PART II

Affairs had gone badly in the little brick house. If, at fourteen, Saint had been a problem to his mother, he was now, at eighteen, her despair. It was not that he was unwilling to work. On the contrary, he hailed each new position that was found for him with shy eagerness. But the habit that had been given to him in school had deepened rather than dissipated when met by the harsher realities of life. The immediate and inexorable array of facts that faced him with each new vocation brought bewilderment to his untrained mind. His thoughts veered from the task of meeting and arranging them, leaped the gap between the bottom and top of the ladder, and solaced him with a fool’s paradise of pictured triumphs.

Unfortunately there were only certain occupations that a gentleman could follow in Charleston without sacrifice of family dignity, and if one were handicapped by the lack of a professional training these were reduced to a minimum. One could work in a bank, or one of the bond and real estate offices on Broad Street. One could become a cotton expert, or even a broker in the wholesale district along East Bay. Strange to say, in spite of the unholy stench and overalls, one could seek employment in the great fertilizer factories beyond the city limits. But a gentleman seeking a livelihood in the early nineteen hundreds could not engage in any branch of the retail business without imposing upon his humiliated family the burden of incessant explanation.

Through the intercession of a distant relative, an outdoor clerkship with one of the banks had been obtained for Saint. It had been a fatal beginning. He had approached it with enthusiasm, slightly blurred by his distrust of arithmetic, but genuine nevertheless. Now he could see, after the short period on the street, a high standing desk in the big banking room, then a roll-top desk in a small outer office, and finally the directors’ room with himself seated in the massive chair at the end of the table. On the first day he had stood looking down that alluring perspective until he had to be spoken to twice by the cashier before he heard. This so distressed him that he penalised himself by memorising a cotton warehouse receipt, although he could not make head or tail of the legal verbiage. His outdoor work took him to the cotton offices on the wharves, and therein lay his complete undoing, for there were the ships and the negroes waiting to betray him into long unexplained absences. At the end of the first week his banking career came to an abrupt end.

Other jobs followed: a swift disillusioning procession of them. Bewildered and baffled, the boy met them, groped among their intricate mechanisms, felt them slipping through his hands, and was powerless to retain them. Finally, on a dark winter morning, he stood before a door with a panel of ground glass, upon which was painted in large black letters, PRIVATE. The palms of his hands were wet and cold, his tongue felt like a withered pea in a dried pod, and his kneecaps were a quaking jelly. In the distance St. Michael’s chimed and struck eleven. He made a solemn vow to himself to stick it out for another quarter hour. If he did not get in then and have it over with, he could not keep his body there any longer. The last man who had hired him had smiled over his head at another occupant of the room all the time that he had talked. He had been sitting where he could not see the other man, but his back had quivered under the derisive answering smile. He prayed now that this man would be alone and that he would not ask him where he had worked before. Fertilizers! This was about the end of the procession; the last stand. He’d have to get it, and he’d have to stick it out when he had it. His thoughts touched on his mother and her hope for the success of the interview. A warm, tender wave swept upward from the pit of his stomach and broke in a blinding mist before his eyes. The big, black PRIVATE on the door swam and quivered. Panic! Suppose the door should open now! He dashed his knuckles across his eyes and gritted his teeth.

A low-pitched man’s voice had been rumbling monotonously in the room beyond the door that he was watching. Now it stopped. He heard the sound of a chair pushed over a bare floor; then the words: “That will do now. Tell the young man outside that I will see him.”

The door with its shaking letters swung inward. A woman passed him and said: “You may see Mr. Raymond now.” He set the machinery of his legs in motion, and the woman closed the door behind him.

The room was large and bare. It smelled faintly of phosphates. In its centre a heavy man sat in a swivel chair behind a flat-top desk. Behind rimless spectacles his eyes were keen and appraising.

“So you are Katherine Wentworth’s boy,” he said in a deep, hearty voice. “I am glad to know you. Knew your father too--boys together--fine, both of them. Got a lot to live up to, Son.” He shook hands cordially and waved his guest to a chair at the end of the desk where the light struck his face, and took a good look at him. What he saw was a tall, slender lad with loosely hung arms and legs and a sallow face that flinched away from his look like an open wound under a probe. He saw brown hair with a cowlick over the forehead, and slate-coloured eyes that were too conscious of their own tragic admissions to meet his glance.

Mr. Raymond busied himself deliberately with a silver cigar-cutter and a long, black cigar. He scratched a match, applied it, and blew a funnel of smoke toward the ceiling. He threw a sidelong glance at the boy. Yes, the respite had helped. They could talk now.

“Think you’d like to try the fertiliser business, eh?” There was a twinkle behind his glasses.

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t mind starting at the bottom?”

“No, indeed, sir, almost anything. That is, I don’t mind doing anything at all.”

“That’s the proper spirit!” exclaimed the big man. “Now, how’d you like to start just where I did and work up?” The deep voice filled the room with warm vibrations; they entered into the boy’s body and started something glowing there. No one had been so understanding before. He felt suddenly that he would like to show this friend what he could do. Perhaps there would be a riot at the factory, all of the other white men gone, and he there alone reasoning with the mob. Or perhaps it would be a fire. He saw himself grown suddenly to splendid stature smashing down a barrier with an axe, manning the hose. He saw the flame leap, gather headway, and roar down the great funnel of a building. Horrors! Mr. Raymond had been talking to him. The big hand slapped the table, and across Saint’s vision crashed the words: “What do you say to that?”

What had it been? Saint groped back among the spent words that had scarcely grazed his consciousness. It was no use, they were gone. His benefactor was leaning forward expectantly, waiting for an answer.

“Thank you very much, Mr. Raymond,” he said lamely, and wondered wildly what he was being grateful for.

“Good! You accept, then?”

“Yes, indeed, sir.”

“Well, we’ll start you with five dollars a week. I am going out to the mines myself to-morrow, and I’ll take you along. Be here at nine o’clock and bring your grip, so that you won’t have to come back for your clothes.”

The big man got to his feet and put his hand on the bewildered boy’s shoulder. “Started with one myself, ended up with a chain, then came on in here. So you see it can be done,” he said, smiling.

In the street Saint stopped and looked up at the window of the room he had left. “Ended up with a chain,” he muttered dubiously. “What kind of a chain, I wonder.”

* * * * *

The next morning found Saint occupying a third of a seat in a dirty little day coach, with a shabby telescope bag tucked behind his legs. The remaining two thirds was snugly filled with the substantial bulk of Mr. Raymond, bulwarked behind an outspread copy of the _News and Courier_. During the half hour of train travel the boy remained in ignorance of their destination and the nature of that chain which apparently represented the goal toward which he was to fight his way.

When they arrived at the little station the paper was folded and stuffed into the man’s overcoat pocket, and they climbed into the rear seat of a waiting buckboard. Then the employer turned his attention to the business of the moment. He had a straight man-to-man way of talking to the boy that both put him at ease and held his attention. He watched him closely but kindly, and he drove his ideas in with short, pointed sentences that ended with “_understand?_” It kept his listener’s wits on tiptoe. There were no heroic visions now. It developed that he had been engaged as storekeeper in the commissary for the negroes at one of the mining camps. There were other camps, each with its commissary in charge of a storekeeper, and over all of them there was a general manager. One of the storekeepers was destined some day to rise above the others to the managerial position and have the direction of the chain. So there it was at last! Saint experienced a feeling of relief. “In the meantime,” the genial voice informed him, “you must watch your stock, send in requisitions for supplies when they run low, and stop a nigger’s credit when it runs through his next week’s wages. Think you can manage it?”

Out of the bitter past a fear leaped upon the boy. “The money--making change--keeping accounts. Do I have to do that too, Mr. Raymond?” he faltered.

“Oh, that’s no bother. Everything’s charged, and you won’t be hurried. It don’t matter how long you keep the niggers waiting.”

The road that had approached the mines through the woods now left the trees behind and passed between abandoned fields that had been left to go to broom straw. The brisk January wind changed and veered over the warm brown expanse, roughening its surface like a squall at sea. Presently through the silence of the country there came to Saint a low insistent rumble.

Mr. Raymond pointed: “That’s the washer,” he explained, “where the rock is cleaned for shipment.”

Saint followed the pointing finger with his gaze and saw, far out over the marshes where the river drew a thin S of silver, a great building crouched at the water’s edge like an antediluvian monster that had gone down to drink.

Before them the road widened. The ancient negro who was driving drew to one side of the open space and brought his mule to a standstill.

“Well, here we are,” said Mr. Raymond.

Saint looked up and saw before him a small clapboarded building with its front gable covered by the false square that always denotes the country store. Across its front ran a low, wide piazza, and upon the piazza three curs and an old negro were dozing in the sun. Behind the little building a wide broom-straw field travelled east until it merged its gold-brown with the silver-brown of the winter marsh, carrying the vision in an uninterrupted flight on to the bright thread of the Ashley River. North, south, and west the little clearing was walled with virgin long-leaf pine. The towering trees swayed gently on their long naked trunks and stopped the shrill cry of the wind down to a grave sustained monotone. Overhead swung a vast empty sky, blue-green over the treetops and almost purple where it dipped behind the warm line of the marsh.

“All out,” commanded Mr. Raymond. “Well, how do you like it, Wentworth?”

The boy stood looking about him. His mouth had dropped a little open, giving his face an expression of vacuity, almost stupidity. In a clairvoyant flash he saw himself from outside his being; as his mother would see him, a failure facing this disgraceful surrender, conventionally respectable only because in his penny traffic with negroes he was safely out of sight, and could be spoken of vaguely as being “in phosphates,” and he pitied her terribly. He saw himself with the eyes of his employer, and he knew what he was thinking at that moment: that he’d never go any higher; that he would stay here until he rotted down into the very soil of the camp. And yet, deep within him, a frozen core was melting; warm new currents were stirring. Standing there, he almost caught the first faint answers to the passionate questions that his youth had flung against the wind. He turned to his employer and gave a strange answer for a man who presumably had his foot on the bottom round of the commercial ladder. He said: “Thank you, sir. I’ll stay. I will be happy here.”

* * * * *

On a certain frosty January night Mamba sat in her immaculate room in the servants’ quarters over the Atkinsons’ coach house and took stock of her gains and losses. With the blinds carefully drawn she had allowed herself the luxury of stepping out of character. Her teeth, to which she had never grown accustomed, and which had become symbolic of the innumerable restraints and prohibitions of her servitude, had been cast aside for the solacing stem of her clay pipe. About her the Atkinson air, no longer clean and naked, coiled and eddied intimately in a visible garment of smoke. A familiar gurgling sound rippled the hated quiet of the Atkinson premises. As she sat relaxed in a golden oak rocker with her bare feet thrust from the folds of an old wrapper straight before her upon the spotless bed spread that Mrs. Atkinson was wont to inspect at regular intervals, she gave an impression of physical well-being. But under the veiling fog of smoke her eyes had in them the look of an unsatisfied hunger.

Six years had passed since she had turned her back on the delights of a bland and care-free senility among her own kind and had bound her forces together for her final adventure with life. In the big white house on Church Street her enterprise had been crowned with unqualified success. She had to an amazing degree the racial adaptability that even age cannot stiffen into a set pattern, and in the part that she had played so long and sedulously she was now letter perfect. She was, in fact, more than that, for she lived with that complete immersion in her impersonation that made her for the time being the character itself. With the passing years the old almost unendurable longings had dimmed to a faint nostalgic yearning so far beyond attainment that it was as impersonal as the hunger of some remote acquaintance. The real pang of separation had come two years ago, when it had become necessary for her to leave her quarters with Hagar and Lissa, and live in a room over the Atkinsons’ kitchen so that she could be near the children when the master and mistress were away in the evenings. Those first days had been cruel. She had missed the strong talk of the court, the broad, frank humour, the smells, the clashing colours, the curs, goats, buzzards, and tumbling black babies. She had missed her pipe in the long summer dusks with the old men and women who were drifting happily with the days, gossiping and scolding the young negroes to their heart’s content. But later her wild longings had found a tame consolation in retrospection. Then she was able to see her compensations. She had a genuine fondness for her white children. She was proud of them. There were moments when she doubted whether she was making a lady of Gwen, but she had at least made a man of Jack, for he could outswear and outfight any boy in the neighbourhood. Yesterday she had seen him meet the neighbourhood bully in the alley beneath her back window, pound him gloriously, and scorch his retreating back with a collection of epithets that would have won the reluctant admiration of Catfish Row. Yes, in spite of Mrs. Atkinson, Jack would do. Now there were food and clothing in abundance. Every week she returned half of her wages to Mrs. Atkinson to put in the bank for her, until now she had a tidy sum awaiting the inevitable emergency. And above and beyond all other considerations, she now had her white folks to stand between Hagar and Lissa and the impersonal justice of the state should evil fortune bring them to that.

But if Mamba had moulded her life according to her plan as far as the big Church Street house was concerned, the same could not have been said of the course of events in the East Bay tenement. Hagar had been in trouble several times. There had been nothing serious; no charges that involved a stay of more than a fortnight, or perhaps a month, at a time in the county jail. But she was getting a bad name with the police.

