The negro to the white man, as the moon to the earth, shows one side only; the other is dark and unknown. It is an instinct with him to conceal the truth any truth from white men; who knows to what use they will put it and him? So deeply have ages of slavery and oppression ingrained this upon black men’s subconsciousness, that only one white man in a thousand ever knows or suspects what his dark brethren think, or know, or feel. Peter Champneys happened to be the thousandth.

There wasn’t a cabin in all that countrywide in which this barefooted last scion of a long line of slave-holding gentry wasn’t known and welcome. There wasn’t a negro in the county he didn’t know by name: even “mean niggers” grinned amiably at Peter Champneys. They remembered what he had once said to a district judge whom he heard bitterly inveighing against their ingratitude, immorality, shiftlessness, and general worthlessness. Peter had lifted his quiet eyes.

“I’ve often thought, Judge, what a particularly mean nigger I’d have been, myself,” he said, and studied the judge with disconcerting directness. “If you’d been born a colored man, and some folks talked and behaved to you like some folks talk and behave to colored men, don’t you reckon you’d be in jail right this minute, Judge?”

The white men who heard Peter’s remark smiled, and one of them said, spitting out a mouthful of tobacco juice, that it was just another piece of that boy’s damfoolishness. But the negroes, who knew that judge as only negroes can know white men, chuckled grimly. They have an immense respect for intelligence, and they made no mistake where Peter’s was concerned.

They knew him, too, a mild-eyed, brown-faced child reading out of a Book by the light of a kerosene lamp to groups of gray-headed, reverent listeners in lonely cabins. And Peter was always making pictures of them Mindel at the wash-tub, Emma Campbell picking a chicken, old Maum’ Chloe churning, Liza playing with her fat black baby, Joe Tuttle plowing, old Daddy Neptune Fennick leaning on his ax. Sometimes these sketches caught some fleeting moment of fun, and were so true and so amusing that they were received with shouts of delighted laughter, passed from hand to hand, and cherished by fortunate recipients.

Now, no simple and natural heart can even for a little while beat in unison with other hearts, encased in whatsoever colored skin may please God, without a quickening of that wisdom which is one of the keys of the Kingdom to come. To be able really to know, truly to understand and come human-close to the lowly, to men and women under the bondage of age-old prejudice, or outcast by the color of their skin, is a terrible and perilous gift. This is the much knowledge in which there is much grief.

Peter Champneys saw both sides. He saw and heard and knew things that would have made his mother turn in her grave had she known. He knew what depths of savagery and superstition, of brute sloth and ignorance, lay here to drive back many a would-be white helper in despair, and to render the labor of many a splendid negro reformer all but futile. But he knew, too, the terrible patience, the incredible resignation, with which poverty and neglect and hunger and oppression and injustice are borne, until at times, child as he was, his soul sickened with shame and rage. He relished the sweet earthy humor that brightens humble lives, the gaiety and charity under conditions which, when white men have to bear them, go to the making of red terrorists. Some of the things he saw and heard remained like scars upon Peter’s memory. He will remember until he dies the June night he spent with Daddy Neptune Fennick in his cabin on the edge of the River Swamp.

That early June day had been cloudy from dawn; Peter was glad of that, for he meant to pick black-berries, and a sunless day for berry-picking is an unmixed blessing. The little negroes are such nimblefingered pickers, such locust-like strippers of all near-by patches, that Peter had bad luck at first, and was driven farther afield than he usually went; his search led him even to the edge of the River Swamp, a dismal place of evil repute, wherein cane as tall as a man grew thickly, and sluggish streamlets meandered in and out of gnarled cypress roots, and big water-snakes stretched themselves on branches overhanging the water. On the edges of the swamp the unmolested vines were thick with fruit. In the late afternoon Peter had filled his buckets to overflowing with extra-fine berries.

It had been a sultry day for all its sunlessness, and Peter was tired, so tired that his head and back ached. He looked at the heavy buckets doubtfully; it would be a man-size job to trudge the long sandy road home, so laden. While he sat there, hating to move, Daddy Neptune Fennick came in sight, hoe and rake and ax on his sturdy shoulder. The old man cast a shrewd, weather-wise eye at the darkening sky.

