad,” he had said.  “I’ve got no mammy—­no nothin’, except Miss Lucy, and she don’t live here.  I’m afraid she won’t be on this earth long.  Nobody lives here but me, Chad.”

CHAPTER 9.  MARGARET

The Major was in town and Miss Lucy had gone to spend the day with a neighbor; so Chad was left alone.

“Look aroun’, Chad, and see how you like things,” said the Major.  “Go anywhere you please.”

And Chad looked around.  He went to the barn to see his old mare and the Major’s horses, and to the kennels, where the fox-hounds reared against the palings and sniffed at him curiously; he strolled about the quarters, where the little pickaninnies were playing, and out to the fields, where the servants were at work under the overseer, Jerome Conners, a tall, thin man with shrewd eyes, a sour, sullen face, and protruding upper teeth.  One of the few smiles that ever came to that face came now when the overseer saw the little mountaineer.  By and by Chad got one of the “hands” to let him take hold of the plough and go once around the field, and the boy handled the plough like a veteran, so that the others watched him, and the negro grinned, when he came back, and said