When Mamba had told Mrs. Wentworth that her motive for seeking permanent white folks of her own was that she had a girl who was born for trouble, she had been as wise as she was prophetic. In the building with Hagar there lived a dozen women who made trouble. In the great honeycomb to the south, as many again. But they had attained the high art of complete invisibility in time of peril. Hagar, on the other hand, with her huge frame and her big wondering child’s face, stood dangerously out of the picture. Also the police knew where she could be found. Mamba had given the woman a religion in Lissa. Deep into the simple intelligence she had driven the need to care for the child, to give it a chance. A Saturday night would come when the mercurial spirits of the neighbourhood would leap beyond bounds. There was always a quantity of the peculiarly deadly corn whisky, marked with the seal of the great commonwealth of South Carolina, and known among the negroes as rotgut. Hagar would drink with the rest, and her enormous body, released from its slight control, would become one of the gesticulating, whooping dervishes in the ensuing orgy that inevitably resulted in a riot call.

In the panic the big woman could be counted upon to rush to her room to see if Lissa was safe. The police knew this. A fruitless raid was humiliating to the force. There must be something to show for it at the recorder’s court in the morning. All else failing, the officers would stand at the bottom of the steps leading to Hagar’s room and whoop for her to come out. At the sound of the summons she would become suddenly cowed. Still a bit dazed by the liquor, dumb and bewildered, she would come down the steps looking like a great child in disgrace. Then some one would go to the Atkinsons’ gate and whisper to Mamba, who would come with money and arrange with a neighbour to care for Lissa until Hagar’s return.

* * * * *

And while Mamba sat in her room on that certain January night dwelling on the past and speculating upon the hazards of the future, in a very different room six blocks away in the black belt Hagar was putting her child to bed. Lissa was a well-grown child for her six years, with a faint colour in her cheeks under the light bronze of her skin. This seemed miraculous to her dark mother, who loved to stroke it with her finger tips. She got the little figure into bed, and sat beside it, singing in her deep contralto which, with her eyes, made up the sum total of her physical heritage from Mamba. It was a week-night, and the court was quiet. Far away on the tracks of the East Shore Terminal a switch engine laboured with a heavy burden. Hagar was singing a sad little lullaby full of minors:

“Hush, li’l’ baby, don’ yuh cry, Mudder an’ fadder born tuh die.”

The soft tossing sounds beside her ceased and were followed by the rhythm of faint steady breathing. The mother tiptoed over, dimmed the kerosene lamp, picked up a large bundle of clean wash, stepped out of the room, and closed the door behind her.

Across the street and down the dim perspective of the wharf her gaze travelled and rested on a side-wheel river steamer lying at the pier head. The boat was motionless, but a steam exhaust beside the funnel wheezed and blew a film of mist between her and the frosty stars. Steam was up. An hour now and perhaps the boat would be under way. Her wash was for the fire-room crew, Sam and Abel. She had never seen the men before they had brought the clothes to her. And she did not know the boat. Perhaps it was just touching port for supplies and was going South. She did not trust the men altogether. Her eyes must be kept open; one could not tell about strange river niggers.

When she arrived at the pier head she saw that the fire-room hatch was open--just a square hole flush with the deck. She looked down and saw an iron ladder that descended into flickering orange light and sounds of low laughter. She stooped over the hatch and called:

“Yuh Sam an’ Abel. Heah Hagar wid yo’ wash.”

The laughter stopped and a lazy voice called: “All right, Sistuh, bring um down.”

Silence for a moment, then: “No, I ain’t gots de time. Come on up an’ bring yo’ two dollah.”

Sam appeared at the bottom of the ladder with his face thrown up toward her. His voice was beguiling. “Aw, come ’long down, Sistuh. Whut mek yo’ so onsociable?”

The thought came to Hagar that they might touch at the port regularly and that customers were not to be discouraged. She still felt vague misgivings, but she lowered her heavy bulk through the opening. It was so low between decks that she could not stand upright. The men, who were both shorter than she, laughed openly and good-naturedly at her. This served to allay her suspicions. She chuckled at her own expense, and her teeth sent a white flash across the darkness of her face. Seating herself on an empty box, she said: “Well, dar’s yo’ cloes.”

Abel had not moved when she entered, but continued to sit on the edge of a bunk with a guitar in his lap. He had a round face with a spurious expression of ingenuousness upon it. Now he bent over his instrument and plucked a chord.

Sam said: “Dat’s right, go on an’ play fuh de comp’ny while Ah git de money.” Then, as though on second thought, he lifted a pint flask from behind him and handed it to Hagar. “Go on, Sistuh,” he urged, “he’p yo’self.”

Abel was picking away steadily now: not a tune, but the intricate improvisation of chords so loved by the negro. The music filled the close space. Before Hagar the red fire box, cut into segments by the black grate bars, grinned like a friendly mouth, and above her the winter stars beyond the hatch showed infinitely remote and pale through the warm light of the fire room. She drew the cork from the flask, and instantly the air was pungent with the rank fumes. She tipped the bottle and took a long pull, then passed it to Abel. He drank sparingly, returned the flask to Hagar, then took up his playing again. The music beat through the woman in recurrent waves of ecstasy. One broad foot commenced to tap the floor. She lifted the flask, and it seemed as though she would never put it down. Her eyelids dropped slowly, narrowing her eyes to bright slits, then closing them. One might have thought her asleep but for the fact that she remained erect on her box and swayed slowly from the hips with the rhythm of the music.

Through the hatch fell a hail from a passing tug, and the vessel’s wash travelled landward under the waiting steamer, lifting it, thrusting it forward, allowing it to settle back, then lifting it again. Across the harmony of the guitar chords rang the bright, certain notes of a ship’s bell--seven crystal beads of sound strung with beautiful precision on a thread of music. Sam and Abel exchanged meaning glances, and Sam grimaced the words “Not yet.” Overhead a crisp, authoritative step smote the deck, then another, and rapid footsteps dwindled away forward.

Suddenly the shattering blast of a steam whistle filled the night. It stilled the guitar which dropped from Abel’s hands. It galvanised the two men into intense activity. They seized Hagar by the arms and hoisted her up until her head struck the ceiling. She opened bewildered eyes and looked blankly about her.

“Step it, Sistuh,” Sam commanded. “Dat’s de cast-off whistle.”

Hagar blinked. Where was she--what was it all about? Her fingers were asleep. They opened slowly and let an empty flask fall to the floor. Sam hustled her up the ladder that eluded her groping hands and feet. Then she was on deck with the cold night air washing over her hot body.

Her conductor gave her a final shove and she was on the wharf. Behind her a negro threw a painter from a bullard, and it fell overboard with a heavy splash. The steamer’s rail was commencing to slide past her now, close, where she could still touch it with her extended hand. Sam’s face came into her range of vision. He was leaning against the rail, and as she looked at him he threw back his head and laughed. She saw the wide mouth and white teeth. Suddenly a thought was thrown out sharp and clear from the slow moiling in her brain. They were going now. They had tricked her out of the two dollars. The money that she needed for Lissa. Red passion burst deep within her and flooded her body. Her eyes were fixed on the laughing face that was drifting away from her into the night. Across the yard of space that divided them her long arms flashed, and her hands closed on the shoulders of the man. He was wearing a tightly buttoned coat. The stuff balled up in her palms, giving her a firm grip. The face that stared into hers changed ludicrously from laughter to fright. She set her knee against a bullard, and threw her whole weight into a backward heave. The man made a frantic clutch at the rail, but the pull on his shoulders jerked his arms up, and he missed. A second later he lay sprawled upon the wharf with Hagar standing astride of him. Behind them sounded a bright jingle of engine-room bells and the noisy threshing of the paddles. The boat regarded its former fireman with a green and sardonic starboard eye, then gathered speed and was engulfed by the aqueous darkness.

Hagar never nursed a grudge. Always her anger was defensive rather than punitive. Had the man kept his head and made payment of what he owed her it is likely that she would have let the matter drop there. But fatal panic was upon him, and he was smitten with that madness which the gods lay upon those whom they are about to destroy. He scrambled to his feet and attempted to make a dash. A swift, clubbing stroke caught him between the shoulders and hurled him forward against a pile of barrels. He cannoned off at an oblique angle and again tried to bolt, but it was too late. The negro who had cast off the steamer heard the noise and came running. A single lantern hung suspended from the ceiling and only served to make the vast cavern of the shed a place of reeling shadows and elusive half lights. The wharf hand rounded a double tier of barrels and was brought up standing by what he saw.

Hagar had her man in a cul-de-sac between two rows of piled freight. She was not blaspheming like other fighting negresses, nor was she at it with teeth and nails. But there was something strangely, almost grotesquely feminine about her, for she was sobbing loudly and bitterly, and through the sound ran a monotone of two words said over and over, and the words were “two dolluh.” Her victim was attempting to speak, but she would not let him, and presently he was so beset that he gave over trying. The watcher saw him emerge from the shadows and balance before the woman. He was small, but quick and wiry. He seemed obsessed with a single idea, to pass the woman and escape into the open. Hagar stood braced across the exit like a Colossus, her arms moving in swift downward strokes from the shoulder as a labourer works with a sledge. The terrified wharf hand saw the man venture too near. A blow took him on the forehead and hurled him back into darkness. “Godamighty!” exclaimed the onlooker, and with eyes showing high lights in the faint lantern glow he turned and raced to give the alarm.

Out of the shadows emerged Sam, driven forward by a single idea--escape. And waiting for him was another fixed and unalterably opposed idea that had possessed itself of the devastating human machine that barred his way. They met, but this time the smaller figure struck, and remained impinged upon the larger one, smashing terribly up at the big sobbing face. Down they went together, striking a pile of boxes that toppled and fell with a crash.

People were coming now, the white watchman swinging his lantern, and men from the boats. They drew together in a little circle and waited.

The bundle that rolled in the shadows lay quiet for a moment, then resolved itself into two individual parts that staggered uncertainly upright. They faced each other, and their breathing sounded above the slap and suck of waves against the bulkhead. Then the man drew himself together and launched himself at the opening in a last desperate attempt. Hagar bent forward and met him with a thrust of the shoulder, her whole tremendous weight flung into the effort. Shock--recoil. The man’s body described an arc, struck the planking, and lay where it fell.

The woman’s lips moved inaudibly. She bent over the inert body, turned it over, and fumbled laboriously through its pockets. At last she found some bills, opened them, retained two, and returned the remainder with an air of detachment. Then she rose, sighed heavily, drew her arm across her face with an incredibly weary gesture, and started home.

In the tricky lantern light the men saw her coming, a gigantic figure, her massive torso bare to the waist, the great breasts of a woman, and the knotted man’s shoulders, blood on her face, and in a dark rivulet between her breasts. No one attempted to stop her. The circle opened as she approached, and with the fixed stare of a somnambulist she passed through, crossed the street, went up to her room, and closed the door behind her.

Twenty minutes later when a policeman came for her she was sitting on the edge of her bed with Lissa pressed to her breast. She was swaying back and forth crooning her lullaby:

“Hush, li’l’ baby, don’ yo’ cry, Mudder an’ fadder born tuh die.”

She raised her face and looked at the officer over the laxed form in her arms. Then she rose, placed the child on the bed, and tucked in the covers with meticulous care. Without a word she got a long coat from a hook, slipped it on, and buttoned it over her nakedness. The officer stood patiently in the doorway watching her. He had slipped his gun back into the holster. He had come for her before, and he knew the woman with whom he had to deal. There would be no trouble.

Hagar got several garments from a trunk and bundled them together. Then she returned to the bed and stood looking down at Lissa.

“Come along, Big Un,” the officer said not unkindly, “let’s get it over with. It don’t get no better from waitin’!”

His prisoner bent and pressed her wounded mouth against the smooth cheek of the child. Then she turned obediently and went to the door.

While the policeman stood waiting for her to precede him down the steps, she paused and looked back into the familiar room. It was not until then that the realisation seemed to dawn upon her that this was different from the other departures. From behind the blind veil of the future a faint prescience of some vast disaster flickered its warning. Slowly her eyes filled, and through the tears she looked upon the big, dim room with its familiar disorder, the bed, and the slim form of the child. In the half light of the lowered kerosene lamp she could see the imprint of her farewell kiss showing dark against the light tan of the cheek. She turned and felt her way down the dark stairs with the policeman clumping heavily behind her.

* * * * *

There was nothing of the chameleon about George P. Atkinson. His ten years spent in the South had not blurred his Mid-Western outline in the smallest particular. Two years in Virginia had left him guiltless of a broad A, and now he went about the Charleston streets obliviously rolling his R’s before him. He refused to attend formal functions because formality bored him. For the same reason he neither played golf nor shot. But he knew cotton-seed oil from the seed to the olive-oil label. He could tell you the Texas cotton crop for 1907, the best market for linters, the advantages of “cold pressing,” and the crude-oil market for any given day in the past half year. Every morning he would breakfast at eight o’clock, read the paper for fifteen minutes, walk briskly to his office and say in that snappy tempo with which employers launch a busy day:

“Morning, Johnson. Yesterday’s reports ready?” He would have told you that he was a specialist, and, as such, he was not to be despised even by his wife, for the net result to the family was ten thousand a year in a city where many of the socially distinguished families were existing at a shade above life’s stark necessities. He might well have been a problem to Mrs. Atkinson in her social ascension, for his ego was strongly marked and assertive, and he showed in raw contrast to the urbane, rather ceremonious, and commercially unambitious men whom he would have met in most of the Charleston drawing rooms in the early nineteen hundreds. But fortunately he asked only to be left at home when she sallied forth on her career, and refused to attend dinners except in his own home. Even on these occasions, Mrs. Atkinson decided that he might have been much worse, for while he said little, she noticed that the men gave him respectful attention when he spoke. He offered cigars and liqueurs to her guests with a natural quiet dignity, insisting on taking them from the butler, and making a little ceremony of passing them himself after they had adjourned to the drawing-room fire. He had the clean-cut “Gibson type” of figure, which was then at the height of its vogue, and he looked well leaning against the Adam mantel. It is true that at times he would break through her restraint and militantly pronounce a spade a spade. But he had mellowed in his fortieth year, and now, at forty-five, did most of his bristling with his close-cropped moustache, no longer giving her the lie when she offset one of his breaks with: “Mr. Atkinson has such a droll sense of humour.”

