"It's a damned outrage!"
My curiosity got the better of me--I coughed.
The paper dropped instantly.
"My dear sir," he said, bending forward courteously and laying his hand
on my wrist, "I owe you an apology. I had no idea anyone was
opposite me."
If I was a surprise to him, he was doubly so to me.
My picture had vanished.
He was sixty-five, if a day; gray, with bushy eyebrows, piercing brown
eyes, heavy, well-trimmed mustache, strong chin and nose, with fine
determined lines about the mouth. A man in perfect health, his full
throat browned with many weathers showing above a low collar caught
together by a loose black cravat--a handsome, rather dashing sort of a
man for one so old.
"I say it is a shame, sir," he continued, "the way they are lynching the
negroes around here. Have you read the Extra?" passing it over to
me--"Another this morning at Cramptown. It's an infernal outrage, sir!"
I had read the "Extra," with all its sickening details, and so handed it
back to him.
"I quite agree with you," I said; "but this man was a brute."
"No doubt of it, sir. We've got brutal negroes among us, just as we've
got brutal white men. But that's no reason why we should hang them
without a trial; we still owe them that justice. When we dealt fairly
with them there was never any such trouble. There were hundreds of
plantations in the South during the war where the only men left were
negroes. We trusted our wives and children to them; and yet such
outrages as these were unheard of and absolutely impossible. I don't
expect you to agree with me, of course; but I tell you, sir, the
greatest injustice the North over did the slave was in robbing him of
his home. I am going to have a smoke before going to bed. Won't you
join me?"
Acquaintances are quickly made and as quickly ended in a Pullman. Men's
ways lie in such diverse directions, and the hours of contact are often
so short, that no one can afford to be either ungracious or exclusive.
The "buttoned-up" misses the best part of travelling. He is like a
camera with the cap on--he never gets a new impression. The man with the
shutters of his ears thrown wide and the lids of his eyes tied back gets
a new one every hour.
If, in addition to this, he wears the lens of his heart upon his sleeve,
and will adjust it so as to focus the groups around him--it may be a
pair of lovers, or some tired mother, or happy child, or lonely
wayfarer, or a waif--he will often get a picture of joy, or sorrow, or
hope--life dramas all--which will not only enrich the dull hours of
travel, but will leave imprints on the mind which can be developed later
into the richest and tenderest memories of his life.
I have a way of arranging my own sensitized plates, and I get a certain
amount of entertainment out of the process, and now and then a Rembrandt
effect whose lights and darks often thrill me for days.
So when this unknown man, with his young legs and his old face, asked
me, on one minute's acquaintance, to smoke, I accepted at once.
"I am right about it, my dear sir," he continued, biting off the end of
a cigar and sharing with me the lighted match. "The negro is infinitely
worse off than in the slave days. We never had to hang any one of them
then to make the others behave themselves."
"How do you account for it?" I asked, settling myself in my chair. (We
were alone in the smoking compartment.)
"Account for what?"
"The change that has come over the South--to the negro," I answered.
"The negro has become a competitor, sir. The interests of the black man
and the white man now lie apart. Once the white man was his friend; now
he is his rival."
His eyes were boring into mine; his teeth set tight.
The doctrine was new to me, but I did not interrupt him.
"It wasn't so in the old days. We shared what we had with them.
One-third of the cabins of the South were filled with the old and
helpless. Now these unfortunates are out in the cold; their own people
can't help them, and the white man won't."
"Were you a slave-owner?" I asked, not wishing to dispute the point.
"No, sir; but my father was. He had fifty of them on our plantation. He
never whipped one of them, and he wouldn't let anybody else strike them,
either. There wasn't one of them that wouldn't have come back if we had
had a place to put him. The old ones are all dead now, thank God!--all
except old Aleck; he's around yet."
"One of your father's slaves, did you say?"