“Gwine to hab one spell o’ wedder,” he called. “Best come on home wid me, Peter, en wait w’ile.”

Even as he spoke a blaze of lightning split the sky and lighted up the swamp. A loud clap of thunder followed on the heels of it. Daddy Neptune seized one bucket, Peter the other, and both ran for the shelter of the cabin, some eighth of a mile farther on. They reached it just as the rain came down in swirling, blinding sheets.

The old man built a fire in his mud fireplace, and prepared the evening meal of broiled bacon, johnny-cake, and coffee. He and his welcome guest ate from tin plates on their knees, drinking their coffee from tin cups. Between mouthfuls each gave the other what county news he possessed. Peter particularly liked that orderly one-roomed cabin, and the fine old man who was his host.

He was an old-timer, was Daddy Neptune, more than six feet tall, and massively proportioned. His bald head was fringed with a ring of curling gray wool, and a white beard covered the lower portion of an unusually handsome countenance. He had a shrewd and homely wit, an unbuyable honesty, and such a simple and unaffected dignity of manner and bearing as had won the respect of the county.

The old man lived by himself in the cabin by the River Swamp. His wife and son had long been dead, and though he had sheltered, fed, clothed, and taught to work several negro lads, these had gone their way. Peter was particularly attached to him, and the old man returned his affection with interest.

The dark fell rapidly. You could hear the trees in the River Swamp crying out as the wind tormented them. On a night like this, with lightning snaking through it and wild wind trying to tear the heart out of its thin cypresses, and the cane-brake rustling ominously in its unchancy black stretches, one might believe that the place was haunted, as the negroes said it was. Daddy Neptune was moved to tell Peter some of his own experiences with the River Swamp. He spoke, between puffs of his corn-cob pipe, of the night Something had come out of it pitterpat! pitterpat! right at his heels. It had followed him to the very edge of his home clearing. Daddy Neptune wasn’t exactly afraid, but he knew that Something hadn’t any business to be pitterpattering at his heels, so he had turned around and said:

“Ef you-all come out o’ hebben, you ‘s wastin’ good time ’yuh. Ef Dey-all lef’ you come out o’ hell, you bes’ git right back whah you b’longs. One ways, I ain’t got nothin’ I kin tell you; t’other ways, you ain’t got nothin’ I ’s gwine to let you tell me. I ’s axin’ you to git. En,” finished Neptune, “dat t’ing done went right out whish! same lak I ‘s tellin’ you! Yessuh! hit went spang out!” He threw another chunk of fatwood on the fire, and watched the smoky flame go dancing up the chimney. In the red glow he had the aspect of a kindly Titan.

“It never bothered you again, Daddy Nep?” Peter was always curious about these experiences. He had a glimmer that negroes are nearer to certain Powers than other folks are, and although he wasn’t superstitious, he wasn’t skeptical, either.

“Never bothered me a-tall, less’n dat ’s whut ‘s been meddlin’ wid my fowls, whichin ef I catches it, I aims to blow its head plum off, ghostes or no ghostes,” said the old man, stoutly.

“Ghosts don’t steal chickens. I reckon it’s a wild-cat gets yours. I heard one scream in the swamp not so long since.”

“Well, I aims to git Mistuh Wildcat, den. I done got me a couple o’ guinea-fowls for watch, en dey sho does set up a mighty potrackin’ w’en anything strange comes a-snoopin’ roun’ de yahd.”

After a while Daddy Neptune put away his pipe and took down from a shelf his big battered Bible, and Peter read the Twenty-first and Twenty-second chapters of Revelation, to which the old man listened with clasped hands and an uplifted face, his lips moving soundlessly as he repeated to himself certain of the words:

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away.... He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God and he shall be my son ...

“I was born in slaveryment,” said the old man, audibly.

