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Mam’ Lyddy’s Recognition
by
“Go way f’om heah, boy, you can’t carry me.”
“Yes, I can, Mam’ Lyddy. You don’t know how strong I am.” He squared himself for the feat.
She laughed at him, and with a flash in his gray eyes he suddenly grabbed her.
“I ‘ll show you.”
There was quite a scuffle. She was too heavy for him, but he won her friendship then and there, and as he grew up straight and sturdy, the friendship ripened. That he teased her and laughed at her did not in the least offend her. No one else could have taken such a liberty with her, but Cabell’s references to old Caesar’s declining health, and his innuendoes whenever she was “fixed up” that she was “looking around” in advance only amused her. It made no difference to her that he was poor, while several others of Betty’s beaux were rich. He was “a gent’man,” and she was an aristocrat.
At times they had pitched battles, but each knew that the other was an ally.
Cabell won his final victory by an audacity which few would have dared venture on. Among his rivals was one Mr. Hereford, whom he particularly disliked, partly because he frequently “outsat” him, and partly because he thought Miss Betty favored his attentions too much, and whom Mammy Lyddy detested because he always ignored her. Cabell charged her with deserting his cause and going over to the side of Mr. Hereford, and threatened to carry off the prize in spite of her and her ally.
“You cyant cyah off nothin’,” she said with a sniff of mock disdain. His eyes snapped. Without a word he seized her, and notwithstanding her resistance he lifted her, and flinging her over his shoulder, as if she had been a sack of corn, stalked up the steps and into the house, where he set her down abashed and vanquished before her astonished young mistress. The old woman pretended to be furious, but that day Cabell Graeme carried off more than Mam’ Lyddy.
When Cabel and pretty Betty were married, Mam’ Lyddy threw in her lot with “her lamb.”
Through all the evil days of carpet-bag rule, no white, not even Cabell Graeme himself, who was a leader of the young men, had looked with more burning contempt on the new-comers, or shown a sterner front to the miscreants who despoiled the country. And when Negro rule was at its worst, Mam’ Lyddy was its most bitter reviler. Cabell Graeme was a captain among the young men who finally put down the evil element that had been running its riotous course. And during the fierce fight that was waged, he was much away from home; but he knew that in Mam’ Lyddy he had left as redoubtable a guardian of his wife and babies as ever kept watch on a picket line.
Among the most obnoxious of the colored leaders was one Amos Brown, a young negro with some education, who to the gift of fluency added enough shrewdness to become a leader. He was while in power one of the most dangerous men in the State, and so long as he had backing enough, he staggered at nothing to keep the negroes stirred up. One of his schemes was to get money from the negroes with which to pay, as he claimed, ten per cent, for the best plantations in the State, after which, according to his account, the Government was to give them the places. This scheme worked well enough till the day of reckoning came, but happily it came. Among those who were duped was old Caesar, who, unknown to Mam’ Lyddy, invested all his little savings in Amos Brown’s homestead-plan and was robbed. Partly in terror of Mam’ Lyddy and partly in hopes of saving his money, the old man made a full disclosure of the scheme, and with the proof he furnished, Cabell Graeme and others succeeded in sending the statesman to the penitentiary.