Rare Vintage Books. The Old Mine's Secret. 1921

CHAPTER I

“O-O-OH! oh me-e!” Dick made the sigh very sad and pitiful.

His father did not seem to hear it. He tilted his chair farther back, perched his feet on the porch railing, and unfolded his newspaper.

It was a mild April morning, and the Osborne family had drifted out on the porch,—Mr. Osborne with his papers and Mrs. Osborne with her sewing; Sweet William was playing jackstraws with himself, Patsy sat on the steps with her back to the others, especially Dick, who, however, was pitying himself too much to notice her.

“I always get blamed for everything I do,” he said mournfully, “but David——”

“‘House for War: Vote 373 to 50.’” Mr. Osborne read the headline. “That is the answer to the President’s message four days ago. Now the Senate——”

“Father! If you’ll just let me off to-day, I’ll work from school-out till dark every day next week. I certainly will. Father, please——”

“Richard Randolph Osborne! You are to

[2]

work your assigned part of the garden to-day, to-day, without further pleas for postponement.” Mr. Osborne’s mild voice and red flabby face stiffened with determination. This was not the first week that Dick had neglected his garden task.

“Yes, sir,” Dick answered meekly, wriggling a little. That was all he could do—wriggle a little—because he was made into a sort of merman by having an old Persian shawl wrapped about him, from the waist down. “I think you might let me off,” he persisted in an undertone; “just this one more time. If mother had patched my trousers last night—if she’d let me put on my Sundays now—I could get that hateful old garden worked this morning. I’ve got something else to do to-day, something awfully important.”

“I’m sorry I forgot, son,” said his mother. “I certainly meant to mend them last night. I was reading, and forgot. I wish you had reminded me.” She took quicker stitches and her thread snarled so that she had to break it and begin again. “I am so sorry,” she repeated in the delicious voice that made her words seem as fresh and sweet as the red roses that fell from the mouth of the fairy-tale maiden.

Mrs. Osborne was a dear, sunny-hearted little woman with dark hair, irregular features, and a

[3]

vivid, eager face. She loved to read; indeed, she could no more resist a book than a toper could refuse a drink, but she was always so sorry and so ashamed when she neglected home duties that every one except the person who suffered from it forgave her freely.

Patsy, Dick’s twin sister, came now to her mother’s defense. “It’s your fault, Dick,” she said. “It’s all your own fault. If you had locked the bookcase door, it would have reminded her there was something to do. And then she would have thought of the trousers.”

“I forgot,” Dick confessed. That put him clearly in the wrong, and made him the crosser. He turned on his sister, growling: “What business is it of yours, miss? You please let my affairs alone and attend to your own. What are you doing, Patsy?”

He tried to wriggle near enough to see, but Patsy made a face at him and ran into the yard. Dick was such a tease! She was not going to tell him that she had decided to be a poet and was composing a wonderful ballad. How surprised he would be when it came out in the Atlantic or St. Nicholas, with her name in big black letters—Pocahontas Virginia Osborne, as it was in the family Bible. Or would she have a pen-name, like ‘Marion Harland’? If she could think of a

[4]

lovely original name—— But perhaps she had better finish the poem first.

She perched herself in the swing and chewed her pencil and read over the four lines she had written:

“Johnny was a sailor,

He was brave and bold;

He thought he would make an adventure

To find the North Pole.”

She could not think of anything else to say, so she read that over again; and then again. While inspiration tarried, an interruption came. It took the shape of her small brother William with two of his followers—Hop-o-hop, a lame duck that he had adopted when its hen mother pecked it and cast it off, and Scalawag, a sand-colored, bob-tailed stray dog that had adopted him.

“Hey, Patsy! I think I’ll give you a kiss,” announced Sweet William, raising his fair, serious face to hers. “I think I might give you two kisses. You are so sweet. Patsy,” he went on coaxingly, “wouldn’t you want to lend me a pencil? Just one little minute, to make you a picture of a horse.”

“Oh, Sweet William, you’re such a nuisance!” said Patsy. “I’m awfully busy. How can I ever finish this, if you bother me?”

But she gave him pencil and paper, and sat

[5]

swinging back and forth, looking idly about the spacious yard where the budding oaks made lacelike shadows, on that April morning.

In the center of the yard was a great heap of bricks. That was the remains of Osborne’s Rest, the family mansion that had been burned in a raid during The War, as those southern Virginians called the War of Secession from which they dated everything. Since then, two generations of Osbornes had dwelt in The Roost, a cottage in one corner of the yard. It was now the home of Patsy, her father and mother, her two brothers, Dick and Sweet William, and a motherless cousin, David Spotswood.

The big front gate opened on The Street, the one thoroughfare of The Village. There were a church, a tavern, two shops, a dozen frame and brick dwellings set far back in spacious grounds, and the county Court-house in a square by itself. Behind the Court-house rambled The Back Way which had once expected to become a street, but remained always The Back Way with only a blacksmith’s shop, a basket-maker’s shed, and a few cabins on it.

A century and a half before, three royal-grant estates, Broad Acres and Larkland and Mattoax, cornered at a stone now on Court-house Green. These plantations had long ago been divided into

[6]

small farms; but in The Village still lived Wilsons and Mayos and Osbornes who counted as outsiders all whose grandfathers were not born in the neighborhood and the kinship.

While we have been looking about, Sweet William lay flat on the ground, holding his tongue between his teeth, to assist his artistic efforts.

“Look at my horse, Patsy!” he crowed, holding up the paper.

