He
had heard the Romany wife of Ruliff Zaphe use the word many years ago
when he and Charley Long visited the big white house on the hill. Was the
man a Romany, and, if so, what was he doing here? Had it anything to do
with Gabriel Druse and his daughter? But no--what was there strange in
the man being a Romany and playing the fiddle? Here and there in the West
during the last two years, he had seen what he took to be Romany faces.
He looked to see the effect of the stranger's remark on old Berry.
"I was a slave, and I was like that. My father made that fiddle in the
cotton-fields of Georgia," the aged barber said.
The son of a race which for centuries had never known country or flag or
any habitat, whose freedom was the soul of its existence, if it had a
soul; a freedom defying all the usual laws of social order--the son of
that race looked at the negro barber with something akin to awe. Here was
a man who had lived a life which was the staring antithesis of his own,
under the whip as a boy, confined to compounds; whose vision was
constricted to the limits of an estate; who was at the will of one man,
to be sold and trafficked with like a barrel of herrings, to be worked at
another's will--and at no price! This was beyond the understanding of
Jethro Fawe.
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