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Updated: June 22, 2025
That Saturday night was one never to be forgotten by others beside Jack Bracken and the old preacher of Cottontown. When Helen Conway, after supper, sought her drunken father and learned that he really intended to have Lily and herself go into the cotton mills, she was crushed for the first time in her life. An hour later she sent a boy with a note to The Gaffs to Harry Travis.
Around it in the next few years had sprung up Cottontown. The factory had been built on the edge of an old cottonfield which ran right up to the town's limit; and the field, unplowed for several years, had become sodded with the long stolens of rank Bermuda grass, holding in its perpetual billows of green the furrows which had been thrown up for cotton rows and tilled years before.
And he need have no known pedigree at all, except an honest ancestry behind him. Such a man was Hillard Watts, the Cottontown preacher. Sprung from the common people of the South, he was a most uncommon man, in that he had an absolute faith in God and His justice, and an absolute belief that some redeeming goodness lay in every human being, however depraved he may seem to the world.
The chapter was where Zacharias climbed into a sycamore tree to see his passing Lord. There was a rattling of the stove pipe in one corner. "Maw," whispered Miss Butts, "Jes' look at Archie B. he's climbin' the stove pipe like Zacharias did the sycamo'." Horror again swept over Cottontown, while the Hillites cackled aloud.
But even this proved a surprise for all, for nearly one thousand bales of cotton were ginned, at a total cost to the mill of only four cents per pound, while Cottontown had been fed during summer with all the vegetables and melons needed all raised on the farm.
O'Hooligan of Cottontown, "side-but'ners I got 'em for her yistiddy the fust that this town's ever seed. La, but it was a job gittin' 'em on Patsy. I had to soak her legs in cold water nearly all night, an' then I broke every knittin' needle in the house abut'nin' them side but'ners. "But fashion is fashion, an' when I send my gal out into society, I'll send her in style.
It happened that morning that the old Bishop was on his daily round, visiting the sick of Cottontown. He went every day, from house to house, helping the sick, cheering the well, and better than all things else, putting into the hearts of the disheartened that priceless gift of coming again.
For the first time in years, the next Sunday the little church on the mountain side was closed, and all Cottontown wondered. Never before had the old man missed a Sabbath afternoon since the church had been built. This was to have been Baptist day, and that part of his congregation was sorely disappointed.
It was a show Cottontown had never seen before. Then two men came out of the bar-room one, the bar-keeper, fat and jolly, and the other lank and with malicious eyes. This gave Bonaparte his cue and he bristled and growled. "Look out, mister," said the tender-hearted Ozzie B. to the Italian, "watch this here dog, Bonaparte; he's terrible 'bout fightin'. He'll eat yo' monkey if he gets a chance."
It was not difficult to imagine that they had had a long siege of malarial fever in which the village doctor had used abundant plasters of mustard, and the disease had finally run into "yaller ja'ndice," as they called it in Cottontown. And thus Cottontown had stood for several years, a new problem in Southern life and industry, and a paying one for the Massachusetts directors.
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