Peter lay on his straw bed before the fire, sleepily watching Neptune finish his prayers. He still had a child’s faith, but he was beginning to wonder how a laboring negro could retain it. One thing he was sure of; if there was such a thing as a Christian man, endowed with ideal Christian virtues, that old man kneeling in his cabin, pouring out his heart to his Maker, was a Christian. And remembering comfortable, complacent white Christians well fed, well housed, well clothed; with education and all that it implies as their heritage; with all the high things of the world open to them by reason of their white skin; praying decorously every Sunday to a white man’s God Peter felt confused. How should the white man and the white man’s God answer and account to the Daddy Neptunes, who had been “born in slaveryment,” had lived and would die in slaveryment to poverty and prejudice? Where do they come in, these dispossessed dark sons of the Father? Surely, the Father has a very great deal to make up to them! Then the firelighted cabin walls, the wavering figure of the kneeling old man, the soft sound of light rain on the roof, faded and went out. Peter fell asleep.

He slept a tired boy’s dreamless slumber. The night deepened. The rain ceased, and a wan and sad moon climbed the sky, wearily, like a tired old woman. In the River Swamp frogs croaked, a whippoorwill at intervals gave its lonesome and lovely call, the shivering-owl’s cry making it lovelier by comparison. The cypresses shook blackly in the blacker swamp water which licked their roots. From the drenched vegetation arose a fresh and penetrating odor, the smell of the clean June night. And presently, he didn’t know why, Peter awoke with every sense instantly alert. It was as if his soul had sensed a sound, knew it for what it was, and was on guard.

A few red embers glowed in the big mud chimney. Save for these, the one-room cabin was in darkness. Somebody was moving about. Peter made out the figure of big Neptune standing with his head bent in a listening attitude at one of the shuttered windows. A bit of fatwood in the fireplace burst for a moment into an expiring flame, which flickered dully on the barrel of the gun in the negro’s hands. Peter scrambled up, and stole noiselessly across the floor.

“Dem guineas potracked en waked me up, Son,” whispered Neptune. “Now I aims to git whut ‘s been sneakin’ off wid my fowls.”

At that moment a low knock sounded on the door. At such an hour, and in that lonely place, it gave the old man and the boy a distinct sensation of fear: who should come knocking so stealthily at the door of the cabin by the River Swamp at that eerie hour? Neptune, his gun gripped in his hands, twisted his head sidewise, listening. The knock came again, this time more insistent. Then a thick voice spoke, muffled by the intervening door:

“Daddy Nepshun, is you awake? For Gawd A’mighty’s sake, Daddy Nepshun, lemme in!”

The old man stepped to the door and flung it wide. The figure that had been crouching against it tumbled in and lay panting on the floor.

“Light me dat lamp, please, Peter,” said Neptune, peering down at his visitor.

Peter, who had recovered from his momentary fear, lighted the kerosene lamp. By its light they perceived a stained, muddy, disheveled wretch, in the last state of terror and exhaustion. Two wild eyes glared at them out of a gray, grimed face.

“Why, Jake! Lawd ‘a’ mussy, hit ’s Jake!” burst from Daddy Neptune. Peter recognized in the intruder a negro to whom the old man had been, as was his wont, fatherly kind. On a time he and his wife had sheltered and fed Jake.

Peter didn’t know why, but something in the man’s aspect, in his rolling eyes, his lips drawn back from his teeth, his torn clothes, his desperate look of a hunted beast, made him recoil. He had never before seen any one with just that look of brute cunning and terror. Daddy Neptune’s steady eyes took in every detail. He stiffened in his tracks.

“Whut you been doin’?” he demanded. Jake turned his head from side to side; he refused to meet the direct old eyes. He mumbled:

“Is you got any w’isky, Da’ Nepshun? For Gawd’s sake, Da’ Nepshun, gimme a drink en don’t ast me no questions twell I ’s able to answer.” His voice was hoarse and shaking; his whole body shook.

“I ain’t got no w’isky, but I got coffee en bittles. Whichin you is welcome to,” said Neptune. “You ain’t say yit whut you been doin’. Whut you been up to, Jake?”

Jake writhed off the floor. Again Peter recoiled instinctively. As the negro got upon his feet his coat fell open, and the torn sleeve and cuff of a gingham shirt showed. On it was a dark stain which was not swamp water or mud. Peter’s eyes fastened upon that dark red smear.

