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"Ain’t you-uns goin’ to teach the Yellett outfit ther spellin’, writin’, and about George Washington, an’ how the Yankees kem along arter he was in his grave an’ fit us and broke up the kentry so we had ter leave our home in Tennessee an’ kem to this yere outdacious place, where nobody knows the diffunce between aig-bread an’ corn-dodger? I war a Miss Tumlin from Tennessee."
As he proposed to take his family and party by the stage, Hammond lent me his riding-horse, which I rode to Allatoona and the Etowah River. Hearing of certain large Indian mounds near the way, I turned to one side to visit them, stopping a couple of days with Colonel Lewis Tumlin, on whose plantation these mounds were.
Ye'll mind the closed-in beds i' the kitchen? Ay, weel, they're a fell spoilt crew, T'nowhead's litlins, an' no that aisy to manage. Th' ither lasses Lisbeth's hae'n had a michty trouble wi' them. When they war i' the middle o' their reddin up the bairns wid come tumlin' about the floor, but, sal, I assure ye, Bell didna fash lang wi' them. Did she, Sam'l?"
The Tumlin family did not remain long enough in the Black Hill country to witness Sally’s failure as the wife of a pioneer. The restlessness of the "settler," if the paradox be permissible, was in the marrow of their bones. The makeshifts of the wagon, the adventures of the road, were the only home they craved.
In circumventing Sally Tumlin the man became the spoils of war, and it is not the Indian way to tell plans on the war-trail. So the squaw left her kingdom in the hands of the enemy, without a word. Sally Tumlin and Warren Rodney looked upon the disappearance of the squaw in the light of a providential solution of the difficulties attending their romance.
On that occasion I had stopped some days with a Colonel Tumlin, to see some remarkable Indian mounds on the Etowah River, usually called the "Hightower:" I therefore knew that the Allatoona Pass was very strong, would be hard to force, and resolved not even to attempt it, but to turn the position, by moving from Kingston to Marietta via.
The wedding party started for the post, old mother Tumlin fluttering about the bride as complacently as if the ceremony had been the culmination of the most decorous courtship. The oafish brother drove the bridal party, making crude jests by-the-way, to the frank delight of the prospective groom and the giggling protestations of the bride.
Perhaps in some far distant council of the Daughters of the Pioneers a prospective member of the house of Rodney would unctuously announce: "My great-great-grandmother was a Miss Tumlin of Tennessee; great-great-grandfather’s first wife had been a Sioux squaw. Isn’t it interesting and romantic?" Eudora now came to her mother with great news.
Had there ever been a word against her character? What was the use of making all that fuss over a squaw? It was not as if she was a white woman. The injustice of it preyed on the former Miss Tumlin. She took to the consolations of snuff-dipping and fell from her pink-and-white estate.
"Ai-yi," openly scoffed the former Miss Tumlin; "talk’s cheap before—" She would have considered it indelicate to supply the word "marriage," but by breaking off her sentence before she came to the pith of it she continued to maintain the proprieties, and at the same time conveyed to her audience that she was too old and experienced to permit any fledgling from her nest to be caught, for want of a warning, by such obvious ante-matrimonial chaff as fair promises.
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