VI. HOW SIMON SUGGS “RAISED JACK.”

Until Simon entered his seventeenth year, he lived with his father, an old “hard-shell” Baptist preacher; who, though very pious and remarkably austere, was very avaricious. The old man reared his boys—or endeavoured to do so—according to the strictest requisition of the moral law. But he lived, at the time to which we refer, in Middle Georgia, which was then newly settled; and Simon, whose wits from the time he was a “shirt-tail boy,” were always too sharp for his father’s, contrived to contract all the coarse vices incident to such a region.

He stole his mother’s roosters to fight them at Bob Smith’s grocery, and his father’s plough-horses to enter them in “quarter” matches at the same place. He pitched dollars with Bob Smith himself, and could “beat him into doll-rags” whenever it came to a measurement. To crown his accomplishments, Simon was tip-top at the game of “old sledge,” which was the fashionable game of that era, and was early initiated in the mystery of “stocking the papers.”

The vicious habits of Simon were, of course, a sore trouble to his father, Elder Jedediah. He reasoned, he counselled, he remonstrated, he lashed, but Simon was an incorrigible, irreclaimable devil.

One day the simple-minded old man came rather unexpectedly to the field where he had left Simon and Ben, and a negro boy named Bill, at work. Ben was still following his plough, but Simon and Bill were in a fence-corner very earnestly engaged at “seven up.” Of course the game was instantly suspended, as soon as they spied the old man sixty or seventy yards off, striding towards them.

It was evidently a “gone case” with Simon and Bill; but our hero determined to make the best of it. Putting the cards into one pocket, he coolly picked up the small coins which constituted the stake, and fobbed them in the other, remarking:

“Well, Bill, this game’s blocked; we’d as well quit.”

“But, Massa Simon,” remarked the boy, “half dat money’s mine. An’t you gwine to lemme hab ’em?”

“Oh, never mind the money, Bill; the old man’s going to take the bark off of both of us—and besides, with the hand I helt when we quit, I should ’a beat you and won it all any way.”

“Well, but, Massa Simon, we nebber finish de game, and de rule—”

“Go to Old Scratch with your rule!” said the impatient Simon; “don’t you see daddy’s right down upon us, with an armful of hickories? I tell you I hilt nothin’ but trumps, and could ’a beat the horns off of a billy-goat. Don’t that satisfy you? Somehow or nother your d—d hard to please!” About this time a thought struck Simon, and in a low tone—for by this time the Reverend Jedediah was close at hand—he continued: “but maybe daddy don’t know, right down sure, what we’ve been doin’. Let’s try him with a lie—twon’t hurt no way; let’s tell him we’ve been playin’ mumble-peg.”

Bill was perforce compelled to submit to this inequitable adjustment of his claim of a share of the stakes; and of course agreed to the game of mumble-peg. All this was settled and a peg driven in the ground, slyly and hurriedly between Simon’s legs as he sat on the ground, just as the old man reached the spot. He carried under his left arm several neatly-trimmed sprouts of formidable length, while in his left hand he held one which he was intently engaged in divesting of its superfluous twigs.

“Soho! youngsters!—you in the fence-corner, and the crop in the grass? what saith the Scriptur’ Simon? ‘Go to the ant, thou sluggard,’ and so forth and so on. What in the round creation of the yearth have you and that nigger been a-doin’?”

Bill shook with fear, but Simon was cool as a cucumber, and answered his father to the effect that they had been wasting a little time in a game of mumble-peg.

“Mumble-peg! mumble-peg!” repeated old Mr. Suggs, “what’s that?”

Simon explained the process of rooting for the peg; how the operator got upon his knees, keeping his arms stiff by his side, leaned forward and extracted the peg with his teeth.

“So you git upon your knees, do you, to pull up that nasty little stick! you’d better git upon ’em to ask mercy for your sinful souls, and for a dyin’ world. But let’s see one o’ you git the peg up now.”

The first impulse of our hero was to volunteer to gratify the curiosity of his worthy sire, but a glance at the old man’s countenance changed his “notion,” and he remarked that “Bill was a long ways the best hand.”