On a murky morning two weeks after Hagar’s arrest George P. Atkinson sat with his paper open before him. It was then in the eighth minute of the fifteen allotted to that daily rite, and he had not yet been allowed to commence. He made what he hoped was a decisive effort to dispose of the interruption.

“I can’t see it, my dear,” he told Mrs. Atkinson. “We go out and hire a woman to work for us. Very good. We pay her adequately. If she is injured in our employ we may be responsible under the Employer’s Liability Law, but, in South Carolina, I doubt even that. Not that I would not do the right thing by Mamba. She’s a good soul and, white or black, I’m fond of her. But when a disreputable creature of the slums with a police record is dragged in, claimed to be her daughter, and goes to court to take her medicine for setting upon and breaking up a law-abiding negro, I am out. Business is business. Charity is charity. Once in a thousand years justice is even justice. I would be an ass to interfere. I won’t. That’s final.”

“But, George dear, you miss the point. It won’t be going out of your way to do it. It’s the thing to do. The right sort of people here do look after their negroes. They take pride in it. Most likely you will not be the only one there. You’re as apt as not to find a Ravenal, Waring, or Pinckney doing the same thing. The other afternoon at the Saturday Club some of the ladies had the most entertaining stories of scrapes that their husbands had gotten their negroes out of.”

“Their negroes! Am I to assume that this person charged with aggravated assault and indecent exposure of the person is my negro?”

“Of course, George. Everybody knows that Mamba’s people used to belong to the Atkinsons, and now, since the South Carolina branch of the family has died out, you are in a way the head.”

The head of the Atkinson clan balled his paper up in a knot and threw it on the floor, looked his wife in the face, and said rudely: “Bah!” Then he cleared his throat, raised his voice, and deliberately repeated the offensive monosyllable.

It was the secret of Mrs. Atkinson’s success that she never lost either her temper or her head. Now, in a voice like a cold douche she said: “You can’t bah away an obligation, George, and you know it.”

Thirteen minutes of newspaper time gone. Was ever a man so put upon! He snapped: “You know as well as I do that there never was an Atkinson plantation on Cooper River. Why, I asked some of the men at the club about it the other day, and I could see that they were laughing at me.”

To many wives this would have meant utter rout, but not to this adroit campaigner. She veered suddenly and took her husband in a most vulnerable spot. “Very well, then,” she said, as though the matter were concluded, “be inhuman, and while you are enjoying your pride that justice is being done, imagine your own daughter in desperate trouble with no one to help her, and then perhaps you’ll know how poor old Mamba feels.”

“Eh, what’s that?” exclaimed Atkinson in a startled voice.

“And you don’t know the whole story, either. You just read what your hateful paper says. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Just let Mamba come in and give you her version of the tragedy; then, if you refuse to help, I’ll promise never to say another word about it.”

Atkinson emitted a short grunt that was intended to convey scepticism of his wife’s promised silence, but she seized it and interpreted it as assent. Opening the pantry door, she summoned Mamba.

The old woman entered with a promptness that suggested prearrangement, and advanced until she stood before her master, then waited with bowed head and hands that clenched each other tightly before her.

“Go ahead,” he said, “I suppose I’ll have to listen before I can get any peace.”

Mrs. Atkinson said in her crisp compulsive voice: “Now, Mamba, tell him exactly what happened.”

When Mamba finished her recital she was sobbing into her apron, and her listener was sitting forward in his chair with his moustache bristling. “So he tried to rob her, did he?” he exclaimed. “When’s the trial?”

“To-morruh mornin’, suh. Ah ain’t want foh bodder yuh ’til Ah can’t wait no longer.”

“Very well, we’ll see what can be done.”

Into his overcoat, then, and out of the door on his last word. He’d be ten minutes late at the office. Wouldn’t do. Bad example. Loose morale. Rotten position he’d be in to-morrow, too. Tacitly backing up his wife in that absurd fiction about the plantation Atkinsons. They’d have a damned good right to laugh at him at the club now. Pretending himself a Carolina aristocrat. Pretence, of all things that he hated. But that poor old nigger and her story about her girl. Well, he was in for it.

* * * * *

When Atkinson entered the courtroom on the following morning he saw Mamba waiting for him just inside the door. Then he noticed that she was accompanied by a child--a mulatto girl about six years of age. It was the old woman’s attitude toward her charge rather than the child herself that first caught his attention. The entrance was jammed with negroes who elbowed their way to the spectators’ inclosure, and a bailiff was attempting to clear the doorway. In the confusion of opposing bodies Mamba was managing to keep the space about the child free. She was silent, but stood with the slender form held before her and gazed into the faces of the milling negroes with an expression of such cold ferocity that they instinctively drew back. Then he noticed the girl. He saw a slender, delicately made body, a small sentient face, and eyes that seemed to note everything that passed before them with that precocity which is characteristic of children with negro blood.

A trial was already in progress; a jury trial at that. It would be afternoon before they could get to Hagar’s case. A whole day gone. Five perfectly good business hours. Well, he was in for it. He’d stick it out. Might pick up something that would be of use when the woman’s time came. With characteristic economy of movement, he went straight to one of the swivel chairs behind the attorneys’ table and motioned Mamba to a seat behind him. From under level brows his keen gray eyes appraised the room.

Against the rear wall of the courtroom were the two sections reserved for the public. There was a scattering of nondescripts behind the railing of the rectangle occupied by the whites. Across the aisle, the coloured space was packed to the walls. Black, brown, yellow, with intent faces and wide eyes, the crowd appeared as thought welded into a unit by its common and utter absorption. The overheated air was tinged with a faint exotic odour compounded of fertiliser dust, fish, and unwashed negro bodies inseparable from such a gathering. It offended the visitor at first, but soon he lost consciousness of it, for he followed the gaze of the crowd to the prisoner in the dock.

She was a big yahoo of a girl about sixteen years of age, very black, and with heavy negroid features. Her eyes set wide apart, and with the broad, flat nose between them, gave her an expression of bucolic calm. She was a creature for the simple rhythms of the country, and seemed out of place in the complex machinery of a city court.

Continuing his survey of the scene, Atkinson met the eyes of the prosecuting attorney, who was seated at a table directly in front of his own. He had a pleasant acquaintance with the young court official, but was unprepared for the informal and cordial reception that he received. The attorney was a man in the early thirties, blond, with that instinctive graciousness of manner toward a guest that Atkinson always admired, and secretly envied, in the men of his adopted city.

“Delighted to see you here, Mr. Atkinson,” he said, extending his hand across the table. “Just looking us over, or are you interested in one of our cases?”

Atkinson explained that he was there to do what he could for Hagar.

“Splendid!” exclaimed the young lawyer. “One can’t help liking the woman. She’s not a criminal type. Do you know whether she is represented by counsel?”

“I think not. As a matter of fact, Mr. Dawson, the woman is guilty of the charge. I understand that the man is still in the hospital, and there is no doubt as to who put him there. But there are extenuating circumstances, and I’m here to vouch for them.”

The prosecutor leaned forward and gave his instructions briefly: “You must make her plead guilty. Whatever you do, do not agree to a jury trial. We’ll talk it over with the judge when her case is called and see what can be done.”

The bailiff bawled for order in court, and the judge inquired formally if counsel for prosecution and defence were ready to proceed with their speeches in the case of the negro girl. Both men rose and bowed. The state’s attorney traversed the ten feet of the space that separated him from the jury box and faced its occupants over the low railing. Instantly the suave and urbane individual who had been talking to Atkinson vanished, and in his place stood a tense, truculent figure. Swiftly, and with a deadly precision, he counted off the salient points of the case on his fingers. The woman had stolen clothing valued at forty dollars; three competent white witnesses had nailed down the evidence; the clothing had been found in her room and identified by owner. A moment of dramatic silence ensued, then an abrupt transition. Leaving the damning facts hanging, as it were, in the air before the jurors, Dawson’s body became electric with that facile violence which characterises the successful prosecutor and can always be depended upon to galvanise his auditors into attention. For ten minutes he poured out a vitriolic arraignment against the type of petty criminal who has the audacity to engage a lawyer to come and monopolise the valuable time of the court and the services of a “highly intelligent” jury. “Taking your time, gentlemen, I submit, to wade through the sordid details of a case upon the very face of which, I again submit, she is as guilty as Judas Iscariot.” On then in the teeth of the jury itself, calling upon them to make a proper example of the case in question, that the culprit and those of her friends who were present might be impressed with the dignity and importance of the court. Turning away abruptly as from a finished task with a foregone conclusion, Dawson took his seat.

“Great Godamighty!” exclaimed a woman’s voice in the negro section, and “Silence in court,” bawled the bailiff.

Counsel for the defence got to his feet and commenced to speak. He was a big man with a heavy lethargic body and a stupid face. His lips were loose and crafty. He gave the immediate effect of one who was going through a familiar routine, saying the trite phrases with noise but without conviction. That tension which one expects to find at a criminal trial, and that Dawson had attained, was now wholly lacking, except in the tranced attention accorded by the tightly packed negro section. The jury lounged at ease in their chairs. The judge and clerk were busy with papers of other cases on the docket.

Atkinson transferred his attention to the prisoner in the dock. She was sitting forward following every gesture of the lawyer with a hypnotic gaze. One got the impression that her interest in the proceedings was impersonal, detached. She was caught by the drama of it but had not succeeded in relating the obscure process that was under way to herself. She was in the grip of forces as remote from her comprehension as are the workings of destiny. Words, words, filling the air with strange, exciting sound. Later there would come a silence, then that fate which was approaching, and was already determined, would be revealed to her. It would make her happy or sad. It would have to be accepted as had other crises in her uncertain advance through life.

The lawyer ended his speech in a burst of noise, an oratorical invocation to the blind goddess who held the scales over the portal and who dispensed justice to rich and poor alike. He turned to his seat followed by such an admiring and unself-conscious gaze from his client that for a moment Atkinson feared that she might altogether forget herself and burst into applause.

The speech over, the court became animate. The judge charged briefly for conviction. The jury marched out and returned almost immediately with the verdict of guilty. The clerk ordered the prisoner to arise and receive sentence. The judge gave her a severe lecture, and, in the midst of a dramatic pause, seven years in the state reformatory.

A composite involuntary sound that was half wail, half moan, sounded from the negro section.

“Order in court,” bawled the bailiff.

A deputy led the prisoner from the dock. She cast a final admiring glance toward her attorney. There could be no doubt about it; he had delivered a satisfactory performance.

Atkinson gasped at the severity of the sentence; then he went around and took an empty chair beside Dawson.

“Good God!” he exclaimed. “Seven years for a few dollars’ worth of second-hand clothes. It’s inhuman.”

The younger man smiled into his earnest face. “I see you haven’t got the hang of it yet,” he said, “but don’t be too scandalised at us. She is not going to do her full time. I’ll keep a note of the case, and later she’ll be let out on good behaviour. You see, there are a lot of shyster lawyers around here who take the nigger’s money in advance and promise to clear them when they know there isn’t a chance. The only way to convince the poor devils that they’re being done is to throw it into them good and deep every time a case goes to a jury. But God! They learn slowly.”

Hagar’s case was called, and Atkinson saw her enter, dwarfing the deputy who led her to the dock. This was his first glimpse of his charge, and he was at once struck by the candour of the big, childlike face, and the questioning, live-brown eyes that were so much like Mamba’s. He was anything but an imaginative man, but in that moment he had a flash of divination. He saw the court, the officers, the jurymen, as these simple souls must see them; akin to the High Gods of Greek mythology, manipulating the vast mysterious force that was the law, looming suddenly and inexorably against the gaiety of life, to smash families--even to mark for death.

Dawson was speaking to him, and he turned with a start. “You had better have a talk with your client,” he was saying. “Tell her to plead guilty when the clerk finishes reading the indictment and puts the question.”

He beckoned to Mamba, and together they stepped to the prisoner’s dock. There he commenced an involved explanation of the reasons why it would be best for her to plead guilty. Hagar did not take her eyes from his face, but he saw that her look was that of a drowning person who watches the shore rather than one of understanding. He stopped speaking. Then she said:

“What dat wo’d Ah’s tuh say?”

“Guilty,” Atkinson told her.

“Berry well, den. Yo’ nod yo’ head at de right time, an’ Ah’ll say um.”

Mamba retired to her seat, and Atkinson joined the prosecutor. The clerk rose, read the indictment, and put the question. Atkinson nodded his head, and, in her deep contralto voice, Hagar said clearly, “Guilty.”

The judge leaned over his desk and raised his eyebrows in interrogation. Dawson beckoned to Atkinson and stepped forward. “Your Honour,” he said, “I would like to present Mr. George Atkinson of the Southeastern Cotton Seed Products Corporation, one of our leading citizens, who is interested in this case.”