“Gimme a bite o’ bittles so ’s I kin git on,” implored Jake.

“I axes you once mo’, Jake: whut you been doin’?” demanded Neptune. His voice was stern, and his face began to set.

“En I axes you to lemme git dem bittles fust, en I’ll tell you, soon ’s I gits back mah wind,” returned Jake, sullenly.

Still retaining his gun, Neptune went to the corner cupboard, from which he took a loaf of bread. Without cutting it he handed it to Jake, who began to tear it with his teeth. All the while he ate, he kept turning his head, listening, listening.

“Cain’t wait for no coffee. Gimme drink o’ water, please, suh.” In silence Neptune handed him a gourd of water. When Jake had gulped this down, Neptune asked again, inexorably:

“Whut you been doin’, Jake?”

Jake shifted from one foot to the other. He thrust his bullet head forward. His hands, hanging at his sides, opened and closed, the fingers twitching.

“Dem w’ite mens is atter somebuddy en dey say hit ’s me,” he muttered hoarsely. His eyes rolled toward the door, which, not having been barred after his entrance, swung slightly ajar.

“Whut dey atter somebuddy for?” Neptune demanded. Outside, in the wet night, the screech-owl cried. The sweet wind danced on airy feet in and out of the cypresses and the gums, kissed them, stole their breath, and tossed it abroad odorously. Stars had come out to keep the pale moon company, and a faint light glinted on wet grass and bushes. Crickets and katydids and little green tree-frogs kept up a harsh concert. And then, above all the minor, murmuring noises of the night arose another sound, very faint and far off, but unmistakable and unforgetable the deep, long, bell note of a hound upon the trail.

The three in the cabin stood like figures turned to stone in the attitude of listening. Jake’s teeth chattered audibly. He edged toward the open door, but Neptune stepped in front of him, and flung up an arresting hand.

“Whut for?” His voice was like a whip-lash.

“Somebuddy done meddled wid a w’ite gal een de cawn-field. En dey ’low hit wuz me.”

A gasp, as if his heart had been squeezed, came from Neptune. Of a sudden he seemed to grow in height, to tower unhumanly tall above the cringing wretch he confronted. His eyes narrowed into red points that bored into the other’s eyes, and plunged like daggers into his heart and mind. Before that glance, like a vivisectionist’s knife, Jake wilted; he seemed to shrink, dwindle, collapse. And with a growing, cold, awful horror, a suspicion so hideous that his mind revolted from it, Peter Champneys stood staring from one black face to the other.

“You you ” Neptune gulped, strangling. A long, slow shudder, as of one confronting unheard-of torture, went over his big frame. The fringe of hair on his bald head rose, his beard bristled. Sparks seemed to shoot from his eyes, burning with a terrible flame.

“Da’ Nepshun ” Jake put out clawing, twitching hands. “Dey ’s dey ’s gwine to git me.” His voice broke into a half-scream.

“Whut you do hit for?” This from Neptune, in a heart-shaken, anguished, rattling whisper. He asked no further questions. He had no doubt. Jake’s rolling eyes had told him the unspeakable truth.

“I ‘clah to Gawd, Da’ Nepshun, I wuz n’t meanin’ no hahm I never had no idea She came down de cawn-field paff wid de cow followin’ ’er en en I don’t know whut mek me meddle wid dat gal. Seems lak hit wuz de debbil, ‘stead o’ me.”

“Is de gal done daid?”

“Yas, suh, she done daid.” Jake rocked himself to and fro, muttering her name.

Peter Champneys looked at the torn shirt-sleeve with the red stain upon it. The room shook and wavered, wind was in his ears. And the red of that girl’s blood got into his eyes, and he saw things through a scarlet mist. The most horrible rage he had ever experienced shook him like a mortal sickness. Oh, God! oh, God! oh, God! That girl!

In the momentary silence that fell upon that tragic room, a sound shivered. Long, slow, bell-like. Nearer. It galvanized Jake into terror-stricken action. He started for the door.

“Dey ’ll git me, dey ’ll git me!” he croaked.

