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The master and servant parted the one to ride wearily to his unpeaceful home, the other to journey along more hopefully to the shadeless cabins in the fields. Compared to the field-hands, who were little more than heathen and barbarian, our favorite China was a princess. One day and night among them proved to the unhappy girl that her master was in the right she could not live with them.
For such variations of labor, slaves are not well fitted; hence there were but two regions in the North where slaves were profitably employed as field-hands, on Narragansett Bay and on the Hudson: elsewhere the negroes were house or body servants, and slaves were rather an evidence of the master's consequence than of their value in agriculture.
"I will relate to you an instance," said he, "of the manner in which this, as we white people consider it, solemn compact, is entered into amongst field-hands. When a couple wish to live together as man and wife, the male nigger mentions it to the overseer, and if there are no impediments, they have a cabin assigned to them."
To this there are doubtless many exceptions, but they are only exceptions; the number of slaveholders who furnish meat for their field-hands, is small, in comparison with the number of those who do not. The house slaves, that is, the cooks, chambermaids, waiters, &c., generally get some meat every day; the remainder bits and bones of their masters' tables.
The great increase of holdings, then, has come in the buying of small homesteads near town, where their owners really share in the town life; this is a part of the rush to town. And for every land-owner who has thus hurried away from the narrow and hard conditions of country life, how many field-hands, how many tenants, how many ruined renters, have joined that long procession?
Since he knew that Blaze possessed a thorough knowledge of this section and its people, it was partly business which had brought him to the Jones home this afternoon. Strictly speaking, Blaze was not a rancher, although many of his acres were under cultivation and he employed a sizable army of field-hands.
On either side of the oak-bordered driveway, between the tree-trunks, crackled torches of pine knots, the glow of their curling flames bringing into high relief the black faces of innumerable field-hands from the Rutter and neighboring plantations, lined up on either side of the gravel road teeth and eyeballs flashing white against the blackness of the night.
"Whilst these things are true of field-hands, it is also true that many slaveholders clothe their waiters and coachmen like gentlemen. I do not think there is any difference between the slaves of professing Christians and others; at all events, it is so small as to be scarcely noticeable.
"Barricade the doors to the atrium!" he commanded, "while I can put on my armour. You, Mamercus, are too old for this kind of work; run and call in the field-hands, the clients, and the neighbours. Cappadox, Falto, and I can hold the doors till aid comes."
Watkins, for an officer walked up and exchanged a few low, hurried words with him. Marcy afterward thought that the barking of Beardsley's dogs, and the shrill frightened voices of the house servants and field-hands which came faintly from the direction of the quarter, ought to have told him that something unusual had been going on there, but he did not pay very much attention to the sounds.