The judge shook hands warmly; then, leaning forward on his elbows, spoke in a leisurely conversational tone: “I am delighted to know you, sir. You are from the North, I understand.”

Atkinson had been busy with plans for his client’s defence, wondering whether he had not better bring Mamba forward and let her tell her story. The social turn taken by the court jarred him from his line of thought. He uttered a surprised affirmative to the comment. The judicial features above the desk smiled pleasantly down upon him, and the agreeable voice with its almost imperceptible drawl led the conversation among the amenities that usually preface an acquaintanceship.

Beyond the small circle of their talk the courtroom waited. Here and there a chair leg creaked or a foot shuffled. Beyond the window a huckster cried his fish in a deep baritone song. In the negroes’ section the tension drew out until it became almost tangible in the air of the room. And at the desk the three men chatted of the relative merits of the Charleston and New York climates. They might have been in a club, or at a chance meeting after business hours. Finally the judge touched on the case.

“And so you are interested in this woman, Mr. Atkinson. Very good of you to assist us, I am sure. Perhaps you will tell me what you know of the affair.”

Atkinson explained his connection with Mamba and Hagar. His interest seemed to be entirely understood by his hearers. The fact that he had espoused the woman’s cause was taken as a matter of course. As briefly as possible he told the story as he had got it from Mamba.

When he had finished the judge looked inquiringly at the prosecutor, and asked: “And what do you know about her, Mr. Dawson?”

“She’s been in the police court several times, Your Honour. Nothing serious: hot suppers, lodge meetings, and the like. There’s nothing vicious about her.”

His Honour pondered: “Still, she has a police record. That’s got to be considered. Evidently the town is no place for her. Ought to get her out of it and give her another chance.” He continued to speak, but now his glance took the other two into consultation: “A two-year suspended sentence ought to do. Give her six hours to get out of the city. Then put her on her good behaviour. If she is arrested anywhere in the county, or enters town again for any purpose whatever, the sentence will become immediately operative. Does that appeal to you as a fair adjustment, Mr. Atkinson?”

It had never occurred to that gentleman that he would be consulted in so important a matter as the actual measure of punishment, but he managed to say that he thought it not only very fair but decidedly generous.

“I am glad that you feel that way about it, sir,” His Honour replied, then shook hands over the desk, expressed pleasure in the meeting, and nodded to the clerk.

An involuntary whisper lifted and died in the negro section. The bailiff bawled for order in court. The clerk called upon Hagar to arise and receive sentence.

Slowly and lucidly the judge made his pronouncement and explained its purport. Then he ordered court adjourned for the day.

The deputy who was to take charge of Hagar until she should leave the city led her from the room, and a bewildered George Atkinson got to his feet and made for the open.

When he was on the pavement again he found that Mamba had accompanied him. She had been so quiet during the proceedings that, in his absorption, he had forgotten her, and the presence of the child which she held tightly by the hand struck him with the impact of a fresh surprise. Mamba caught his hand, shook it, tried to speak, then turned suddenly and followed Hagar. He stood looking after the strange old figure. Age with its back to the wall, fighting for something against great odds. His heart contracted with an unfamiliar spasm of pity, then expanded with a desire to protect. All feeling of boredom had passed during the trial. He had espoused a cause. For the moment he had put his best into it. Now, with the fight behind him, he could not let it go. It kept tagging along beside him, plucking at the sleeve of his mind. It made him think about something that had nothing to do with cotton seed. It started something in his brain like the slow turning up of a light. This negro business; millions and millions of them. Race problem. What to do with the whole mass. You came up to that, and it was there before you like a wall without a gate. One either stood there battering his hands to pieces on it, or he walked away and made it his business to forget. But this old woman, now, and her great ungainly daughter, and that child that they had a way of speaking about with their voices lowered; this was something different. These three were not a race problem. They were individual entities battling with destiny, needing a leg up most terribly. The weak throwing themselves on the mercy of the strong. Mamba--Hagar--the child--not negroes now: but to his mind just isolated human beings driven by some obscure urge toward a vague elusive goal, as he was--his wife--his children. Was that the feeling behind the law as he had found it in the court that morning? Was it the key to the puzzling attitude of the men he knew who could be so callous to the mass, yet who responded with exaggerated generosity to the need of a known individual?

He came to a street crossing, and his alert mind leaped to grapple with actualities, suddenly and keenly cognisant of the world about him. Over the cobbles at his feet a low cart was being dragged by an aged goat. In it sat a crippled negro. His head was bare to the sun, and his face wore the vacuous look that is common to both dreamers and fools. His hat lay upward in his lap, and there were a few pennies in it. The sight was a familiar enough one to Atkinson. He had seen the beggar every day, and yet his existence had never impinged upon his consciousness. Now he saw him differently. “God!” he thought. “What a hell of a joke for life to play on a man.” He fumbled in his pocket, drew out a dollar bill, and dropped it in the hat. The face below him became incredulous. Slow fingers picked the bill up and felt it, turning it over and over. Atkinson pulled himself together. “Can’t stand here all day looking like Santa Claus,” he told himself.

He turned on his heel and stepped briskly away, but his half-solved problem was not to be outdistanced; it was with him again, insinuating itself between his mind and the image of yesterday’s quotation board. Individuals--human beings--that’s the answer, perhaps. Can’t lift the mass. No use to try, it’s too vast. Can’t get hold of the edges of it, and if one did it would probably drop and smash things to pieces. But when you know of one who is catching hell, got to be decent, human. And leave the race problem to God and the great-grandchildren.

He was at his office now. Squaring his shoulders, he took the steps two at a time, opened the door, and exclaimed briskly, “Afternoon, Johnson. Got yesterday’s reports ready?”

* * * * *

Saint Wentworth sat in the little room behind the camp commissary, his brow furrowed with the intensity of his mental concentration. Before him, propped upon a table, was a self-instruction book of music, and his fingers were busy finding chords on the neck of a battered guitar. The open page showed diagrams of the strings with black dots where the fingers were to fall for each chord. Some of the combinations were awkward for his unaccustomed hands, but he hung doggedly to each until he could find it with his eyes lifted from the page before he passed on to the next. At first glance one would have said that his three years at the phosphate mines had changed him but little in appearance. As he sat in the half light of the little room between the fading day against the small window and the flickering illumination of the open fire, he showed the same slightly stooping shoulders, the colourless hair with its flaring cowlick, and the old lack of compression about the mouth which is to the conventional mind an infallible symbol of weakness. Only when he finally closed the book, laid the guitar aside, and, with hands jammed deep into trousers pockets, commenced to wander about the room, would one have noticed differences. Changes that became evident, not so much in the physical appearance of the man himself as in his interrelation with the room. He was one of those not uncommon people who find expression in the things with which they surround themselves; people for whom no evaluation can serve that does not take the setting into account. There were books on a shelf, plays, biography, poetry, a modern novel or two; the astonishingly varied collection that in age may mean only the dilettante, but in youth the seeker. An etching was given one of the four walls to itself: an extremely well done piece of work by a young Charleston artist--the gateway of old St. Michael’s with its wrought-iron urns and scrolls. A small but fine plaster of the Nike was given the mantel. A couch against one of the walls was covered with brown burlap, and had pillows of orange and lemon upon it. The draperies at the single window were the colour of sunlight. Now day was retreating rapidly behind the panes. The fluctuations of firelight grew more noticeable on walls and furnishings, thrusting mellow shafts under the table and into corners--possessing the room. Saturday night, and the negroes would soon be coming to do their shopping.

Wentworth cast a long look about him, sighed, and passed through the door into the commissary with its familiar odours--kerosene from the barrel in the corner, cabbages--the smells seeming stronger and more sour in the dusk. Then he caught a clean wholesome whiff from a pile of print cotton goods at his elbow. He threw some wood on the coals in the small open fireplace, lighted the lamps, and stepped through the outer door onto the little piazza. A cold red sunset burned low behind the serried pines, and over the eastern marshes the mists thickened and swirled, bringing night in from the Atlantic wrapped in their folds.

A group of negroes approached, their resonant voices preceding them. They were in high humour. To-night they could commence to buy on next week’s wages. The exhaustion of credit that invariably pinched them during the latter half of each week was now happily at an end until next Wednesday, or even Thursday if one were careful. Maum Vina, with her kind, peering eyes, and Reverend Quintus Whaley, fat and unctuous, were the first to enter. Behind them groups of twos and threes gathered before the store, climbed the steps, and entered the building. Loud chaffing and banter filled the air. Most of the women were swinging bottles by strings to be filled with kerosene for their lamps, and some brought jugs for molasses. The men were covered with dust from the mining pits. This was the hour when labour was forgotten, friends met, and gossip was exchanged. The commissary building glowed hospitably. The open fire crackled on the hearth, and several oil lamps flickered in the draught and sent ribbons of smoke up among the rafters.

Wentworth waited on Ned first because he knew that he was in trouble and ought to hurry back to Dolly. His customer was a small black negro in late middle life, with a grizzled moustache, and large teeth between which was clenched a cheroot that added a smell like burning leather to the other odours in the room. He was pondering over a selection from several bolts of black and white cambrics and cotton flannels. He smoked steadily while he held the widths of cloth against a soap box, black for the outside and white for the lining, appraising the effect with his head cocked speculatively on one side. From time to time he would look up and speak to an acquaintance. It seemed to Saint that he was deliberately protracting his errand, enjoying the importance that it gave him. And there was a smugness about him that was annoying. Saint remembered the sounds of weeping that he had heard when he had passed his cabin, and the stricken face of Dolly as she looked from the door. Now he spoke sharply, “If you’re sure the box is large enough, say what cloth you want and get through. I haven’t all night to give you.”

Ned produced a stick about eighteen inches in length and placed it in the box, where it fitted nicely. “Ain’t yo’ see, suh, dat he size? He ain’t but a six mont’ ole baby, an’ he always been puny.”

“Well, come along, then. Cambric or flannel?”

“Gib me dis”--and the man indicated the cambric--“two yahd black and two yahd white. Dat flannen cos’ too much, anyhow.” He added a package of tacks to his purchase. His gaze went longingly to a glass jar filled with large candy balls of striped red and white. “An’ put in t’ree ob dem candy ball fuh sweeten my mout’,” he concluded. He spat the cheroot loudly into the fire and put one of the candies in his cheek, where it looked like the symptom of an acute toothache. Then around the obstruction he said, “Now, suh, please gib me a cherry bounce an’ I’ll be gone,” and he started optimistically toward the keg which contained the sticky sweet drink that the negroes loved.

“No, I don’t,” said Wentworth sternly. “Get on back to Dolly. You ought to be ashamed to be hanging around the store and your woman alone with your dead baby.”

“Dolly tek on too much, Chief. Baby is plentiful. Dey comes an’ dey goes.” And with this philosophical comment he took his departure.

A young woman who was passing behind the speaker heard his remark and sucked her teeth loudly at him. “Ole rooster wid young pullet oughtn’t to crow so loud,” she flung after his retreating figure.

There was some laughter from the group at the fire, but an old woman, Maum Vina, with the bright peering eyes, spoke soberly. “Yo’ hadn’t ought to laugh at ole Ned like dat. Dat can’t do no good. What if Gilly Bluton is run after Dolly, he done de same by plenty odder gal roun’ here. When a man know dat anodder man is runnin’ after he ’oman, dat one t’ing. But when he know dat odder people know, den he goin’ fight. Yo’ mus’ want to hab killin’ in dis camp, enty?”

“Well, he ain’t gots no right to strut so,” the young woman said defiantly. “An’ Gilly ain’t no gawd. He can bleed same as any odder man. What de matter wid dese mens roun’ here, anyhow, dey ’fraid um so?” She cast a look of scorn around the circle which the men chose to ignore. But old Vina was undaunted: “Yo’ ain’t use’ to talk like dat ’bout Gilly,” she said. “Mus’ be he done quit goin’ to yo’ house now.”

Saint turned to wait on the next customer, then instinctively followed her gaze toward the door. A stranger had entered. In the small and intimate neighbourhood a new face was sure to claim attention, but this arrival was such a striking figure that her sudden appearance created a minor sensation. The noise around the fire seemed to recoil upon itself, leaving a poised question in the air. All eyes were fixed upon the open door, and the great bulk of the woman who filled it. She stood for a moment blinking in the light, then crossed with a heavy tread and faced Wentworth across the counter. In a deep, mellow voice, she said: “Is yo’ know me, Mr. Saint?”

He shook his head in mystified denial.

“Well, Ah is hear lot ’bout yo’. Ah is Mamba’ gal. Ma sen’ me down here an’ ax can yo’ fin’ me some work.”

Saint had heard about the trouble during his last week-end in the city. It had only confirmed him in an antagonism that he had always felt toward Hagar. She was a thoroughly bad lot. Mamba’s excuses for her delinquencies had never convinced him of her innocence. She would undoubtedly be a bad influence in the camp, and if he let her stay he would be answerable to the company for her behaviour. Mamba had no right to put her problem up to him in that fashion. Well, anyway, there was no work for a woman in the camp. He would only have to tell her so and send her on her way.

“That would be simple enough if you were a man,” he said. “There’s plenty of work in the pits, but we don’t use female labour. You’ll have to hunt somewhere else.”

But his visitor did not take his dismissal. Instead, she drew a step closer and looked at him incredulously out of eyes that might have been Mamba’s own. “Ma didn’t tell me no other place to go,” she explained. “All she say was for me to come to yo’ an’ tell yo’ she done sen’ me.”

