So I rode straight to Barry Upper Branch, and a handsome black woman
in a flaunting gown, with a great display of beads, and an orange
silk scarf twisted about her head, came to parley with me, and told
me that both the brothers were away, and added that she thought I
should find them at the tavern.
The tavern was a brick building abounding in sharp slants of roof,
and dimmed in outline by a spreading cloud of new-leaved branches,
and there was one great honey-locust which was a marvel to be
seen, and hummed with bees with a mighty drone as of all the
spinning-wheels in the country, and the sweetness of it blew down
upon one passing under, like a wind of breath. And before the tavern
were tied, stamping and shaking their heads for the early flies,
many fine horses, and among them Parson Downs' and the Barry
brothers', and from within the tavern came the sound of laughter in
discordant shouts, and now and then a snatch of a song. Then a great
hoarse rumble of voice would cap the rest, telling some loose story,
then the laughter would follow--enough, it seemed, to make the roof
shake--and all the time the hum of the bees in the honey-locust
outside went on. Verily at that time in Virginia, with all the
spirit of the people in a ferment of rebellion against the
established order of things, being that same ferment which the
ardour of Nathaniel Bacon had set in motion, and which, so far as
I see now, was the beginning of an epoch of history, there was
nothing after all, no plotting nor counterplotting, no fierce
inveighing against authority, nor reckless carousing on the brinks
of precipices, which could for a second stay the march of the
mightiest force of all--the spring which had returned in its
majesty of victory, for thousands of years, and love which had
come before that.
I tied my horse with the others, with a tight halter, for he was apt
to pick quarrels, having always a theory that such discomforts as
flies or a long weariness of standing were in some fashion to be
laid to the doors of other horses, and indeed made always of his own
kind his special scapegoat of the dispensation of Providence. 'Tis
little I know about that great mystery of the animal creation and
its relation toward the human race, but verily I believe that that
fine horse of mine, from his propensity for kicking and lashing out
from his iron-bound hoofs at whatever luckless steed came within his
reach whenever the world went not to his liking, could not see an
inch beyond the true horizon limit of the horse race, and attributed
all that happened on earth, including man, to the agency of his own
sort. Sure I was, from the backward glance of viciousness which he
cast at the other stamping steeds as soon as I dismounted, that he
concluded with no hesitation they had in some way led me to ride him
thither instead of to his snug berth in the Cavendish stables, with
his eager nose in his feed trough.