Bill, who did not deem Simon’s modesty an omen favourable to himself, was inclined to reciprocate compliments with his young master; but a gesture of impatience from the old man set him instantly upon his knees; and, bending forward, he essayed to lay hold with his teeth, of the peg, which Simon, just at that moment, very wickedly pushed half an inch further down.

Just as the breeches and hide of the boy were stretched to the uttermost, old Mr. Suggs brought down his longest hickory, with both hands, upon the precise spot where the tension was greatest. With a loud yell, Bill plunged forward, upsetting Simon, and rolled in the grass, rubbing the castigated part with fearful energy. Simon, though overthrown, was unhurt; and he was mentally complimenting himself upon the sagacity which had prevented his illustrating the game of mumble-peg, for the paternal amusement, when his attention was arrested by that worthy person’s stooping to pick up something—what is it?—a card upon which Simon had been sitting, and which, therefore, had not gone with the rest of the pack into his pocket.

The simple Mr. Suggs had only a vague idea of the pasteboard abomination called cards; and though he decidedly inclined to the opinion that this was one, he was by no means certain of the fact. Had Simon known this, he would certainly have escaped; but he did not. His father, assuming the look of extreme sapiency which is always worn by the interrogator who does not desire or expect to increase his knowledge by his questions, asked:

“What’s this, Simon?”

“The Jack a-dimunts,” promptly responded Simon, who gave up all as lost after this faux pas.

“What was it doin’ down thar, Simon, my sonny?” continued Mr. Suggs, in an ironically affectionate tone of voice.

“I had it under my leg thar, to make it on Bill, the first time it come trumps,” was the ready reply.

“What’s trumps?” asked Mr. Suggs, with a view of arriving at the import of the word.

“Nothin’ ain’t trumps now,” said Simon, who misapprehended his father’s meaning, “but clubs was, when you come along and busted up the game.”

A part of this answer was Greek to the Reverend Mr. Suggs, but a portion of it was full of meaning. They had, then, most unquestionably been “throwing” cards, the scoundrels! the “oudacious” little hellions!

“To the “Mulberry,” with both on ye! in a hurry,” said the old man, sternly.

But the lads were not disposed to be in a “hurry,” for the “Mulberry” was the scene of all formal punishment administered during work hours in the field. Simon followed his father, however; but made, as he went along, all manner of “faces” at the old man’s back; gesticulated as if he were going to strike him between the shoulders with his fists; and kicking at him so as almost to touch his coat-tail with his shoe. In this style they walked on to the mulberry-tree, in whose shade Simon’s brother Ben was resting.

It must not be supposed that, during the walk to the place of punishment, Simon’s mind was either inactive or engaged in suggesting the grimaces and contortions wherewith he was pantomimically expressing his irreverent sentiments towards his father. Far from it. The movements of his limbs and features were the mere workings of habit—the self-grinding of the corporeal machine—for which his reasoning half was only remotely responsible. For while Simon’s person was thus on its own account, “making game” of old Jedediah, his wits, in view of the anticipated flogging, were dashing, springing, bounding, darting about, in hot chase of some expedient suitable to the necessities of the case—much after the manner in which puss, when Betty, armed with the broom, and hotly seeking vengeance for the pantry robbed or room defiled, has closed upon her the garret doors and windows, attempts all sorts of impossible exits, comes down at last in the corner, with panting side and glaring eye, exhausted and defenceless. Our unfortunate hero could devise nothing by which he could reasonably expect to escape the heavy blows of his father. Having arrived at this conclusion and the “Mulberry” about the same time, he stood with a dogged look, awaiting the issue.

The old man Suggs made no remark to any one while he was seizing up Bill—a process which, though by no means novel to Simon, seemed to excite in him a sort of painful interest. He watched it closely, as if to learn the precise fashion of his father’s knot; and when at last Bill was strung up a-tiptoe to a limb, and the whipping commenced, Simon’s eye followed every movement of his father’s arm; and as each blow descended upon the bare shoulders of his sable friend, his own body writhed and “wriggled” in involuntary sympathy.