Peter would have flung himself upon the wretch, to reach for his throat with bare hands; but something in Neptune’s face stopped him. Neptune’s bigness seemed to fill the whole room. He drew a deep breath, and with one movement jerked the door wide.

“Run down de paff by de fowl-house,” he said sharply. “Den hit ’s de swamp for you.”

Peter turned sick. Was Neptune like all other niggers? Hadn’t he the proper sense of what this devil had done?

Jake leaped for the door, cleared the steps at a bound, and was flying down the path. Neptune took one forward step, filling the doorway. He lifted the shot-gun to his shoulder. Just as the fugitive neared the fowl-house, the gun spoke. The flying figure leaped high in the air, and then sprawled out and was suddenly still and inert. The guinea-hens set up a deafening potracking, and the cooped fowls squawked and flapped. Above all the noise they made rose the bloodhound’s note.

It was done so quickly, it was so inevitable, that Peter could only stand and blink. He thought, sickly, that the very earth should shudder away from the soiling touch of that appalling carrion. But the earth was the one thing that would receive Jake unprotestingly. He lay on his face, his arms outflung, and from the gaping hole between his shoulders a dark stream welled. The indifferent earth, the uncaring grass, received it. The wind came out of the swamp on mincing feet and danced over him, and fluttered his torn shirt-sleeve.

Stonily, voicelessly, Neptune stood in the cabin door, staring at that which lay in the pathway. Then he lowered the smoking gun, and leaned on it. His bald head drooped until his gray beard swept his breast, and his throat rattled like a dying man’s. Shudders went over him. And stonily young Peter Champneys stood beside him, his boyish eyes hard in a dead-white face, his boyish mouth a grim, pale line.

“Peter,” said the old man presently, in a thin whisper, “I helped raise dat boy. Wuz n’t sich a bad boy, neither. Used to sing en wissle roun’ de house, en fetch water en fiah-wood. Chloe, she loved ’im. Used to say Ouah Fathuh right in dis same room ‘fo’ he went to sleep. Ef I ’d ‘a’ knowed

“En dat po’ lil w’ite chile’s daddy en mammy, dey done raise ’er used to say ‘er prayers en laff en sing en trus’ de Almighty Gawd ”

He raised his sinewy arms and shook the gun aloft.

“Ah, Gawd Almighty! Gawd Almighty! Whah is You dis night? Whah is You?” cried the old man. And of a sudden he began to weep dreadfully; heart-broken cries of pain and of protest, the tortured cries of one suffering inhumanly.

“And all this while God said not a word.”

Shaken to the soul, full of sick horror, and loathing, and rage, Peter Champneys yet had a swift, intuitive understanding of old Neptune; and as if through him he had caught a glimpse of the naked and suffering soul of the black people, the boy began to weep with him. With understanding merging into pity he crept nearer and put his slender, boyish arm around the big, shaking, agonized figure, and the old man turned his head and looked long and sorrowfully into the white child’s face. He put out the big, seamed, work-hardened hand that had labored since it could hold an implement to labor with, and laid it on the child’s shoulder.

Then, bareheaded and empty-handed, Neptune sat down on his cabin steps to wait for what should happen, and Peter Champneys sat beside him, the gun between his knees. Over there by the fowl-house lay Jake, a horrid blotch in the moonlight.

Presently, echoing through the River Swamp, the hunting hounds set up their thrilling, deep-mouthed belling. They were closing in on their quarry and the nearness of it excited them. A few minutes later, and here they were, a posse of some thirty or forty mounted men struggling pell-mell after them. One great hound leaped forward, stood rigid by that which lay in a heap in the cabin clearing, pointed his nose, and gave tongue. Other dogs bunched around him, sniffed, and joined in.

The mounted men came to an abrupt standstill, the horses, like the dogs, bunching together. Neptune had risen and Peter Champneys stood on the top step, his head about level with the old man’s shoulder. He looked in vain for the sheriff; evidently, this was an independent posse. One of the men rode up to the door, shouting to make himself heard above the din of the dogs, and Peter recognized him, with a sinking of the heart a tenant farmer named Mosely, of a violent and quarrelsome disposition.