Saint thought: “Confound the old woman. Is there no limit to her audacity?” He met the singularly bright gaze that was bent upon him. In some uncanny way it seemed to evoke Mamba herself. It gave him the same melting twist in the pit of his stomach that he had felt when she had cozened those spurious letters of recommendation out of him three years before. “But I tell you we only employ men,” he repeated in a voice that was weakly argumentative.

She unbuttoned her sleeve and jerked it back to the shoulder, then held out her arm, turning it slowly. Under the dark skin the muscle of the forearm rippled. She bent the arm upward at the elbow, and the biceps bunched. She gave a low, confident laugh. “Ain’t dat all right?” she asked.

The negroes began to laugh and whisper. A woman in the pits--who ever heard of such a thing!

Saint regarded the demonstration of muscle and laughed. “It certainly is,” he answered her. Then, quite to his own surprise he found himself adding: “If you want to try it, I don’t see why you shouldn’t.” He took down an account book. “And while you’re here you might as well give me your name.”

The woman hesitated, biting her full lower lip with strong white teeth. Finally she asked: “Ain’t yo’ gots one in dere dat Ah can use?”

Saint wondered if she hadn’t one of her own.

“Ah did hab one what Ma gib me, but it’s done wore out.”

He spun the pages of his book and stopped at one that showed an open account. There had been the usual purchases--rice, grits, molasses, candy, cheroots, amounting to perhaps a dollar, pleading mutely from the page for settlement. He read the name at the top of the sheet--“Baxter--how’ll that do?” he inquired.

The woman repeated the word slowly as though to accustom her tongue to its use.

The negroes were regarding the performance with undisguised interest. Now Maum Vina spoke impulsively: “Do, Mr. Saint, don’t gib she dat bad-luck name. Don’t yo’ ’member Baxter done got drownded loadin’ a schooner?”

There was a moment of superstitious silence, while the negroes’ eyes seemed to grow as they watched her, placing an absurd importance on the simple matter. The woman’s voice broke the silence: “Ah guess Ah’ll take it, anyhow. It gots a good sound to it, an’, aftuh all, Ah ain’t so lucky mahse’f.” Then she seemed arrested by the drama of her predecessor. She reached across the counter and dropped a long index finger on the writing.

“When he buy dat bittle he been well an’ hongry, an’ he nebber lib long ’nough to pay for um. Ain’t dat so?”

Saint nodded assent.

“Po’ Baxter,” she apostrophised. “Yo’ ain’t mean to cheat nobody. If Ah lib long ’nough Ah’s goin’ settle dat bill fuh yo’.”

Saint had to leave her then to serve his customers. It was an interminable business--two cents’ worth of grits, three cents for molasses, a penny invested in a herring, salt pork, kerosene--and so it went with each shopper. When he had time to notice Baxter again she had joined the group in the doorway and seemed already to have made her place among them.

Near closing time Gilly Bluton came in. They heard his buggy drive up and stop outside. Then he entered, elbowing his way through the crowd around the door, with a young woman clinging to his arm. “What make yo’ don’t stand back an’ gib de lady room!” he demanded irritably.

They crowded back then, not breaking up and scattering, but opening for him in two closely standing divisions. There was a hostile significance in the way they massed, leaving the man and his partner more room than they needed, as though their touch were evil. But Bluton chose to ignore them and swaggered over to the show case where luxuries were exhibited. The man was a mulatto with negro predominating, but among the negroes of the camp, most of whom retained the sooty blackness indicative of undiluted Gullah blood, he seemed of a different race. The contrast was accentuated by the fact that he could read and write, and figure with great rapidity. Talents which, applied with energy and cunning and without conscience, resulted in his acquisition of most of the wages of the labourers that were not previously retained by the commissary or appropriated by the magistrate. He always wore store clothes of extreme cut, and never spent money unless he had an audience. The woman who accompanied him was not a resident of the camp, but lived at Red Top, a neighbouring hamlet. She glared her defiance and flaunted her triumph before the local belles.

With white people Bluton had an ingratiatingly confidential manner, and he now made the purchase of a highly coloured box of candy for the young woman appear as an especially intimate transaction between Saint and himself. Not that he presumed an equality, he was much too astute for that. But he always managed to give an impression to watching negroes that his basis of contact with the whites differed from theirs. Finally he purchased a real cigar from the solitary box which was housed under the cash till, lighted it, and turned leisurely to survey the group at the door.

Saint despised the man, and the necessity of serving him was the one real humiliation of his humble vocation. But Bluton was a person of importance and the one negro who had it in his power seriously to inconvenience the company if he were given a grievance. This had been intimated to Saint when he came to work at the mines. It had been pointed out that the negro’s position as the confidential employé of Proc Baggart, the magistrate, would enable him so to demoralise the labour that the operation of the camp would be thrown decidedly out of gear. They would like to have sent him packing, but he was too deeply entrenched, and he knew it, and the power that it gave him.

He stood for a moment lolling against the counter and looking disinterestedly at the group around the door that was now breaking up into pairs and individuals and straggling away toward the cabins. The older ones left in silence. The younger women and men told Bluton good-night, some boldly calling him Gilly, and the timid ones Mr. Bluton. Some regarded him with fawning wonder in their stupid eyes. The man nodded absently in response, then he shot after them: “What’s the use yo’ boys sayin’ good-night? I ’spec’ I’ll be seein’ yo’ all at de game ’bout nine o’clock. Dis Saturday night, ain’t it?”

Baxter had been sitting on a box beside Maum Vina, who had promised to put her up for the night. Now she and the old woman rose and called a good-night to Wentworth.

Bluton turned slowly and met her gaze. Without shifting his eyes he removed the cigar from his mouth and crossed slowly until he stood before her; then he looked her up and down.

“Whar did yo’ come from, Big Gal?” he asked at length, his large, facile mouth mocking her with its smile.

The woman was standing in the doorway, with the night behind her, and the flickering lamps pointing up high lights in her boldly modelled face, bringing out glints of dark amber in her wide eyes. As the man approached, her body tensed defensively, and lifted itself to its full height. There was nothing humorous about the wrapped wool of her head--the shabby clothes. She was invested in a sudden natural dignity.

“Ah come from Sabannah,” she told him. “Ah come ’cause Ah wants to. An’ my name ain’t Big Gal. It’s Baxter.” Her gaze never wavered, the glints of amber giving it a strange lucence as it held Bluton’s eyes. For a moment they stood without movement. A sense of impending drama drew wire-tight through the room--twanged the nerves of susceptible onlookers.

Maum Vina’s cackle, timid but urgent, jangled across it. “Come on, daughter. Time to go home,” she said gently. She took Baxter’s hand and drew it toward the door.

Bluton laughed shortly, uncomfortably, lowered his eyes, and folded his loose lips tightly over the cigar. The girl by the show case, who had been standing with a chocolate in her fingers, ran over and caught her man by the arm, glaring defiance at Baxter. The big woman regarded her with a look of supreme contempt, then turned without a word and went with Maum Vina. Behind her the tense atmosphere went suddenly slack.

Bluton collected his faculties and, stressing each word exaggeratedly, called after the disappearing figure: “All right, Sistuh, jus’ as _you_ say, ob course.”

* * * * *

Saint experienced some difficulty in getting Baxter on the pay roll. No one could look at her and doubt her ability to perform even that gruelling labour. But this was the fatal objection: there was no precedent for it. Women worked in the fields, the home, bore children. But the mines were for the men. Then, too, the mining was done by gangs composed of two negroes each, and no man was willing to risk the ridicule of having a female partner. The prospect was becoming dark indeed when Saint discovered that an aged negro called Drayton was going to be laid off because he was becoming feeble and none of the younger negroes would take him on as pit partner. He arranged that Baxter should have a try-out with the old man. The woman had no idea what the work would be like, but she had superlative confidence in her muscle. And, too, the open country, the sense of space, and the cool yielding sand beneath her feet gave her a sense of harmony with her surroundings.

At the field’s edge on that first morning she was joined by Drayton, a grizzled little man with a wisp of a moustache and old, stubborn eyes. There was a story that when he was in his prime and a schooner was being loaded with rock against time, he had wheeled and dumped five hundred barrow loads of four hundred pounds each without pausing even for food and had earned the record wage of seven dollars in a single day by his feat. Ever since this achievement he had strutted like a little cockerel, and the story was always on his lips. He would say to the big lazy bucks: “How much barrow can yo’ load in a day?” When he got the answer he would always cluck his tongue in scorn and tell of his own record. He knew well that they would be glad to turn upon him when his hand grew feeble and his ultimate hour of humiliation arrived. But his worst fear had never conjured up the idea of having to work with a woman. To-day the sweet winter air was as wormwood on his tongue.

They stood in the open looking each other up and down, these strangely mated partners. Then, in a deep, bullying voice that no one had ever heard him use before, the old labourer took the offensive. “Spec’ me tuh make mine han’ out ob yo’, enty! Well, Ah ain’t gots no time fuh foolin’. Ah spec’ yo’ done heah ’bout dat time Ah done roll fibe hundred barrow in a day, enty? Well, dat de kin’ ob a man yo’ gots fuh partner. Ef yo’ can’t keep up wid me, Ah goin’ quit, yo’ onnerstan’!”

Baxter looked at the agitated little figure and saw the surrender masquerading behind bluster and noise, and her heart went out to him, but before she could reply the other negroes caught sight of them, and whoops of derision rent the air.

“Do look, Daddy Drayton gots he nurse wid um.” “Whar dem fibe hundred barrows now, Daddy?” Hats were hurled into the air, and bodies bent double in spasms of laughter.

Baxter had been missing Lissa terribly, and now a flood of maternal yearning rose and overwhelmed her. She saw the old man turn on his tormentors and grimace fiercely at them, like an old and toothless dog who must seem so much fiercer than a young one because he is so uncertain of himself. She was full of tenderness for him. She would have debased herself if she could have propped up his toppling dignity thereby. She was sorry that her huge body made him seem all the smaller by comparison. She wished that she could shield him, help him over his bitter hour.

“Ah t’ank yo’ fuh take me on,” she said humbly. “Ah heah how yo’ is de bes’ man on de field. Ah ain’t nuttin’ but a ’oman, but Ah is goin’ do de bes’ Ah can.” And so they turned their backs on the jeering crowd, and entered upon their strange partnership.

The field to be mined was a large one. The axe men had gone before them and cleared it of forest, and it waited, clean and bare, for the diggers. Presently the foreman came around and assigned a “task” to each pair of workers, or, if they were industrious, two together, while he was about it. A “task” was a rectangle four by six feet in size. The labour consisted in digging one’s way slowly downward, throwing out the earth, which was called the overburden, and uncovering, at a depth of about six feet, the layer of phosphate rock deposit. Then the real labour commenced, for the rock, which lay in a stratum of about a foot in thickness, had to be broken into small pieces with a pick and thrown up out of the pit with a shovel by hand. This work was usually done by one of the partners, while the other had the far easier task of wheeling the rock in a barrow to the little railroad and dumping it in a pile for the cars.

Baxter spat upon her hands and closed them about the pick handle. The first stroke drove the implement into the soil up to the handle socket. Drayton’s eyes widened, and he could not restrain a grunt of admiration. The woman dug most of the day, and when they got to the rock, she elected to pick it out while he rolled it to the cars, telling him that she wanted to keep away from the men who were gathered at the tracks.

Once the foreman came up and looked into the pit. He was a gentleman, and his people had for generations been used to appraising negro labour. The hole had reached its depth of six feet, and the woman was standing on the bare floor of rock into which she was driving her pick. She paused and looked up. The pit had been full of sun all day, and the work terribly heavy. Baxter had thrown off her outer waist, and through her undershirt the man could see the swell of powerful shoulder and back muscles, the high lift of her chest as it rose and fell on long, unhurried breaths. He turned to Drayton with a wink. “You’re not such a damned bad picker, after all,” he observed.

The old man smiled; then, in the new, deep voice of authority, he ripped out some unnecessary instructions to the woman. She answered submissively: “Yas, suh. T’ank yo’, suh.” And he wheeled his barrow off toward the tracks.

She glanced up out of the pit full into the amused eyes of the white man, and a look of absolute comprehension passed between them. “You know men, Baxter, you’ll do,” he said with a grin as he turned away.

By the time that Saturday night came the jibes at Drayton’s expense had ceased and he was the secret envy of most of the lazy young pit men in the field.

Baxter for her part had earned eight dollars for the week’s labour. She had settled in old Maum Vina’s cabin, and she owed half of her income to the commissary for supplies which she had contributed to their living. That first Saturday night she turned her back on the allurement of gossip and laughter at the store, took her four dollars, tied it up in a corner of her handkerchief, dropped it in her bosom, and went home to bed. There would be a long journey to-morrow, and she must be up and on her way in the early morning.

* * * * *

The next morning Baxter found that Maum Vina was going to spend the day at Red Top, and, as their way would be the same for several miles, they started off together. The day was flawless, and the early sun sent its level radiance over the broad marshes, flooding the barren winter wastes with gold until they looked like fields of ripened grain. Down the tunnelled road under the live oaks the light shot, edging the stalactites of Spanish moss with filaments of fire. A red bird fell like a live coal out of the sky into a roadside casena bush and whistled three confident notes up into the face of the new day. The air had a tang to it and lifted the travellers into a good stride. As Baxter strode along life throbbed upward through the soles of her Sunday shoes and filled her with a sense of well-being. This was reinforced when she lifted her hand to her breast, where she could feel her four big silver dollars tied in the corner of her bandana.

