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

bride there; but she and their first-born died together, and now the place is ashes in his mouth. He’d sell for the merest song.”
    So Anthony Currain made his farewells and rode on; and at the day’s end, following many words of direction, he came up a winding drive to a great house that looked off for miles south and west: southward over the long swell of gently rolling hills, westward across fertile bottom lands and past the flank of an isolated mountain mass to where many lesser heights rose in a crescendo to the pale distant silhouette of tall peaks against the setting sun.
    There he found that lonely man of whom Colonel Williams had spoken, and Thomas Brettany would sell, so Anthony Currain looked no further. He bought Chimneys and established there his younger son, and he himself went home to Great Oak and lived and died. When that younger son of his died childless, Chimneys fell back into
the weak hands of the second Anthony Currain, who sold it on terms to two brothers named Higpen. They made rapacious play with the rich bottoms till in the 1830’s the gold rush to placer workings in the mountains a few miles southeastward lured them away; and the discoveries around Gold Hill kept them enchanted there till they were penniless. When the second Anthony Currain died, their unpaid debt put the place back in his widow’s hands, and greedy tenants worked the land till Tony—the third Anthony Currain—persuaded his mother to send Travis, his younger brother, there to take charge.
    For Trav the move was promising; the prospect of freedom from Tony’s many impositions was an attractive one. Two passions were strong in him: a passion for keeping good land healthy and at work, and a love for the poetry of numbers. When one of his tutors while he was still a boy introduced him to Welch’s Improved American Arithmetic, Trav read it through as one reads a novel, hungrily; he turned back to pore over it page by page. What was alligation? Why were some fractions vulgar? What was double fellowship, the rule of three, tare, tret, cloff, suttle?
    The answers led him inevitably to an exploration of the plantation ledgers; he became their custodian. But at Great Oak, Tony and a succession of sloven overseers made the crops, and Trav had only the figures to set down. At Chimneys the double responsibility would be his. He welcomed it, and since then a dozen years had failed to bring satiety.
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    Riding homeward in the late afternoon Travis checked his horse on a rise of ground and turned to look out across the low hills clad in pine and chestnut through which many little streams hurried to fatten the south fork of the Yadkin a few miles away. He and James Fiddler had gone toward his eastern bounds to inspect a sandy slope where a young vineyard of scuppernongs began to show fine promise; and now the overseer reined in beside him. Trav was a big man in his early forties, heavy-shouldered so that he seemed to stoop, with soft brown hair thinning a little, eyes mildly blue. He was close shaven; and even on this hot evening in early July, after a long day in the saddle, there was cleanness about him. The dust upon his garments and his boots and
heavy on the brim of his soft old hat, and the sweat that darkened his shirt were superficial; the shirt had been fresh that morning, the boots scrupulously polished.
    His eyes swept this his domain, and James Fiddler’s too. The over seer’s father had been one of the tenant farmers here, greedy and improvident; James himself had stayed on, at first to rob Trav, then to love him. Their horses cropped the dry grass, willing to pause a while; and Trav spoke without turning, contentedly. “We’ve made a change here, James, in these years.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI remember well how it was when I came; all the old fields gone to sedge and pine. But we’ve put them back to work, one way or another; wheat and corn, tobacco, the orchards, and