“Shet up them damn dogs!” he yelled. And to Neptune, savagely: “Now then, nigger, talk! What’s been doin’ here?”

It was Peter Champneys who answered.

“Daddy Neptune’s been worried by something or somebody stealing his fowls. He’s been on the watch. So when he saw that that nigger over there running by the chicken-house, he just blazed away. Got him between the shoulder-blades.”

A yell so ferocious that Peter’s marrow froze, burst from the posse, which had dismounted.

“It’s him!” howled a farm-hand, and kicked the corpse in the face. “What in hell did that big nigger shoot him for, anyhow?” he roared. “He’d ought to be strung up himself, the old black ” And he cursed Neptune vilely. He felt swindled. There would be no burning, with interludes of unspeakable things. Nothing but senseless carrion to wreak vengeance upon. And all through a damned old meddling nigger’s fault! A nigger taking the law into his own hands!

Somebody, discovering Daddy Neptune’s woodpile, had kindled a fatwood torch. Others followed his example, and the red, smoky light flared over enraged faces and glaring eyes of maddened men; over the sweating horses, the baying dogs, and the black corpse with its bruised face. The guinea-hens, after their insane fashion, kept up a deafening potracking, flapping from limb to limb of the tree in which they roosted. The indifferent swamp chorus joined in, katydids and crickets shrilling all the while. And over it all the moon went about its business; the awful depths of the sky were silent. The wind from the swamp, the night, the earth, didn’t care.

Somebody whipped out a knife and bent over Jake’s body. A yell greeted this. Dogs and men moved confusedly around the thing on the ground, in a sort of demoniac circle upon which the hissing, flaring pitch-pine torches danced with infernal effect. Peter Champneys watched it, his soul revolting. He had no sympathy for Jake; he felt for him nothing but hatred. He couldn’t think of that gay and innocent girl coming down the corn-field path, unafraid to meet what she had met without a suffocating sense of rage. She had been, Peter remembered, a very pretty girl, a girl who, as Neptune had said, used to sing, and laugh, and say her prayers, and trust Almighty God.

But Peter was seeing now the other side of that awful cloud which darkens the horizon of the South the brute beast mob-vengeance that follows swiftly upon the heels of the unpardonable sin. There must be justice. But what was happening now wasn’t justice. It was stark barbarism let loose.

Neptune, who had “helped raise” Jake, had meted out to him justice full and sure. He had avenged both the wronged white and the wronged black people. Peter looked at the men in the cabin clearing, and saw the thing nakedly, and from both angles. For instance, consider Mosely, who had done things with a clasp-knife. And that other man, the farm-hand, shifty-eyed and mean, always half drunk, a bad citizen: they would be sure to be foremost in affairs like this. They had precious little respect for the law as law. And here they were, making the holy night indecent with bestial behavior. Again a sick qualm shook Peter: Mosely was calmly putting four severed black fingers into his coat pocket. Oh, where was the sheriff? Why didn’t the sheriff come?

Peter caught a glimpse of a shapeless, battered, gory mass under trampling feet. Maddened by the little they were able to accomplish, and with the torture-lust that is as old as humanity itself roused to fury by frustration, the posse turned from that which had been Jake, to old Neptune, standing motionless by his doorway. Neptune had not moved or spoken since Peter had answered the posse’s questions. He had not even appeared to hear the vile abuse heaped upon him. He was not in the least afraid for his life: He was beyond that. That which had happened, which was happening, had dealt the stern, simple-hearted old man so mighty a blow that his faculties were stunned. He couldn’t think. He could only suffer a bewildered, baffled torment. He stood there, dumb as a sheep before the slaughterers, and the sight of his black face maddened the men who were out to avenge a black man’s monstrous crime.

“Hang the damn nigger!” screamed Mosely, and the crowd surged forward ominously. You could see, by the shaking torch-light, faces in which the eyes glared wolf-like, brandished fists, glints of guns. Neptune, without a flicker of fear, regarded them with his sorrowful gaze. But Peter Champneys stepped in front of him, and thrust the cold muzzle of the shot-gun against Mosely’s face. The man, a coward at heart, leaped back, trampling upon the toes of those behind him, who cursed him shrilly and vindictively.

