Stories by American Authors, Volume 9

The narrator rides along a windswept ridge in the Virginia countryside of 1872, where the landscape is dotted with once‑grand plantations now faded into silence. Autumn colors cloak the oak and hickory groves, and the crumbling mansions stand as solemn witnesses to a bygone era. The road itself feels like a thin thread connecting the present to a history that lingers in the fields and abandoned out‑buildings. As the horse slows, the quiet is broken by a lone figure emerging from the overgrown path.

The figure is a black laborer, his hands busy with a hoe and a watering‑pot, and at his side a weary old setter that seems to belong to someone long gone. Their conversation reveals the name Marse Chan, a former master who vanished after the war, and hints at the tangled legacy of the plantation and its surrounding lands. Curiosity draws the narrator deeper into the story, promising a glimpse into the lives left behind and the lingering echoes of a Southern past.