“It’s the devil!—it’s tarnation,” said Simon to himself, “to take such a wallopin’ as that. Why the old man looks like he wants to git to the holler, if he could—rot his picter! It’s wuth, at the least, fifty cents—je-e-miny, how that hurt!—yes, it’s wuth three-quarters of a dollar, to take that ’ere lickin’! Wonder if I’m ‘predestinated,’ as old Jed’diah says, to get the feller to it? Lord, how daddy blows! I do wish he’d bust right open, the darn’d old deer-face! If ’twan’t for Ben helpin’ him, I b’lieve I’d give the old dog a tussel when it comes for my turn. It couldn’t make the thing no wuss, if it didn’t make it no better. Drot it! what do boys have daddies for, any how? ’Taint for nuthin’ but jist to beat ’em and work ’em—There’s some use in mammies—I kin poke my finger right in the old ’oman’s eye, and keep it thar, and if I say it aint thar, she’ll say ’taint thar, too. I wish she was here to hold daddy off. If ’twan’t so fur, I’d holler for her any how. How she would cling to the old feller’s coat-tail!”

Mr. Jedediah Suggs let down Bill, and untied him. Approaching Simon, whose coat was off:

“Come, Simon, son,” said he, “cross them hands, I’m gwine to correct you.”

“It aint no use, daddy,” said Simon.

“Why so, Simon?”

“Just bekase it aint, I’m gwine to play cards as long as I live. When I go off to myself, I’m gwine to make my livin’ by it. So what’s the use of beatin’ me about it?”

Old Mr. Suggs groaned, as he was wont to do in the pulpit, at this display of Simon’s viciousness.

“Simon,” said he, “you’re a poor ignunt creetur. You don’t know nothin’ and you’ve never been no whars. If I was to turn you off, you’d starve in a week.”

“I wish you’d try me,” said Simon, “and jist see. I’d win more money in a week than you can make in a year. There aint nobody round here kin make seed corn off o’ me at cards. I’m rale smart,” he added, with great emphasis.

“Simon! Simon! you poor unletered fool. Don’t you know that all card-players and chicken-fighters, and horse-racers go to hell? You crack-brained creatur’ you. And don’t you know that them that play cards always lose their money, and—”

“Who wins it all then, daddy?” asked Simon.

“Shet your mouth, you imperdent, slack-jaw’d dog. Your daddy’s a-tryin’ to give you some good advice, and you a-pickin’ up his words that way. I know’d a young man once, when I lived in Ogletharp, as went down to Augusty and sold a hundred dollars’ worth of cotton for his daddy, and some o’ them gambollers got him to drinkin’, and the very first night he was with ’em they got every cent of his money.

“They couldn’t get my money in a week,” said Simon. “Anybody can git these here green fellows’ money; them’s the sort I’m a-gwine to watch for, myself. Here’s what kin fix the papers jist about as nice as anybody.”

“Well, it’s no use to argify about the matter,” said old Jedediah; “What saith the Scriptur’? ‘He that begetteth a fool, doeth it to his sorrow.’ Hence, Simon, you’re a poor, miserable fool! so, cross your hands!”

“You’d jist as well not, daddy. I tell you I’m gwine to follow playin’ cards for a livin’, and what’s the use o’ bangin’ a feller about it? I’m as smart as any of ’em, and Bob Smith says them Augusty fellers can’t make rent off o’ me.”

The Reverend Mr. Suggs had, once in his life, gone to Augusta; an extent of travel which in those days was a little unusual. His consideration among his neighbours was considerably increased by the circumstance, as he had all the benefit of the popular inference that no man could visit the city of Augusta without acquiring a vast superiority over all his untravelled neighbours, in every department of human knowledge. Mr. Suggs, then, very naturally felt ineffably indignant that an individual who had never seen a collection of human habitations larger than a log-house village—an individual, in short, no other or better than Bob Smith—should venture to express an opinion concerning the manners, customs, or anything else appertaining to, or in any wise connected with, the ultima thule of backwoods Georgians. There were two propositions which witnessed their own truth to the mind of Mr. Suggs—the one was, that a man who had never been at Augusta, could not know anything about that city, or any place or thing else; the other that one who had been there must, of necessity, be not only well informed as to all things connected with the city itself, but perfectly au fait upon all subjects whatsoever. It was therefore in a tone of mingled indignation and contempt that he replied to the last remark of Simon.

