“Yes,” growled the man, suddenly turning savage at her words, “and your husband, old Yankee Sessions, told me to get out of his house once, a few years back. I was just out of pen, and I was hungry. I stopped here and told his black butler to rustle me some grub and a little spending-money, or I’d cave his woolly head in. That’s the way to speak to niggers. And he—”
“That’s the way nobody but ‘poor white trash’ ever speaks to them, down here,” contradicted Mrs. Sessions. “I remember the time. Ehud was sick abed with quinsy and—”
“And just as I’d got that nigger so scared that he’d do anything I told him,” snarled the bushwhacker, drink and a sour memory combining to enrage him, “down them stairs rushes old Yankee Sessions, half-dressed, and wavin’ a sword in his hand. And he kicked me—yes, kicked me—out of his house, the dirty Yank. I reckon here’s where I square accounts with his long-tongued widder.”
He lurched to the stair-foot and caught Mrs. Sessions roughly by the shoulder.
“Show us where you’ve hid the blue-backed cur!” he ordered. “Or we’ll—”
He got no further.
At his brutal touch Mrs. Sessions had involuntarily cried out. A cry of stark indignation, not of terror.
And in the midst of the guerrilla’s surly threat she saw the unshaven mouth grow speechless and slack; the drink-bleared eyes widen in crass horror.
The unwashed paw fell inert from her shoulder. The man reeled back a step as though struck across the face. He was staring stupidly at the stairway. And his fellows had followed the direction of his gaze.
All this in the fraction of a second; even as Mrs. Sessions turned to note the cause of the strange panic.