Then spoke up small Peter Champneys, standing barefooted and bareheaded, clothed in a coarse blue blouse and a pair of patched and faded denim trousers, but for all that heir to a long line of dead-and-gone Champneyses who had been, whatever their faults, fearless and gallant gentlemen.

“Get back there, you, Mosely!” Peter Champneys spoke in the voice his grandfather had on a time used to a recalcitrant field-hand.

“Chuck that little nigger-lover in the swamp!”

“Knock him down an’ git the nigger, Mosely!”

“Burn down the house!”

But the shot-gun in that steady young hand held them in check for a breathing-space. They knew Peter Champneys.

“Mosely!” snapped Peter. “You, too, Nicolson! Stand back, you white-livered hounds! First one of you lays a hand on me or Daddy Nep gets his head blown off! Damn you, Mosely! don’t make me tell you again to get back!”

And Mosely saw that in the boy’s eyes that drove him back, swearing.

The huge farm-hand, who had shifted and squirmed his way to the back of the crowd, now lifted his arm. A rope with a noose at the end snaked over the tossing heads, and all but settled over black Neptune’s. It slipped, writhing from the old man’s shoulder and down his shirt. The mob set up a disappointed and yet hopeful howl.

“Try it again! Try it again!” they shrieked. Then a sort of waiting hush fell upon them. The farm-hand, to whom the rope had been tossed, was again making ready for a throw, measuring the distance with his eyes. Peter, his lips tightening, waited too. The farm-hand was a tall man, and the posse had shifted to allow him space. His arm shot up, the noosed rope whizzed forward. But even as it did so Peter Champneys’s trigger-finger moved. The report sounded like a clap of thunder, and was followed by a roar of rage and pain. The rope-thrower, with the rope tripping his feet and impeding his movements, danced about wildly, shaking the hand from which three fingers had been cleanly clipped. At that instant another posse rode up, with a baying of hounds to herald it. One saw the sheriff on a large bay horse, a Winchester in the crook of his arm. With a merest glance at what had been Jake, he pushed his way through the throng, and was confronted by Peter Champneys standing in front of old Neptune Fennick, with a smoking shot-gun in his hands.

“You better do something, quick! If you let anything happen to Daddy Nep, you’ve got to kill me first,” panted Peter.

“He’d ought to be shot for a nigger-lover, Sheriff!” shouted the farm-hand.

“All right. Do it. But you’ll get your neck stretched for it! My name’s Champneys,” shouted Peter.

The sheriff moved restlessly on his bay. A Champneys had fed his parents. Chadwick Champneys had given him his first pair of shoes. The sheriff was stirred to the depths by the crime that had been committed, and he had no love for a nigger, but

He turned to the menacing crowd. “Here, boys, enough o’ this! The right nigger’s dead, and that’s all there is to it. No, you don’t do no hangin’! I’m sheriff o’ this county, an’ I aim to keep the law. Let that old nigger alone, Mosely! If that young hell-cat puts a bullet in your chitlin’s, it’ll be your own funeral.”

He straightened in the saddle, touched the rein, and in a second the big bay had been swung around to stand between Neptune and the white men. The muzzle of Peter’s gun touched the sheriff’s leg.

“Put that pop-gun up, Son,” said he, turning his head to look down into the boy’s face. Their eyes met, in a long look.

“I knew that girl since she was bawn,” he said, and his hard face quivered. “Hell!” swore the sheriff, and the hand on his bridle shook. He knew old Neptune, too, and in his way liked him. But it was hard for the sheriff, who had seen the dead little girl, to look into any black face that night and retain any feeling of humanity.

“Yes, sir. I knew her, too,” said Peter Champneys, gulping. “But I know Neptune, too. And what happened wasn’t his fault. It’s got nothing to do with Neptune and and things that Mosely ” His voice broke.