“Bob Smith says—does he? And who’s Bob Smith? Much does Bob Smith know about Augusty! He’s been thar, I reckon! Slipped off yarly some mornin’ when nobody warn’t noticin’, and got back afore night! It’s only a hundred and fifty mile. Oh yes, Bob Smith knows all about it! I don’t know nothin’ about it! I a’n’t never been to Augusty—I couldn’t find the road thar I reckon, ha! ha! Bob—Smi—th! The eternal stink! if he was only to see one o’ them fine gentlemen in Augusty, with his fine broad-cloath and bell-crown hat, and shoe-boots a-shinin’ like silver, he’d take to the woods and kill himself a-runnin’. Bob Smith! that’s whar all your devilment comes from, Simon.”

“Bob Smith’s as good as anybody else, I judge; and a heap smarter than some. He showed me how to cut Jack,” continued Simon, “and that’s more than some people can do if they have been to Augusty.”

“If Bob Smith kin do it,” said the old man, “I kin too. I don’t know it by that name; but if it’s book knowledge or plain sense, and Bob kin do it, it’s reasonable to s’pose that old Jed’diah Suggs won’t be bothered bad. Is it any ways similyar to the rule of three, Simon?”

“Pretty much, daddy, but not adzactly,” said Simon, drawing a pack from his pocket to explain. “Now daddy,” he proceeded, “you see these here four cards is what we call Jacks. Well, now, the idee is, if you’ll take the pack and mix ’em all up together, I’ll take off a passel from top, and the bottom one of them I take off will be one of the Jacks.”

“Me to mix em fust?” said Jedediah.

“Yes.”

“And you not to see but the back of the top one, when you go to ‘cut,’ as you call it?”

“Jist so, daddy.”

“And the backs all jist as like as kin be?” said the senior Suggs, examining the cards.

“More like nor cow-peas,” said Simon.

“It can’t be done, Simon,” observed the old man, with great solemnity.

“Bob Smith kin do it, and so kin I.”

“It’s agin nater, Simon; thar a’n’t a man in Augusty, nor on the top of the yearth, that kin do it!”

“Daddy,” said our hero, “ef you’ll bet me—”

“What!” thundered old Mr. Suggs, “bet, did you say?” and he came down with a scorer across Simon’s shoulders—“me, Jed’diah Suggs, that’s been in the Lord’s sarvice these twenty years—me bet, you nasty, sassy, triflin’, ugly—”

“I didn’t go to say that, daddy; that warn’t what I ment, adzactly. I ment to say that ef you’d let me off from this here maulin’ you owe me, and give me ‘Bunch’ ef I cut Jack, I’d give you all this here silver, ef I didn’t—that’s all. To be sure, I allers know’d you wouldn’t bet.”

Old Mr. Suggs ascertained the exact amount of the silver which his son handed to him, in an old leathern pouch, for inspection. He also, mentally, compared that sum with an imaginary one, the supposed value of a certain Indian pony, called “Bunch,” which he had bought for his “old woman’s” Sunday riding, and which had sent the old lady into a fence-corner, the first—and only—time she had ever mounted him. As he weighed the pouch of silver in his hand, Mr. Suggs also endeavoured to analyze the character of the transaction proposed by Simon. “It sartinly can’t be nothin’ but givin’, no way it kin be twisted,” he murmured to himself. “I know he can’t do it, so there’s no resk. What makes bettin’? The resk. It’s a one-sided business, and I’ll jist let him give me all his money, and that’ll put all his wild sportin’ notions out of his head.”

“Will you stand it, daddy?” asked Simon, by way of waking the old man up. “You mought as well, for the whippin’ won’t do you no good; and as for Bunch, nobody about the plantation won’t ride him, but me.”

“Simon,” replied the old man, “I agree to it. Your old daddy is in a close place about payin’ for his land; and this here money—it’s jist eleven dollars lacking of twenty-five cents—will help out mightily. But mind, Simon, ef anything’s said about this, hereafter, remember, you give me the money.”

“Very well, daddy, and ef the thing works up instid o’ down, I s’pose we’ll say you give me Bunch—eh?”

“You won’t never be troubled to tell how you come by Bunch; the thing’s agin natur, and can’t be done. What old Jed’diah Suggs knows, he knows as good as anybody. Give me them fixaments, Simon.”

