- ledges the reflex interest in my own mind; his eyes rest as
fixedly upon me as if they were a dead man's. I can, at length, no longer endure this in silence, so I ask, in a voice attuned to his apparent humour—
"How far to Woodville?"
The only reply is a slight grunt, with an elevation of the chin.
"You don't know?"
"No."
"Never been there."
"No."
"I can ride there before night, I suppose?"
No reply.
"ood walker, your horse?"
Not a nod.
"I thought mine pretty good."
Not a sneer, or a gleam of vanity, and Belshazzar and I warmed up together. Scott's man of leather occurred to my mind, and I felt sure that I could guess my man's chord. Cotton! I touched it, and in a moment he became animated, civil; hospitable even. I was immediately informed that this was a famous cotton region: "when it was first settled up by 'Mericans, used to be reckoned the gardying of the world. The almightiest rich sile God Almighty ever shuck down. All on't owned by big-bugs." Finally he confided to me that he was an overseer for one of them, "one of the biggest sort." This greatest of the local hemipteras was not now on his plantation, but had "gone North to Paris or Saratogy, or some of them places."
Wearing no waistcoat, the overseer carried a pistol, without a thought of concealment, in the fob of his trousers. The distance to Woodville, which, after he had exhausted his subject of cotton, I tried again to ascertain, he did not know, and
