With a glad cry the maid left the house, with its open door, and turned
north, running. The stranger turned eastward into the night. As they
parted a long, low howl rose tremulously and reverberated through the
night. The colonel's wife within shuddered.
"The bloodhounds!" she said.
The rector answered carelessly:
"Another one of those convicts escaped, I suppose. Really, they need
severer measures." Then he stopped. He was trying to remember that
stranger's name.
The judge's wife looked about for the draft and arranged her shawl. The
girl glanced at the white drapery in the hall, but the young officer was
bending over her and the fires of life burned in her veins.
Howl after howl rose in the night, swelled, and died away. The stranger
strode rapidly along the highway and out into the deep forest. There he
paused and stood waiting, tall and still.
A mile up the road behind a man was running, tall and powerful and
black, with crime-stained face and convicts' stripes upon him, and
shackles on his legs. He ran and jumped, in little, short steps, and his
chains rang. He fell and rose again, while the howl of the hounds rang
louder behind him.
Into the forest he leapt and crept and jumped and ran, streaming with
sweat; seeing the tall form rise before him, he stopped suddenly,
dropped his hands in sullen impotence, and sank panting to the earth. A
greyhound shot out of the woods behind him, howled, whined, and fawned
before the stranger's feet. Hound after hound bayed, leapt, and lay
there; then silently, one by one, and with bowed heads, they crept
backward toward the town.
The stranger made a cup of his hands and gave the man water to drink,
bathed his hot head, and gently took the chains and irons from his feet.
By and by the convict stood up. Day was dawning above the treetops. He
looked into the stranger's face, and for a moment a gladness swept over
the stains of his face.
"Why, you are a nigger, too," he said.
Then the convict seemed anxious to justify himself.
"I never had no chance," he said furtively.
"Thou shalt not steal," said the stranger.
The man bridled.
"But how about them? Can they steal? Didn't they steal a whole year's
work, and then when I stole to keep from starving--" He glanced at the
stranger.
"No, I didn't steal just to keep from starving. I stole to be stealing.
I can't seem to keep from stealing. Seems like when I see things, I just
must--but, yes, I'll try!"
The convict looked down at his striped clothes, but the stranger had
taken off his long coat; he had put it around him and the stripes
disappeared.
In the opening morning the black man started toward the low, log
farmhouse in the distance, while the stranger stood watching him. There
was a new glory in the day. The black man's face cleared up, and the
farmer was glad to get him. All day the black man worked as he had never
worked before. The farmer gave him some cold food.
"You can sleep in the barn," he said, and turned away.
"How much do I git a day?" asked the black man.
The farmer scowled.
"Now see here," said he. "If you'll sign a contract for the season, I'll
give you ten dollars a month."
"I won't sign no contract," said the black man doggedly.
"Yes, you will," said the farmer, threateningly, "or I'll call the
convict guard." And he grinned.
The convict shrank and slouched to the barn. As night fell he looked out
and saw the farmer leave the place. Slowly he crept out and sneaked
toward the house. He looked through the kitchen door. No one was there,
but the supper was spread as if the mistress had laid it and gone out.
He ate ravenously. Then he looked into the front room and listened. He
could hear low voices on the porch. On the table lay a gold watch. He
gazed at it, and in a moment he was beside it,--his hands were on it!
Quickly he slipped out of the house and slouched toward the field. He
saw his employer coming along the highway. He fled back in tenor and
around to the front of the house, when suddenly he stopped. He felt the
great, dark eyes of the stranger and saw the same dark, cloak-like coat
where the stranger sat on the doorstep talking with the mistress of the
house. Slowly, guiltily, he turned back, entered the kitchen, and laid
the watch stealthily where he had found it; then he rushed wildly back
toward the stranger, with arms outstretched.
The woman had laid supper for her husband, and going down from the house
had walked out toward a neighbor's. She was gone but a little while, and
when she came back she started to see a dark figure on the doorsteps
under the tall, red oak. She thought it was the new Negro until he said
in a soft voice:
"Will you give me bread?"
Reassured at the voice of a white man, she answered quickly in her soft,
Southern tones:
"Why, certainly."
She was a little woman, and once had been pretty; but now her face was
drawn with work and care. She was nervous and always thinking, wishing,
wanting for something. She went in and got him some cornbread and a
glass of cool, rich buttermilk; then she came out and sat down beside
him. She began, quite unconsciously, to tell him about herself,--the
things she had done and had not done and the things she had wished for.
She told him of her husband and this new farm they were trying to buy.
She said it was hard to get niggers to work. She said they ought all to
be in the chain-gang and made to work. Even then some ran away. Only
yesterday one had escaped, and another the day before.
At last she gossiped of her neighbors, how good they were and how bad.
"And do you like them all?" asked the stranger.
She hesitated.
"Most of them," she said; and then, looking up into his face and putting
her hand into his, as though he were her father, she said:
"There are none I hate; no, none at all."
He looked away, holding her hand in his, and said dreamily:
"You love your neighbor as yourself?"
She hesitated.
"I try--" she began, and then looked the way he was looking; down under
the hill where lay a little, half-ruined cabin.
"They are niggers," she said briefly.
He looked at her. Suddenly a confusion came over her and she insisted,
she knew not why.
"But they are niggers!"
With a sudden impulse she arose and hurriedly lighted the lamp that
stood just within the door, and held it above her head. She saw his dark
face and curly hair. She shrieked in angry terror and rushed down the
path, and just as she rushed down, the black convict came running up
with hands outstretched. They met in mid-path, and before he could stop
he had run against her and she fell heavily to earth and lay white and
still. Her husband came rushing around the house with a cry and an oath.
"I knew it," he said. "It's that runaway nigger." He held the black man
struggling to the earth and raised his voice to a yell. Down the highway
came the convict guard, with hound and mob and gun. They paused across
the fields. The farmer motioned to them.
"He--attacked--my wife," he gasped.
The mob snarled and worked silently. Right to the limb of the red oak
they hoisted the struggling, writhing black man, while others lifted the
dazed woman. Right and left, as she tottered to the house, she searched
for the stranger with a yearning, but the stranger was gone. And she
told none of her guests.
"No--no, I want nothing," she insisted, until they left her, as they
thought, asleep. For a time she lay still, listening to the departure of
the mob. Then she rose. She shuddered as she heard the creaking of the
limb where the body hung. But resolutely she crawled to the window and
peered out into the moonlight; she saw the dead man writhe. He stretched
his arms out like a cross, looking upward. She gasped and clung to the
window sill. Behind the swaying body, and down where the little,
half-ruined cabin lay, a single flame flashed up amid the far-off shout
and cry of the mob. A fierce joy sobbed up through the terror in her
soul and then sank abashed as she watched the flame rise. Suddenly
whirling into one great crimson column it shot to the top of the sky and
threw great arms athwart the gloom until above the world and behind the
roped and swaying form below hung quivering and burning a great crimson
cross.
She hid her dizzy, aching head in an agony of tears, and dared not look,
for she knew. Her dry lips moved:
"Despised and rejected of men."
She knew, and the very horror of it lifted her dull and shrinking
eyelids. There, heaven-tall, earth-wide, hung the stranger on the
crimson cross, riven and blood-stained, with thorn-crowned head and
pierced hands. She stretched her arms and shrieked.
He did not hear. He did not see. His calm dark eyes, all sorrowful, were
fastened on the writhing, twisting body of the thief, and a voice came
out of the winds of the night, saying:
"This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise!"