Our hero handed the cards to his father, who dropping the plough-line with which he had intended to tie Simon’s hands, turned his back to that individual, in order to prevent his witnessing the operation of mixing. He then sat down, and very leisurely commenced shuffling the cards, making, however, an exceedingly awkward job of it. Restive kings and queens jumped from his hands, or obstinately refused to slide into the company of the rest of the pack. Occasionally, a sprightly knave would insist on facing his neighhour; or, pressing his edge against another’s, half double himself up, and then skip away. But Elder Jedediah perseveringly continued his attempts to subdue the refractory, while heavy drops burst from his forehead, and ran down his cheeks. All of a sudden, an idea, quick and penetrating as a rifle-ball, seemed to have entered the cranium of the old man. He chuckled audibly. The devil had suggested to Mr. Suggs an impromptu “stock,” which would place the chances of Simon—already sufficiently slim in the old man’s opinion—without the range of possibility. Mr. Suggs forthwith proceeded to cull out all the picter cards—so as to be certain to include the jacks—and place them at the bottom; with the evident intention of keeping Simon’s fingers above these when he should cut. Our hero, who was quietly looking over his father’s shoulders all the time, did not seem alarmed by this disposition of the cards; on the contrary, he smiled as if he felt perfectly confident of success, in spite of it.

“Now, daddy,” said Simon, when his father had announced himself ready, “nary one of us ain’t got to look at the cards, while I’m a cuttin’; if we do, it’ll spile the conjuration.”

“Very well.”

“And another thing—you’ve got to look me right dead in the eye, daddy—will you?”

“To be sure—to be sure,” said Mr. Suggs; “fire away.”

Simon walked up close to his father, and placed his hand on the pack. Old Mr. Suggs looked in Simon’s eye, and Simon returned the look for about three seconds, during which a close observer might have detected a suspicious working of the wrist of the hand on the cards, but the elder Suggs did not remark it.

“Wake snakes! day’s a breakin’! Rise Jack!” said Simon, cutting half a dozen cards from the top of the pack, and presenting the face of the bottom one for the inspection of his father.

It was the Jack of Hearts!

Old Mr. Suggs staggered back several steps, with uplifted eyes and hands!

“Marciful Master!” he exclaimed, “ef the boy hain’t! well, how in the round creation of the——! Ben, did you ever! to be sure and sartin, Satan has power on this yearth!” and Mr. Suggs groaned in heavy bitterness.

“You never seed nothin’ like that in Augusty, did ye, daddy?” asked Simon, with a malicious wink at Ben.

“Simon, how did you do it?” queried the old man, without noticing his son’s question.

“Do it, daddy? Do it? ’Taint nothin’. I done it jest as easy as—shootin’.”

Whether this explanation was entirely, or in any degree, satisfactory to the perplexed mind of the Elder Jedediah Suggs, cannot, after the lapse of time which has intervened, be sufficiently ascertained. It is certain, however, that he pressed the investigation no farther, but merely requested his son Benjamin to witness the fact that, in consideration of his love and affection for his son Simon, and in order to furnish the donee with the means of leaving that portion of the state of Georgia, he bestowed upon him the impracticable pony, “Bunch.”

“Jist so, daddy, jist so; I’ll witness that. But it ’minds me mightily of the way mammy give old Trailler the side of bacon, last week. She was a-sweepin’ up the hath—the meat on the table; old Trailler jumps up, gethers the bacon and darts; mammy arter him with the broomstick as fur as the door, but seein’ the dog has got the start, she shakes the stick at him, and hollers, ‘You sassy, aig-sukkin’, roguish, gnatty, flopped-eared varmint, take it along, take it along! I only wish ’twas full of a’snic and ox vomit and blue vitrul, so as ’twould cut your intrils into chitlins!’ That’s about the way you give Bunch to Simon.”

It was evident to our hero that his father intended he should remain but one more night beneath the paternal roof. What mattered it to Simon?

He went home at night, curried and fed Bunch; whispered confidentially in his ear, that he was the “fastest piece of hoss-flesh, accordin’ to size, that ever shaded the yearth;” and then busied himself in preparing for an early start on the morrow.