“Hm-m! I don’t call that much like a horse,” observed Patsy.

Sweet William’s face clouded, and then brightened. “Tell you what!” he said. “It’ll be a cow. I’ll kick out one hind leg and put a bucket here. Now! She’s spilt all the milk.”

Patsy laughed; and then one knew that she was pretty, seeing the merry crinkles around her twinkling hazel eyes, and the upward curve of her lips that brought out dimples on her freckled pink cheeks.

“I love you when you laugh, Patsy!” exclaimed Sweet William, hugging her knees. “You may have my picture. And I’ll sit in the swing with you.”

“You and Scalawag and Hop-o-hop may have the swing,” said Patsy. “I’m going in. I’ll finish my poem to-morrow. I want to find out—I think Dick has a secret.”

[7]

She jumped out of the swing, gave Sweet William’s ear a “love pinch,” and strolled back to the porch.

“Dick,” she asked in an offhand way, “what are you going to do with that candle you got this morning?”

Dick’s gloom relaxed and he winked tantalizingly.

“You wish you knew,” he said. “But—you’ll—never—find—out. Ah, ha-a-a!”

“Don’t you tell, Mister Dick!” said Patsy. “I don’t want you to tell. I’d rather find out for myself. And I certainly will find out, sir. You just see if I don’t.”

Mr. Osborne still had his nose in his day-old paper; news younger than that seldom, came to The Village. “‘Army plans call for a million men the first year.’ That is a gigantic undertaking, Miranda, and—”

“It certainly is,” she agreed placidly. “Mayo, Black Mayo has bought some more pigeons; and Polly says he’ll not tell what he paid for them, so she knows it’s some absurd sum that he can’t afford.”

“Yes.” Her husband agreed absently. “And a million men means not only men, but arms, equipment, food. Bless my life! Is that clock striking—it can’t be!—is it ten? And I here

[8]

instead of at the Court-house.” He got up and stuffed the newspaper and a Congressional Record in his pocket.

“What are you going to do, dear?” asked his wife.

“We want to find out if the Board of Supervisors can appropriate money to send our Confederate veterans to the Reunion in June. There have been so many unusual expenses, bridges washed away and that smallpox quarantine, that funds are low. I hope they can raise the requisite amount.”

“Of course they will. They must,” Mrs. Osborne said quickly and positively. “Why, the yearly reunion—seeing old comrades, being heroized, recalling the glorious past—is the one bright spot in their gray old lives.”

“Mr. Tavis and Cap’n Anderson were talking about the Reunion at the post office yesterday,” said Dick. “They are just crazy about having it in Washington. Cap’n has never been there. But he was telling how near he and old Jube Early came to it, in ’64.”

“What an experience it will be, taking peaceful possession in old age of the Capital they campaigned against when they were soldier boys, over fifty years ago!” said Mrs. Osborne. “Certainly

[9]

they must go. How many are there, Mayo?”

“Nine in our district,” answered her husband. “Last year there were sixteen. Three have died, and four are bedridden.”

“Ah! so few are left; so many have passed on.” Mrs. Osborne glanced through the open door at a portrait, her father in a colonel’s gray uniform. “Of course they must go, our nine old soldiers.”

“Sure!” said Dick. “If there isn’t money enough, we boys can help raise it. Mr. Tavis says he’ll pay me to plant corn, afternoons and Saturdays. I wasn’t thinking about doing it. But our old Confeds mustn’t miss their Reunion.”

“Good boy! that’s the right spirit,” exclaimed Mrs. Osborne.

She adored the memory of her gallant father and of the Confederate cause to which he had devoted himself. The quiet, uneventful years had brought no new deep, inspiring interests to the little Southern community. Its love and loyalty clung to the past. To the children the Lost Cause was a tradition as heroic and romantic as the legends of Roland and Arthur; but it was a tradition linked to reality by the old gray-clad men who had fought with Lee and Jackson. As Jones and Tavis and Walthall, they were ordinary old

[10]

men, rather tiresome and absurd; but call them “Confederate veterans” and they were transformed to heroes whom it was an honor to serve. Dick, shirking the work that meant food for his family, would toil gladly to send them to their Reunion.

“They must have this, perhaps their last—”

Mrs. Osborne paused, and her husband said: “We’ll manage it; we’ll manage it somehow. If there is a deficit, we may be able to make it up by private subscription. Perhaps I’ll get a case next term of court, and can make a liberal contribution.” He laughed.

Mr. Osborne—called Red Mayo to distinguish him from a dark-haired cousin of the same name, called Black Mayo—was a lawyer more by profession than by practice; there were not enough law crumbs in The Village, he said, to support a sparrow.

He strolled toward the Court-house while Mrs. Osborne took her last hurried stitches. Then she handed the patched trousers to her son, who rolled indoors and put them on. He went into the garden and gloomily eyed the neglected square where peas and potatoes and onions were merely green lines among crowding weeds.

“I certainly can’t finish it this morning,” he growled. “There’s too much to do.”

[11]

“If you work hard, you can finish by sundown,” said his cousin, David Spotswood, who was planting a row of beets on the other side of the garden.

“I can’t work after dinner,” said Dick. “I’ve got something else to do. I just can’t finish it to-day.”

“You’d better,” said Patsy, who had followed him into the garden. “When father says ‘Richard’ and shuts his mouth—so! he means business. Say, Dick! What were you getting that candle for? What are you going to do? Let us go with you, Anne Lew