As harvest work dwindled to the last scattered corn and cotton to be picked from the fields, Alonzo went back to the glade now and then, not expecting to find anyone, but in a reflective, questing mood, nonetheless. One day as he rested against the rock he had seen Driscoll Proctor use for the same purpose, he heard someone approaching and quickly left, but stopped and waited as soon as he was hidden, to see who came.

The man was a stranger. Staring at him through foliage, Alonzo finally placed him. He had seen him two or three times on the sidewalk outside the old stage and post office. He was the man who painted portraits of people. Alonzo had heard of his painting the Davis family and now being at Beulah Land to paint the Kendricks. He watched for a little while, but the man did nothing other than sit down by the brook and look into it, so Alonzo left him to it—with some resentment, for he had come to think of the glade as his own.

Making his way to his own land, the fancy came to him that perhaps he should turn back and tell the man who he was and ask him to come to his house when he had fulfilled his obligations at Beulah Land. He could paint drunken Mama, sloppy Maude, Geraldine—even himself, master of the farm, just as Leon Kendrick was master of Beulah Land. At first the fancy amused him, but by the time he reached home he was angry, and he did not know why.

14

The Central Railroad linking Savannah and Macon had been completed in 1843. The wail of train whistle and racket of boxcars carried far over the quiet countryside, and the line of smoke from the engine stack was still a sight that caused people to lift their heads from their work and marvel.

Highboro had the fortune to be directly on the line, and for several years Leon had sent his cotton and lumber to Savannah by rail. The sudden ease of travel did not, however, do very much to encourage those at Beulah Land to make more frequent trips to Savannah than they had done before. Their society was, if not self-contained, then bounded roughly by the county lines.

Penelope wrote to friends in Savannah, but had returned to visit only once, three years ago. When she came back, she declared that the old city had “gone down,” and was growing much too rapidly for her taste, and that she had actually been introduced to people she had not even heard of before she came to live at Beulah Land.