“Go ’long! Aint I done tell you she ridin’ Injun Belle?” Mammy Jacks replied scornfully. “She tuck’n sond piccaninny fer you. You gwine ter go? Co’se,”—she turned away with great dignity—“ef you hev udder fish ter fry, it’s notin ter Mammy Jacks. She done tell you.” “Stop!” I said, my mind a jumble of impossible conjectures, “Don’t be in such a hurry. I’ll go, of course, if I can be of use. But I don’t understand—” “Dat’s needer yer nor dar,” Mammy Jacks answered. “Ef you ’er too bigitty ter go, Marse, dar’s an eend. Eh? You gwine? Clar to goodness den, sooner’n you skip de better! Ef you not fine Missie no’th aidge uv de Knob you ter wait an hour twel she come. Bimeby she trompin’ round. She sholy boun’ ter come.” I followed the woman from the room, still marvelling, still questioning, my head in a whirl. She hurried me through the living-room to the door at the rear of the house which looked towards the negroes’ cabins—low huts of shingle, vine-clad, mushroom-like, dwarfed by the giant shade trees that rose above them. Beside the house-door stood a black boy with a single cloth about him, who still panted from the speed at which he had come. His face was strange to me, and I asked if he were coming with me. “Look like you know de track widout him!” the woman rejoined. “Aint you bin ter de Knob de las’ week uz ever wuz? You better run ’long er Missie’ll be dar befo’ you! Den you’ll hear mo’ en you pleez’d ter like. Dat’s w’at I’m thinking, Marse Craven.” I strode off without waiting for more, passed beside the cabins and skirted the negroes’ patches of corn and vegetables. Beyond these I plunged into the woods, following a fairly-marked track. The Knob was a rocky point, rising well over a hundred feet above the forest roof, some two miles southwest of the Bluff. I had visited it for the sake of the view which I was told its summit afforded; and I should have gone a second time if about the same distance northwest of the Knob, there had not risen above the trees another hill—King’s Mountain. Its slopes were greener, it was more pleasant to the eye. But I knew that on those slopes, above which vultures and crows hovered in the air, the bodies of my fellows lay unburied. And that thought had been too much for me. I had not gone again.