House Divided by Ben Ames Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

miles away. Its shape reminded him of a camel with two humps, one of them jutting confidently upward against the sky; and he remembered that he had been told to look for Pilot Knob as a landmark useful to travellers hereabouts.

    He rode slowly, and came into a region where farms were more numerous; and as the sun dropped down the western sky he emerged from a belt of forest into a ten-acre clearing under good cultivation. To his left, set among oaks and junipers on a low saddleback that paralleled his road, a neat and spacious house promised hospitality. He turned aside. The lane led between a grassy meadow and a garden hedged with junipers to the door.
    His chance host proved to be an old acquaintance. Colonel Joseph Williams, commanding the Surry County militia, had served well through the Revolution; and Anthony Currain had met him at Yorktown. So there was a warm welcome waiting. In the cool of that first evening the two friends walked together in the garden, and Colonel Williams showed Anthony Currain the small shoots of box brought from Hanover County in Virginia to outline the garden beds.
    â€œAnd these along the hedge are tree box,” he said. “They will grow tall to replace the junipers by and by. And that sapling yonder will be a fine magnolia some day. Just savor the fragrance of this rose, if you please, Mr. Currain. I propose to make a pleasant garden here, with lanes and vistas, and an arbor of scuppernongs, and fruit trees well nurtured.”
    He was a man of many plans and projects; and he led Anthony Currain beyond the garden to a small walled enclosure. “The bricks in that wall were made on the place, sir, like the bricks in the house,” he said quietly. “When I no longer sleep in the house, I shall come to sleep in this lovely spot, and my generations after me.”
    They leaned on the farther wall to watch a doe and two fawns in the glade below. “I call that my deer pasture, Mr. Currain,” the Colonel explained. “They come to drink at the springs. We never molest them, and they seem to know themselves secure against man; yes, and against panthers, too. This is Panther Creek, but the beasts seldom approach the house.”
    Anthony Currain liked the remote peace and the gentle beauty of the spot, and he lingered, listening to his host’s stories of the day in February 1781, when Cornwallis and his army crossed the Yadkin at the ford a mile northwest of the house. When he told his errand, Colonel Williams eagerly displayed all the beauty and the promise of
this region, urging that if it was land the other wanted, here was his perfect goal.
    â€œFifty years from now, sir,” the enthusiast predicted, “all along the Yadkin here will be strung, like beads on a rosary, scores of rich and fruitful farms. Anything a man can want this soil will produce. It’s only necessary to girdle the trees and drop a few seeds. I began to build here before the Revolution, but I never found time to finish my house till after Cornwallis surrendered.” He chuckled. “In fact, it’s not yet finished. The walls bulge every time my family increases. And this is a land for good increase, Mr. Currain. Stay here and you’ll be glad all your days.”
    â€œI had a thought to pass the mountains and see what lies beyond,” Anthony Currain confessed; and after hours of talk the Colonel saw he could not be shaken.
    â€œRide on, then,” he agreed. “But I know a place will hold you. It’s a long day’s ride due west, in the friendly hills. Cross at Shallow Ford and go on; but avoid the road to Wilkesboro. Mulberry Field Meeting-House, we used to call it, but they’re making a town there now, and you and I have no love for towns. Ask your way to a place called Chimneys. Any man you meet will direct you. It’s a great house, all of brick, with twin chimneys at the ends. Thomas Brettany came from Betharaba to build it and brought his