As the pair stepped briskly along Baxter stole a sidelong glance at her companion, studying her in this first moment of leisure that they had enjoyed together. The old woman had a strange habit. In the house she was just like every one else, but as soon as they were out upon the open road she walked with bent head. Her large clay pipe clenched between her jaws wreathed her face in rank tobacco smoke, and through it her eyes could be seen, bright and eager, sliding from side to side of the road, missing no crevice or rut in their scrutiny. Presently she referred to this unusual behaviour, and told her companion the cause.

Twenty years before, when her old man had died and left her penniless, a conjure woman had told her not to worry, that she would find money in the road before she was too old to look after herself, and that she would die in affluence. Since then the years had been cruel. She had seen her two children go into the little graveyard with the father. Age had stripped her down to that last pitiful hope. But there was not a shadow of a doubt in her mind that some day she would find her fortune lying at her foot. But already her sight was failing a little, the keen eyes missing things that they would have seen easily enough even a year ago. So she must hurry and cover many miles of road while she could, and she must be careful, too. Who knew but what the money would be there in the road right around the next corner? Once, in the excitement of the recital, she raised her eyes while she talked to Baxter, then, in a panic, she made her wait for her while she trotted back and returned, searching the ground.

The younger woman was impressed. “Ah wish tuh Gawd Ah had somet’ing like dat tuh look forward tuh,” she said enviously. “Ah ain’t gots nuttin’ but bad luck gib tuh me when Ah talks tuh one ob dem cunjers.”

Presently they approached a bend in the road and heard the rattle of a rapidly driven vehicle. Then a light buggy swung the curve into full view and raced toward them behind the finest span of trotters that Baxter had ever seen. Before her the fore legs flashed up and down with the precision of pistons, and she got a fleeting impression of broad muscular chests under glistening chestnut coats, eyes showing glints of white, and mouths quivering open to the relentless pull on the bits. The driver was pushing them hard, using the whip against tight lines, and they were upon the two pedestrians in a flash. As Maum Vina snatched Baxter’s big, slow-moving body to the side of the road, the woman looked up in sudden anger at the man. Not personal resentment so much as a militant pity for the horses which were being so hardly used. The appraising of strangers was not a calculated business with her. She had always had instinctive first impressions, and experience had taught her that they were far more accurate than subsequent pondered judgments. Now, for the first time in her life, she was actually frightened at what she saw in a human face. The head was held straight on the rather spare shoulders, and a broad-brimmed felt hat shaded a long face that was shaped like a coffin--broadest at the high cheek bones, and tapering only slightly to an extravagantly long, square chin. The eyes were narrowed against the wind, and a broad, thin gash of a mouth was drawn in a tight, fixed smile. Under the shading hat brim the skin showed with a fungous-like pallor, most unusual in a country where the white men were used to working out under a subtropical summer sun. A shower of sand from the spurning hoofs stung the women’s faces. They stood watching the vehicle diminish down the perspective of the avenue, take a far curve, disappear.

“Sweet Jedus!” ejaculated Baxter in a hushed voice. “Who dat rattlesnake, Mauma?”

Then, while they pursued their way, the old negress told her about Proc Baggart and the part that he played in the lives of the negroes of his section. She was an amazingly astute old creature. In the moments when her eyes were not employed upon their eternal quest they had looked into people’s souls and minds and told her what they saw there. She knew much more about the operation of Baggart’s magisterial office than a negro was supposed to know. She also knew enough to feign ignorance, which for one of her race is the ultimate in human wisdom. Baggart was the law for the mining district. First as constable, then as magistrate, he had killed six negroes. The last killing had been rather spectacular and had served well to put the fear of God into the onlookers. The victim had been drinking, and instead of scurrying to the roadside at the approach of the buggy had remained in the middle of the road. He shouted something unintelligible at the magistrate, who replied by shooting him dead from the buggy seat with a shotgun; then, with a Saturday night gang of fifty negroes about him, driving the vehicle over the body and proceeding deliberately upon his way to give himself up and go through the form of a trial.

The magistrate, it seemed, made more money than any man in the county. There were things called taxes that the negroes were supposed to pay, but they were afraid to go to the house in town to find out about them, because it looked like a jail. So the magistrate waited awhile until the taxes got penalties--a process which to Maum Vina’s mind was similar to that by which an evil she-dog will eventually come home with a litter of still more evil puppies--then he sent for the negroes to come and pay him what he claimed. Sometimes he would send official-looking little blue papers by the constable. At other times he would just send word that such a negro was wanted. Once a new negro in the camp had asked for a receipt for his tax money, but after that he was hounded so that he had to go away. Then there were the dogs. That was where Gilly made most of his money, it was said. He would come slipping around when no one was looking, and if he saw a dog in a yard he’d report it to the magistrate. If the negro didn’t have a license, and of course no one ever did, he’d have to raise ten dollars for Baggart, or sometimes twenty, if he wasn’t civil. Gilly would get half of that as informer. That gave him mighty keen eyes. And Gilly also ran the big crap game just outside of the Company’s land. Everybody knew that the building belonged to Baggart and that he must be in on the game, because it was never raided. They all knew that the dice were crooked, but it was the only safe place to play. An independent game out in the bushes always managed to leak out, and the offenders were given stiff fines or jail sentences. When the old woman finished her recital she was at her turn-off, and without lifting her glance from the white sand of the road she said good-bye and left Baxter to her meditations.

For the greater part of an hour the big woman’s road led between woods, and she strode along with bowed head. Her thoughts were now upon her errand, and her darkly brooding expression gave place to a smile of happy anticipation. Abruptly the road left the woods, and her glance leaped free over the broad marshes and the silver ribbon of the Ashley to the city lying low along the horizon with the glamour of the morning sunlight upon it. Up the river, faint but very clear, came the familiar music of St. Michael’s bells calling the white folks to service. An exquisite pang of nostalgia twisted the listener’s heart. Now, in the crowded court on East Bay, in the long Sunday leisure, she would have been combing Lissa’s hair out for her, trying to straighten it so that she could be in the new style and not have to wear it wrapped like the older negroes. And while she worked she would have been listening to the talk, and sharing the laughter. Then to-night there would have been church, and singing with her friends.

She came in sight of the bridge--a taut thread of white stretched between the city and her destination at the end of the road. Fear assailed her. Perhaps she was late. She quickened her pace to a lumbering trot.

When she reached the bridge two figures were waiting: Mamba in her Sunday black, and Lissa in a new cloth coat, a recent gift of her grandmother, and of which not even one of the Battery white folks need have felt ashamed.

Baxter panted up, huge, hot, and dusty. She greeted Mamba hastily, “Hello, Ma! How yo’ been?” then fell on her knees in the dirt of the road and strained the child to her breast, drawing her finger tips along the soft cheek with her characteristic gesture. As always she was awed by the miracle that this fragile thing could be the fruit of her great crude body. After a moment, with gentle pushing movements, the child released herself from the enfolding arms and stood looking at her mother. Then, with the frank callousness of youth, she sidled over and leaned against Mamba’s clean, stiff Sunday black. A little dashed in spirit, Baxter got to her feet and fumbled in her bosom for her handkerchief. Then she untied the knot, biting it free with her strong white teeth, and handed Mamba four silver dollars.

“If Ah is careful, Ma,” she said, “Ah can count on dat each week, an’ when Ah git hardened some more, maybe Ah can do better.”

The old woman took the money and put it in a handbag that she carried. She was preoccupied with her calculations for the child, half forgetting the mother, who stood there waiting for a word of approval. But after a moment Mamba smiled her new smile, grim and rather terrifying with its big masculine teeth, and admitted: “Dat ain’t so bad.”

She stood pondering a moment longer, her lips moving silently to some thought, then she went on more brightly: “Now, if yo’ can keep dat up steady, we can start dem music lessons for Lissa. Ah got her in the infant choir las’ Sunday ebenin’, an’ de leader say she gots de bes’ voice in de Sunday school. She say dat fuh three dolluh a week she can tek she right on up so she can earn a libbin’ singin’ out ob books an’ teachin’.”

They stayed for a while longer, sitting beside the road and saying the inconsequential things that always crowd up in the moments before a parting, while the real words that should be carried away to be remembered afterward elude the mind. For Baxter the glory had somehow gone out of the sunlight. The sight of Lissa leaning against her grandmother filled her with a new sort of loneliness that hurt her more than the past days of separation. Finally she rose to go. This time she did not take the child in her arms and kiss her, but patted the little head gently with her big hand. “Well, so long,” she said, and turned abruptly away.

* * * * *

The winter passed slowly for Baxter that first year at the mines, for it was not merely a succession of days and weeks, but one of those periods in a human life when a new agony yields slowly to custom, and custom becomes a commonplace with which one can go on living without flinching.

Every Sunday brought Mamba to the bridge head, but Lissa was in the regular Sunday school now and did not want to miss the singing and companionship of the other children. So she came only occasionally to see her mother. When she did she was strange and diffident, preferring to sit by Mamba on the roadside embankment as they talked. The child’s music teacher had got her into the Sunday school of the stylish mulatto church which was attended by only the most prosperous of the coloured citizens. Rumour in the negro quarter had it that there was a door at the entrance of the church painted tan and that, when an applicant for a pew passed through it, his complexion was observed by the vestry. If it showed darker than the door there were no pews for rent. Whether or not this was malicious humour on the part of the full-blooded negroes, there is no way of knowing, but the fact remained that, while they might scoff, it could not be denied that membership in the Reformed Church meant entrée to the coloured _haut société_. And so Mamba had gladly let Lissa go with her friend while she continued to attend her humble place of worship near the old East Bay tenement.

No better method could possibly have been devised in the old city, where the caste system among negroes went to exaggerated extremes, of making a colour snob of Lissa. The mother felt this instinctively, but her first definite impulse to try to prevent it was immediately suppressed by Mamba’s inflexible determination to give the girl her chance to the new negro life that she felt to be so full of possibilities.

“Yo’ an’ me, Hagar--what de hell is we?--Nuttin’! But Ah ain’t no fool at schemin’, an’ yo’ gots de strength. Look like we ought fuh gib dat gal a chance ’tween us.”

And so the spring wore away. The green and brown of the winter woods gave place to the spilled gold of jessamine, and the wood lilies marched in white battalions through the swamp proclaiming the Easter season. In the open, deciduous trees hung like puffs of yellow smoke against soft horizons, and in the swamps pollen spread a glaze coloured like verdigris over the pools.

Then came the hot days, with the sunlight trembling in waves over the denuded mining fields, and impounding its heat in the pits where Baxter laboured with her great body for her child and learned to spend her thwarted maternity on Maum Vina and old Drayton, who had to be humoured like a child while he was kept happy by her apparent submission to his authority. But the physical labours, at any rate, had not been without compensation. Her muscles were like iron and were no longer a vast half-directed force but a perfectly disciplined machine.

* * * * *

July came, and in its second week a spell of record-breaking heat. Baxter’s pit was out in the centre of the field and would get no shade all day. Wednesday--and to-night there would be a church service, and after that a “love feast” under the auspices of the lodge. All over the fields the men were taking it at half speed. As they were paid by the output they were not pushed by the foremen, and when they carried a barrow to the cars they would sprawl for a few moments in the strip of shade. But Baxter could not afford to lag. The sun had come up in a smother of red haze; later it had climbed above it, but the moisture had flowed sluggishly along the earth and settled in the pits. Out of an intolerable grey-blue dome the sun struck directly down into the humid excavations, making of each a veritable Turkish bath. Baxter had stripped to the limit that her self-respect would allow and swung along steadily, lifting ten pounds of rock with every hoist of the shovel and hurling it out for old Drayton to barrow to the cars.

When knocking-off time came she was conscious of physical exhaustion for the first time since she had got her muscles hardened to the work.

Church night, lodge meeting, and “love feast” all rolled into one! What a night it was going to be! Everywhere the negroes were beginning to show excitement, cutting pigeon wings and shuffling. Mouth organs were coming from pockets and overwhelming the evening birds in the casenas and scrub oaks.

For two months the white men who worked at the plant had been spending the nights on the high sandy ridge three miles away where there was no fever in hot weather. They would scurry off at sundown as though the devil were after them, and would not dare to return until after sunup. But the negroes were immune to malaria. They could stay. Unnumbered generations behind them along the swarming Congo--in the swamps of Angola--had tolerated the breed to the poison, had given them this heritage of safety and these months of freedom from the surveillance of the white man. What a God-given dispensation of nature! From moonrise until to-morrow’s sun--a negro country. Even Proc Baggart, who feared neither god nor devil, wouldn’t dare to prowl in the malarial lowlands. When the white men were there no liquor was sold on the mining company’s property, and there was comparatively little drinking among the negroes. But now! Negro country! Who cared for rules with no one to enforce them!

Bluton appeared with a buggy load of half-pint dispensary flasks which he had brought from town and which he resold at double price, until every cent left of last week’s wages in the camp went into his pockets. The negroes hated to patronise him--the yellow hound, the rattlesnake! Why hadn’t one of them thought of going for it?--but they never did--and Bluton always remembered and had the jump on them every time. Now he got in his empty buggy and drove off with the money, telling them frankly that, if he came back later, he wasn’t going to risk a pocketful of change in that gang.