“Hell!” swore the sheriff again. And he whispered, more gently, “All right, Peter. An’ I reckon you better stay by the old nigger for a day or two until this thing dies down.” After all, the sheriff thought relievedly, Neptune’s swift action, actuated by whatsoever motive, had saved the county and himself from a rather frightful episode. Turning to the crowd, he yelled:

“Get them dogs started for home! They’re goin’ plum crazy! Get on your hawse, Mosely! You, over there, with your fist shot up, ride next to me. Mount, all o’ you! Mount, I say! No, I’ll come last.

“What’s that you’re sayin’, Briggs? No, suh, not by a damn-sight you won’t! Not while I’m sheriff o’ this county an’ upholdin’ law an’ order in it, you won’t drag no dead nigger behind my hawse nor yet in front of him, neither! Let the nigger lay where he is and rot what’s left of him.”

“Do you want us to bury it?” quavered Peter.

“Bury it or burn it. What the hell do I care what you do with it?” growled the sheriff. “He’s dead, that’s all I got to think about.” He ran his shrewd eyes over the posse, saw that not one straggler remained to do further mischief, and drove them before him, willy-nilly. In five minutes the trampled yard was clear, and the sound of the horses’ hoofs was already dying in the distance. In the sky all other stars had paled to make room for the morning star.

Peter and Neptune, left alone, looked at each other dumbly. A thing remained to be done. The sun mustn’t rise upon the horror that lay in the cabin yard. Neptune went to his small barn and trundled out a wheelbarrow, in which were several gunny-sacks, a piece of rope, and a spade.

Peter turned his head away while the old man covered the thing on the ground with sacking, rolled it over, floppily, and tied it as best he could. The sweat came out on them both as they saw the stains that spread on the clean sacking. Neptune heaped the bundle into his wheelbarrow. At a word from him Peter went into the house and returned with a lighted lantern, for the River Swamp was still very dark. The sun wouldn’t be up for an hour or two yet. Peter held the lantern in one hand, and carried spade and shot-gun over the other shoulder. In the ghostly light they entered the swamp, every turn and twist of whose wide, watery acreage was known to Neptune, and was fairly familiar to Peter. They had to proceed warily, for the ground was treacherous, and at any moment a jutting tree-root might upset the clumsy barrow. Despite Neptune’s utmost care it bumped and swayed, and the shapeless bundle in it shook hideously, as if it were trying to escape. And the stains on the coarse shroud grew, and spread.

In a small and fairly dry space among particularly large cypresses, Neptune stopped. At one side was a deep pool in whose depths the lantern was reflected. About it ferns, some of a great height, grew thickly. Neptune began to dig in the black earth. Sometimes he struck a cypress root, against which the spade rang with a hollow sound. It was slow enough work, but the hole in the swamp earth grew with every spade-thrust, like a blind mouth opening wider and wider. Peter held the lantern. The trees stood there like witnesses.

Presently Neptune straightened his shoulders, moved back to the barrow, and edged it to the hole. Swiftly and deftly he tipped it, and the shapeless bundle slid into the open mouth awaiting it. It was curiously still just then in the River Swamp.

When they emerged into the open, the sun was rising over a clean, fresh world. The dark tops of the trees were gilded by the first rays. Every bush was hung with diamonds, the young grass rippled like a child’s hair, and birds were everywhere, voicing the glory of the morning.

The old negro dropped his wheelbarrow, and lifted a supplicating face and a pair of gnarled hands to the morning sky. His lips moved. One saw that he prayed, trustingly, with a childlike simplicity.

Peter Champneys watched him speculatively. He tried to reason the thing out, and the heart in his boyish breast ached with a new pain. Thoughts big, new, insistent, knocked at the door of his intellect and refused to be denied admittance.

He thought it better to take the sheriff’s advice and stay with Neptune for a few days, but nobody troubled the good old man. The verdict of the whole county was in his favor. He went his harmless, fearless, laborious way unmolested. That autumn he died, and the cabin by the River Swamp was taken over by nature, who gave it to her winds and rains to play with. Her leaves drifted upon its floor, her birds built under its shallow eaves.

Nobody would live there any more. The negroes said the place was haunted: on wild nights one might hear there the sound of a shot, the baying of a hound; and see Jake running for the swamp.