Of course, there were exceptions, and it was into the hands of the greatest of all, and one of the most remarkable men who ever carried a rifle or spurred a horse that I was to fall. I marked him the instant that I came on the outskirts of the group. He was a tall fellow with blond hair worn very long and a fine blue eye, the handsomest man I have ever seen in all my travels. He looked twenty - as a matter of fact, he was just eighteen - but he had his full height even then, which was two or three inches over six feet. He had filled out not to the great bulk that was eventually his, but to some hundred and ninety pounds of leathery muscle and iron bone. Indeed, he was fit company rather for the men than the boys, and it was only by accident that I found him among the younger crew on this occasion. He was one of those men of whom I have spoken before, who are naturally strong and who know their strength. He had a bold, high carriage of the head, the very look of a hero, a throat like a brown pillar, and a breast arched with muscle - and with pride.
I studied him with delight and terror commingled. It was a time before I paid any attention to what he was saying, for he was delivering his opinion on a subject that for years had been the most important question in the country and that was eventually to bring on the saddest and the bitterest war that was ever fought. But after a moment I began to follow the thread of his talk.
“Suppose I had a black skin,” he said. “Would that make me any different? I aim to say that I’d be just the same underneath. I’d need the same sort of eating and the same sort of sleeping. The same sort of things would make me happy, and the same sort of things would make me sad. But suppose you come along and you say… `Look here, Chuck Morris, your dad was mine and belonged to me, and therefore I own you.’ Suppose that you was to say that, how would I feel and what would I do? I’d bust loose, that’s all. I tell you gentlemen, we must abolish slavery.”
There was a little muttering of assent, but I began to sit up stiff and straight. I had heard of abolitionists in my life, of course, because like every boy south of the Mason-Dixon line I knew that everyone north of that line was a designing scoundrel. But for some reason I felt that in going into mis for land of the West I would be where politics did not exist, and where all men were noble and free of thought. It sickened me to find myself in such a crew, and I decided on the spot that, if the others were of the same temper, I had rather die than go on with them.
The young orator was continuing. He was growing so excited that he stood up to his full height, a very splendid young god with a golden head and flashing eyes, with his big, supple body clothed in tightly-fitted deerskin all aflash with colored beads.
“It ain’t a right thing, of course,” he said, “but what’re we gonna do about it? They got those men with the black skins, and they call them slaves. I say those black men are just as good as the white ones. I say again, slavery is wrong!”
This I could stand no longer. This was open heresy of the most damnable stamp, and I lifted my head and said: “That’s not so!”
There was a dead silence. I saw Chuck Morris start and glare swiftly around the circle as though he were trying to pick out the voice that had challenged him, but, since he couldn’t seem to find the man, he said: “Who said that?”
I didn’t answer. I was plainly too frightened to speak, for I felt that, if I did, my head would be in the lion’s mouth. He went on again, talking very slowly, his glance fixed vaguely in my direction, while he said: “Down yonder they tie a man up to a post …a man like you or me, except that his skin is black… and they whip him and his blood runs down, and I tell you folks that treat other folks like that are worse than devils! They’re cowards, and one man that never owned slaves could lick any two mat do own slaves.”
I wanted, with all my might, to let all of these challenges slip away unnoticed. I knew that there was a great deal too much danger for me if I dared to speak out what I thought, and yet to save my soul I could not keep my rage from rushing up into words. They came tumbling out of my lips before I could check them. I found myself jumping to my feet and standing up in clear view of them all.
“That’s a lie!” I shouted at him. “And an abolitionist like you isn’t fit to sit with a gentleman.”
A BATTLE OF FISTS
Looking back now through what I know of Chuck Morris, I can understand why the other boys in that circle were too appalled and too astonished so much as to turn their heads toward me. But most of my courage returned the moment I leaped up, and most of my old self-confidence. I had seen how big and how lion-like this fellow was, but all my life I had been fighting - fighting with my hands, and, though I had often come against youngsters almost half as big as I was, I usually found that the bigger they were, the softer they were. Indeed, with one exception, I have never seen a man over six feet in height who was really built in good proportion, well knit, well balanced. That great exception was Chuck Morris, not as he was when I first saw him, but as he afterward developed into a glorious Hercules.
At that time I had fought so many times - so many times I had beaten two and even three boys at once by the ferocity and the weight of my attack - that I looked upon the handsome blond giant as just one victim more. The bigger he was, the more satisfaction I would take in leveling him with the grass. He walked across the little circle with his hands clenched into fists, but, when he stood close and I saw how he towered a head above me, he smiled a little and stepped back.
“If you was a mite bigger and a mite older,” he said, “I’d teach you how to talk to your betters. Are you a slave-keeper, maybe?”
He had spurred a willing horse with those insults. I could not speak for a moment, so great was my passion. Then I said: “Chuck Morris, lemme tell you why it’s right for a Virginia gentleman to keep slaves while it isn’t right for a damned Yankee. In Virginia a man with black skin knows his place when he’s around a white gentleman. But when that black man goes North, he feels like bossing around the bad blood he finds there.”
Chuck Morris lifted his hand, but he controlled himself, though he ground his teeth. “Boy,” he said, “send your pa around to me, and I’ll teach him to learn you better manners.”
“Why,” I said, picking my words one by one and rejoicing when I saw the sting of them madden him, “you Yankees never would have been free if it hadn’t been for a general from Virginia who came up and fought your battles for you. That was General Washington. And he owned slaves, Chuck Morns.
“You lie,” he said, and then, seeing that this point would not bear debating, he struck me across the mouth.
That open hand was as heavy a clenched fist wielded by any boyish arms that I had ever encountered. It gave me the first taste of what was coming, but I was not a whit dismayed. With all the skill which a thousand free fights had given me in the science of hitting, with all the power which ten years of moiling and toiling had given to my young back and shoulders, I flung my fist into his face and landed it squarely on the point of the chin where the long leverage of the jaw bone throws the shock against the base of the brain. Chuck Morris dropped upon his face.