In the air of celebration, with the spirits of every one about her vaulting, Baxter felt by contrast tired and depressed. She dawdled over to Bluton’s rig. What a scramble there was for the flasks! She hadn’t touched a drop since she came to the camp. Perhaps just a half pint might pick her up. She pulled the bandana out of her bosom and handed the mulatto fifty cents. The hot liquor was strong in her throat. It did not take long to saturate the system, like beer or wine. There was a great scramble for the last few bottles. Suddenly, as though animated by some overpowering force outside of herself, Baxter brushed the squabbling men aside, seized the last flask, and, flinging her bandana out, emptied it on the floor of the vehicle. Then everybody laughed as she shied the first flask, now empty, at a distant yellow pine. Near by half a dozen young bucks were skylarking, tussling with each other. A splendidly proportioned young black threw a larger one for a solid fall and turned to the onlookers with a shout of boastful laughter. Baxter sauntered amiably toward him, took him by the collar, snatched him suddenly across her knee and administered a resounding spank where his pants were stretched the tightest. She probably owed her easy success in some degree to the surprise of her attack, but it delighted the onlookers, who held their sides for laughter.

She felt her spirits soar. Life was glowing and singing for her again. What use were the lonesome blues, anyhow!

Time for meeting. The lodge members all wore their regalia--broad, flat blue sashes edged with silver fringe, crossing their breasts from shoulder to hip. The keeper of the great key arrived and elbowed her way through the crowd to the door of the building that served as both church and lodge room. Suspended about her neck on a silken rope was a silver key a foot in length. It was tremendously impressive. She fumbled beneath it in her bosom and finally brought out a small, rusty key with a dirty red string tied through its ring. Then with this she opened the ten-cent padlock that held the two panels of the sagging portal together. Ready hands opened the doors wide and placed props against them, and the crowd surged into the steaming room and seated themselves noisily on the unstable backless benches to await the coming of the preacher.

* * * * *

The Reverend Quintus Whaley let his large and cherished body through the door of his well-kept cabin and turned his steps toward the church. He had a broad sensual mouth and a pair of small cunning eyes that gleamed avidly under heavy eyelids. As he walked ponderously through the twilight the alternate advance of right and left thighs kept his pendulous belly swinging, not without a certain massive dignity, from side to side. He wore a new black tail-coat, a recent gift from the mining company, and the watch, which he presently hauled from a pocket in his alpaca vest, had come as a Christmas reminder of the fact that the white folks not only gave him his bread but buttered it as well. Astute as he was, he little realised the fact that, for the investment that he represented, he was the most valuable, though unproclaimed retainer of the corporation. The allowance at the commissary for supplies, the best cabin in the village--these were good, but the coat and watch that invested him with all the dignity of a city preacher--well, they made it very easy for him to see the hand of God behind all of the labour policies of the Company. He smiled now to himself as he remembered the threatened exodus of labour during the past autumn. One of the more intelligent and daring men had gone North to work and had sent home such good reports that much unrest resulted. A land with big wages--and no Proc Baggart. Then, fortunately for the Company, the man had died of pneumonia. Acting upon a brilliant inspiration, they had telegraphed instructions to have the body cremated before shipping. But it was the Reverend Quintus whose magnificent rolling rhythms had pointed to the hand of God in the fate that had befallen their brother. And it was he who had exhibited to the awed negroes the ashes that alone remained of the daring adventurer.

He entered the church, smiling and bowing from right to left. The sisters greeted him effusively, craning forward to warm themselves in the light of his smiles. But the men sat unmoved and, for the most part, silent. The reading desk was quite high, reaching to the preacher’s shoulders, and there was a shelf beneath the open Bible to which the Reverend, with remarkable dexterity for so heavy a man, now transferred a pint flask from beneath his coat.

A shrill leading soprano flung the first clear notes of a spiritual into the close silence. A tenor rang in and chimed with it from the last bench, then the full chorus lifted and beat against the thin clapboarded walls in recurrent waves of melancholy beauty.

The Reverend Quintus dropped to his knees behind the high reading desk and, safe from view, drew the cork from his bottle and took a long preliminary pull. He was not always so lucky. To-night he would speak with the tongue, not of men, but of angels.

* * * * *

Baxter had not entered the building with the crowd. Her high spirits had not endured, and now she wanted to be alone. Maum Vina had lingered, watching her a little anxiously, but she sent the old woman in and promised to follow soon. The cool of evening was creeping up out of the swamp, sending low, flat layers of mist over the parched and tortured mining fields, banking up in the avenues under the live oaks, swimming out over the marsh to blur the horizon. As night grew heavy in the East, a gleam like phosphorus under dark water commenced to fringe the skyline, and the watcher knew that the lights were going on in the city. Mamba would be putting Lissa to bed.

Of late the pain of missing had become almost more than the mother could bear. She almost never saw the girl now. Mamba could only leave the Atkinsons on Sunday morning while the children were at Sunday school and church; and that was Lissa’s opportunity to sing in the choir and meet the well-to-do members of her race. Mamba had pointed this out, and it had been accepted with that blind obedience that made Baxter still seem so much of a child. But the mother’s spirit was the prisoner of a past from which it would not free itself because the present offered it no harbourage. And she could no longer visualise Lissa clearly--the child of even a few months ago was becoming confused with an imagined portrait of the young girl into which she was growing.

She dashed a hand across her eyes; she looked at the moisture streaked along the dark skin that she was holding before her face in the gloom. She forced a laugh, short and bitter, there by herself in the night. Deliberately she lifted her second flask, half emptied it, then set it mechanically beside her. Now the bitterness and the pain were ebbing. She let her memory go back into the old days, and, instead of the ache of longing, she experienced a warm sense of immediacy--an illusion of reality so intense that she almost felt the touch of soft skin against her hands. The image was quite clear now--no longer confused with physical change--the child that had been hers was hers to keep now, always, like this, near her.

She was happy now with her head bowed upon her lifted knees. Over the eastern marshes the moon pushed its flattened disk of copper, pulled free of the horizon, rounded out to a perfect sphere and brightened to polished brass. Then it sailed confidently up toward the zenith.

Maum Vina left the church building and came to hunt for Baxter. She was relieved to see her sitting so still. Touching her on the shoulder, she dispelled the reverie. There was a new peace in the big face with its features of a child that Baxter raised. The moon was well up now, pouring its light down on the cabins and church, arranging the little settlement rigidly in a cubist pattern of sharp blacks and whites, planes and angles. The church windows were three yellow slabs on a black rectangle. Baxter sighed heavily and got to her feet. Then she remembered the flask, picked it up with an odd detachment of manner, drained it, and threw it in a clump of bushes.

Maum Vina led her by the hand toward the church, and she went submissively, moving hugely behind the wiry little figure.

* * * * *

They entered the building at a dramatic moment. The Reverend Quintus was sending his mellifluous syllables against the walls in a call for confession and repentance, when a violent and misdirected gesture dislodged his nearly emptied flask from its snug retreat and sent it clattering, naked and blatant, down on the floor beneath fifty pairs of astonished eyes.

There was a moment of silence; then a crashing roar of laughter from the congregation. That was dangerous. The cloth could endure anything but ridicule. He leaned forward over the desk, and his tremendous voice rose over the babblement among the benches. In his extremity he relapsed into the thick Gullah dialect that he seldom employed in the pulpit.

“Onnah heah me condemn de hypocrite--enty? Onnah heah me say confess--enty? If onnah confess and repent when onnah ain’t gots no sin, den onnah is hypocrite. An’ God despise hypocrite worse dan rattlesnake. So now, in de presence ob dis congregation, I done t’row my licker down an’ confess my sin. An’ I calls on ebery nigger in deese walls fuh t’row he licker down! Yeah, verily, if dere be one among yo’ what is widout de sin ob hypocracy, let him be de fus’ to cas’ he licker down!”

He paused for breath, and there was an uneasy fidgeting on the benches. He was quick to follow up his advantage.

“Remembuh what de hymn say: ‘Hypocrite, hypocrite, God despise. He tongue so nimble an’ he will tell lies.’”

He was glaring down at them now, and there was none to meet the condemnation in his eyes. He allowed the silence to grow for a full minute, then snapped the tension with a thundering blow on the desk and, without preface, flung his great, resonant voice into the opening line of a spiritual. Old tactics! But they could always be counted on in an emergency. Sitting protectively over their own flasks, his brethren were well content to let bygones be bygones and to hurry the present into the past with song.

* * * * *

It was time for the love feast. The committee had the refreshments ready--gaudy little factory-made cakes from the commissary, cherry bounce, thinned economically with lemonade. But the spirit of song had seized the bodies of the congregation, and the gross appetites of the stomach were forgotten. They passed the plates to a few, but the singers would have none of them. Benches were being thrown back and the floor cleared for a shout. Already splay feet were slapping the loose boards of the floor. The spiritual rang out:

“Oh, mornin’ star is in de West-- Honour de Lamb, honour de Lamb! An’ I wish dat star was in my breast. Honour de Lamb, honour de Lamb....”

Now the shouters were in full swing, bodies that could give themselves utterly to a rhythm swayed and bent; here two facing each other, the rest forgotten; there several together with a more concerted interplay. But always the feet hit the same time, swaying and rattling the whole building.

“Oh, way down yonder in de Harbes’ Fiel’-- Honour de Lamb, honour de Lamb! Angel workin’ on de cha’iot wheel. Honour de Lamb, honour de Lamb!”

One of the larger groups started to circle, and a ring shout was under way. The refreshment committee knew that this could last until morning. They put their plates aside to be eaten by those who would drop out later from exhaustion.

Shrill and piercing above the more measured rhythm of the spiritual, with its worship of the new Christ, cut the voice of a soprano in the Gullah shouting rhythm:

“Simmi yubba leaba, simmi uyh, Ronda bohda simmi yuh....”

Only the two lines, but repeated interminably in a heavily syncopated measure, with the concerted stamping of the feet crashing through it like the thunder of a tribal tom-tom.

Some of the older people began to drop out and reach gratefully for the cooling drink. But, with the younger, the excitement mounted. Women screamed. Men emptied their flasks openly, their feet holding the rhythm the while.

Ned was there. He had tried to persuade Dolly to come, but she never went out with him now, and had said she was ill and would go to bed. They had a sort of understanding now. He did not ask much of her--except not to go around openly with Bluton. She was not to shame him before everybody. Now he looked up from his shouting and saw them in the door. Dolly was good-looking, the best-looking woman in the room. Her full figure was pressed close to the man to whose arm she clung. Gilly had been drinking, and the beast that he was looked unguarded out from his face. The cunning, bestiality, hypocrisy--there they were. His eyes were fixed on Ned, gloating with insolent amusement. The man and woman left the doorway and sauntered into the room. Then, with the rhythm of the shouters, who were so rapt that they were dazed, rushing it up to a swift dramatic climax, tragedy was upon them.

Ned had his razor out, holding it as the old razor fighters used to, the handle clenched lightly in his hand, and the blade with back resting against the closed fingers of his fist. Held so, it could not close on its owner and could be hurled downward with the full weight of the fist behind it. Some one snatched up one lamp and hurled it from a window, but one remained hanging from a beam and could not be reached. There was a rush for doors and windows. When the crowd gained the open and looked back, it was over. Ned had vanished as if by magic. Dolly was gone. Of the three principals in the drama Bluton alone remained. He lay under the lamp that was swinging slightly, casting his shadow eerily from side to side, creating a terrifying illusion of movement. He was not alone. Baxter loomed above him. She stood as though hypnotised, looking down at the dark venous blood that flowed out of the slashed clothing and sent the arc of its sinister circle rapidly toward her. Now it was under one of her great bare feet. She moved. A foot slid sickeningly and waked her suddenly from her trance.

“Sweet Jedus!” she ejaculated and dropped to her knees.

Knife wounds were nothing new to her. She opened a slashed sleeve and examined the cut. It was as clean and incisive as surgery--but, God! she didn’t know a man had so much blood to spill. She hoisted her skirt, snatched off her petticoat and tore it into strips. She saw the windows and doors, then, filled with wide eyes and sullen faces.

“Gimme a han’, somebody,” she called. “Can’t be yo’ goin’ stan’ dere an’ let a man dead!”

No one moved. Their hatred of Bluton seemed to make the air dark and thick about the kneeling woman. Ned had done it for them. They had only to go away and leave him. But no one could muster the courage to call her off. They could only watch and see which way the dice would fall--“Good Luck Gilly”--or the rest of them. He lay with his face toward her. There was a slash across the forehead close to the hair and, below it, the yellow skin had gone a ghastly grey. Alone--he was worse off than she, for all his money and his dubious good luck. His hand lay flung open beside her. It was long-fingered, sensual, soft, with that beauty of modelling so often found in the hand of a negro. The palm was scarcely lighter than the outer skin. She took it in both of hers, his plight forgotten for the moment. Her brain had been cloudy with liquor, but the excitement had charged across it like an electric storm and left it clear and ringing, but it was a thing separate from herself, working irresistibly from premises of its own choosing. The slender hand lying between her strong, dark ones held her fascinated gaze. It dissociated itself from the personality of Bluton. The touch of it made her flinch, but she could not release it. Then she knew why: it was an enlarged replica of Lissa’s, shaped and coloured the same. A warm smothering sensation took her suddenly, making her senses lurch and waver. Then her starved maternity took Bluton in. It was instinctive but it was utter. For that night, while he lay alone and near to death, she gave him all that she could have given to her own flesh and blood.

She worked with frantic haste. A band tied above a wound and drawn tight with her bare hands was as effectual as a tourniquet. He was deeply slashed in both arms as he had shielded his face with them, and there was that gash across the forehead. After the uproar in the room its poisoned atmosphere now hung in a dead and ominous quiet. The silent watchers at the window waited, their eyes following Baxter’s every movement. No arteries had been cut, but the veins had poured out the man’s life until he was in desperate straits. The ghastly visage thrown up toward the light showed that something must be done immediately. Baxter bound the wounds, staunching the bleeding. Then she stood up and met the eyes that were fixed on her.

“We gots to get um to town quick,” she said. “If we can get um in de hospital, maybe dey can pull um t’rough.”

Not a body moved. They kept on standing there staring at her inimically. She faced them desperately. Oh, if she only had Mamba now! Mamba who always made plans, pushed things through. She turned back on her own resources, and a plan began to form. She met old Drayton’s eyes peering in a window, and in a second she had him by the arm.

“Listen!” she shot into his face. “Yo’ go an’ break in de commissary stable an’ get de wagon here soon as yo’ can. Ah’ll fix it wid Mr. Saint.” The old man hesitated. “If dat wagon ain’t here in fibe minute I ain’t nebber goin’ dig anoder pit wid yo’. Onnerstan’!”

She loosed him and he started for the stable at an unsteady run.

A voice that was unable to conceal its satisfaction called out, “Dat ain’t no use. Dey ain’t le’s nuthin’ but city niggers free to de hospital. Country nigger gots to pay in exvance.”

“Dat all right,” Baxter answered. “Gilly always gots money.”

She dropped on her knees and went through Bluton’s pockets. Not a penny. Then they all remembered at once. The man had stripped the settlement of every cent on the whisky sale and had carried the money away to hide. The irony of the situation struck the negro humour and they began to laugh.

“Sarve um right,” some one called. “Can’t trus’ we--now he can dead. Ain’t nuttin’ but a low white-folks nigger nohow.”

The big woman glared at them.

“He ain’t goin’ dead. Yo’ hear dat, yo’ dirty passel ob yellow-liver nigger?--He ain’t goin’ dead. ’Cause Ah’s goin’ see um t’rough.”

The wagon rattled up. Baxter heard it, stooped, lifted her charge in her arms, and, taking him from the building, lay him on the floor of the vehicle. There was an old tarpaulin on the seat. She spread it carefully over him and climbed in. Then she looked down at the sullen crowd about the wagon and lashed them with her parting words.

“Yo’ gawd-damned low-livered niggers. Yo’ fair mak’ me ’shamed tuh be black.”

No one answered, and the vehicle started off under the live oaks with the horse moving soundlessly between the deep sandy ruts and the passenger lying, awful in his immobility, under the tarpaulin.

* * * * *

Baxter brought all of her faculties to bear on the problem of getting him into the hospital. If she could only have Mamba here now--she would know what to do. Then, slowly, under the urge of necessity, her brain began to evolve a scheme. What if he were found near the hospital--lying unconscious in the street--who would know that he was not a town nigger? She had had friends who had been found so by the police and carried to the hospital, where they were cared for. She knew the city well. The police were few in the quiet part of the town. Perhaps she could slip through the darkened streets and leave Bluton on one of the beats.

They had covered several miles before she finally decided to risk the plan. She had been so intent upon it that no other consideration had entered her mind. Now she was aware of a menacing shadow--a prescience that all was not right. Then it came down upon her like a physical blow--what if she were caught? Two years in jail. Immediately the horror elaborated itself in her quickened imagination. What would Mamba say? Lissa!--All the young girl’s toney friends--her music--and her ma in the jail! They would throw Lissa out--she knew it. Instantly it loomed insurmountable before her. But here was Bluton--she could not let him die now. Sweat burst out on her face, cold and clammy in the night air.

With the odd instinct of dumb animals, the horse had sensed her hesitation and stopped in the middle of the road. She mopped her streaming face. Then, with a decisive gesture, she slapped the animal’s back with the slack lines. She’d have to gamble on her luck. Maybe it had changed. Anyway, she’d have to see it through.

She was on the main road now, and the going was good. In the distance she could see the taut thread of the bridge, white under the moonlight, and the red light at the draw glowing like a single ruby at its centre. Then came a short drive over the flats, with the marsh talking to her in its soft plopping monosyllables.

On the planking now, the loose timbers making a thunder of sound in her apprehensive ears as the shod hoofs fell rhythmically against them. The draw was closed. That made it final. She must go ahead now. Had it been left open to-night, as was sometimes done, fate would have turned her back. A high tide ran under the bridge, sweeping the moon’s silver under it in a shining flood. Overhead the luminous disk--no longer brass, but a cold platinum--was so brilliant that its light had drowned out all of the lesser stars. The vehicle, with its silent passenger and the great hunched figure of its driver, moved toward the dark clustered buildings of the city as though it advanced beneath a vast flood light upon a gargantuan stage.

The toll office was closed for the night, but Baxter’s approach had been heralded by the noise of the vehicle, and as she left the bridge she saw the night watchman waiting. He was a very old, bent man, and he stood swinging his stick and peering up in surprise.

“Where you goin’ this hour of the night?” he called querulously, with the pettishness of one who has just been awakened. Then Baxter remembered that she had no money to pay toll.

“Jus’ takin’ some truck to town,” she said lamely. “I’ll pay comin’ back when de office open.”

But the persistent old creature would not let it go at that. She had stopped the wagon, and he now came up and peered over the side. He was standing there, undecided what to do. Baxter’s mind was in panic. Should she risk bolting for it with the old horse and heavy wagon? They were both silent, trying to make up their minds. Bluton became the deciding factor. There was movement beneath the canvas and a low, agonized groan. With an instinctive reflex action, Baxter’s foot shot out and caught the horse full on the rump. An astonished spring jerked the vehicle clear of the watchman. Then the animal gathered himself together and set off with the vehicle clattering and jouncing over the cobbles. The din would bring the whole town down about her ears if it continued, and so, as soon as the driver collected her wits, she threw her weight on the right line with the result that they were plunged into the immediate peace of an unpaved side street. She pulled the animal down to a walk and listened with her heart thumping heavily in her throat. There was no sound of pursuit. Evidently the watchman had gone back to his nap and the policeman had been at the remote end of his beat.

She waited a moment under a shade tree to quiet the trembling animal and to gather courage for the plunge from the pool of shadow into the relentless moonlight. Confidence that her luck had changed began to come. She had won the first break. The horse was quiet now. She must get on with it.

She moved out of the shadow, driving slowly and soundlessly in the soft deeply rutted earth. Now her whole being seemed concentrated in her sense of hearing. In the remote residential section through which she was passing the stillness was so absolute that she even heard faint snoring in one of the houses. Then, with a sudden intrusion of humour into tragedy, came a fretful female voice waking the offender and telling him to lie on his side. Then came footsteps on the pavement of a side street, indolent, heavy, maddening in their deliberation. Baxter pulled the wagon under the wide-flung branches of a tree and waited. Around the corner a half block away came a policeman. He was swinging his club by its thong, and his head was thrown back while he gazed up into the wonder of the night. Without looking down, he pursued his leisurely way down the street past where Baxter was waiting.

She saw his broad back receding ahead of her and knew that for the second time luck had been with her. Now she had only to wait until he was out of earshot, then follow, discharge her passenger near the hospital, and the officer would find him on his next round. Presently she was under way again and covered the three blocks to her destination without adventure.

She pulled the wagon into the shadow of a palmetto. A faint air was talking to the tree, and it was answering in its harsh gutturals, so different from the voices of other trees. The sound frightened Baxter, but she conquered her qualms. She climbed down and removed the canvas from Bluton’s form. Then she saw that his eyes were open and fixed upon her.

“Oh, dat yo’, Baxter?” he said in a weak voice. “What de hell is all dis about, anyhow?” Then he moved, became aware of his wounds, and groaned loudly.

“Shut yo’ damn’ mout’,” she answered fiercely; then gathered him up, carried him into the light, and placed him on the pavement. Bending down, she spoke almost savagely into his face.

“Yo’ want fuh dead?”

“Fuh Gawd’s sake, no! You wouldn’t----”

She cut him off. “Berry well, den. Listen! Keep yo’ eye an’ yo’ mout’ shet. Don’t tell nobody who yo’ is or whar yo’ come from. Got dat straight?”

He nodded. Then she saw that the exertion had caused him to faint again.

She drove the rig down a side street, tied the horse beneath a tree, and crept back to watch. She had not long to wait. The deliberate steps were coming back. She saw the figure now, a black, solid bulk in the white light.

Now he was fairly on the supine form of Bluton. Had he gone blind? Then, “Well, I’ll be god damned!”

He stooped, made a swift examination, then rose quickly, trotted to a box on the corner, and put in a call. Scarcely had he got back to the inert form before the wagon came. Two alert figures sprang out and lifted the wounded man in. Then, with a single clang of the bell, the vehicle lunged away toward the hospital.

* * * * *

Baxter slipped back around the corner of the fence that had been shielding her and returned to the wagon. There, suddenly, in her moment of triumph, she knew that she had lost. The bridge was the only way back, and the irate watchman would be waiting for her there. There would be no disguising her great body that always got her into trouble. She was caught in a trap. The realisation came with a numbing shock and paralysed her initiative. Mamba! She must get to her and ask her what to do. The recklessness generated by the whisky had gone from her blood; the maternal impulse that had driven her blindly into her danger was passing. She was suddenly terribly afraid; a little whimpering sound escaped her.

Then she heard a human voice, casually conversational, expressing amused surprise. “Well, if here ain’t the big un back in town!”

She looked down and knew the man instantly. He had called for her more than once in the room on East Bay, and he had been the officer who had carried her off that last fateful night.

She was speechless, sitting massively above him, sobbing freely now into the crook of her arm. Down on the pavement the Celtic intuition in the big square body was beginning to put two and two together.

“So, it’s you that just dumped the high yaller on Calhoun Street? Well, I got to hand it to you; you ain’t fergot how to take ’em to pieces! Reckon you better drive back there to the box while I call a special to take you in.”

“I swear to Gawd, chief, I ain’t cut dat nigger up. Listen ’fore yo’ call, fuh Gawd’ sake! an’ lemme tell yo’ how ’tis!”

He led the horse out into the light where he could see the woman plainly and told her to go ahead. When she had finished her story he stood silent a moment. Then he said, “You know, Big Un, it’s funny, but I don’t believe you’re lying. I think you’re just about that damned a fool.” Then he asked, “This the first time you been in town?”

“Yes, Boss. I swear tuh Gawd.”

He fairly snapped his answer at her: “Well, git out o’ it damn quick! An’ I ain’t seen no woman nor wagon since suppertime, I don’t care what the hell anybody says.”

He turned and walked briskly away. In a moment he had rounded the nearest corner, and his footfalls were fading into silence.

Hagar must get to Mamba now. That was the only thing to do. Her own mind had stopped working. She had to cross the city in a diagonal direction, and it was more instinct than conscious judgment that selected the deserted byways and alleys for her passage. But luck was with her--luck and a sharp retrenchment in the police department with a resultant cut in personnel--and she traversed the distance without being again in jeopardy. Finally, just before day, she drove the wagon into the court in East Bay Street.

She routed out a startled friend and sent her to wake and fetch Mamba; then sat waiting like a child who knows that she has done wrong and will be punished.

An hour after the old woman came cursing into the court arrangements were complete. The wagon had been washed down until it was scarcely recognisable as the mud-covered country vehicle; a half-grown boy had been engaged at an honorarium of two dollars to drive it over and deliver it to the commissary, and a fisherman had contracted, for the sum of three dollars, to row Baxter around the city and across the river where she would be within safe walking distance of the mines.

Mamba peered from the gateway and scanned the street. It was absolutely empty, its air astir with that indefinable thrill of expectancy which is the precursor of dawn. There was silence save for the far panting of a freight engine. Growling bitterly over the injustice of a fate that had imposed such a daughter upon her, the old woman conducted the culprit across the street and to the pier head. At the foot of a ladder a boat could be discerned, its rower waiting with oars ready.

Silently Baxter descended and took her seat. In the moment of departure, the old face, hanging above her against the thinning night, softened, and the deep-timbred voice said gently, “Good-bye, Daughter. Fuh Gawd’ sake take care ob yo’self an’ keep out ob trouble.”

The oars dipped, and Baxter was once again out of the city. Behind her the night seemed to cower suddenly down into the narrow streets and beneath the dock. Far out beyond Fort Sumter a new day lifted, washed and shining, from the Atlantic. The oarsman pulled steadily ahead. Above the crouching woman, and looming fabulously into the morning skies, hung the great Battery mansions, their high-flung columns and façades showing rose and saffron in the young day. To her left the “mosquito fleet” was putting to sea for its day at the fishing banks, sailing straight into the eye of the rising sun, and, under Baxter’s dazzled gaze, seeming to founder and vanish eastward in a flood of intolerable glory. Close by her now, where she could touch them with her hand, small, plangent waves sprang up and caught the light. She looked for a long moment, lifted out of herself by the splendour; then her large bullet head fell forward on her crossed arms.

“Sweet Jedus,” she muttered, “in a worl’ like dis, why Yo’ gots to make me such a damn’ fool!”

The oarsman pulled doggedly ahead toward the distant line of trees.