"I wish you'd mentioned it earlier," Carter blurted out, "and I'd have split his dirty skull, trade or no trade."
She shook her head. "No, that wouldn't have done. There's the law to be thought of even here. Besides, he's a King, and could let loose, so they say, twenty thousand fighting men against the Coast factories, and wipe them out. If only I could get away to some place he couldn't reach!" She shivered. "If I stay on here at my father's factory, I'm bound to be caught and taken to Okky City."
Carter's brown eyes opened in sheer surprise. "You speak of your father's factory. Do you mean to say that you live here on the Coast?"
"At the Smooth River factory."
"What, Slade's place?"
"Yes, I'm Laura Slade. Couldn't you guess?"
"How could I?" Carter blurted out. "Mr. Smith told me that Slade's girl—" And there he stopped, and could have bitten off his tongue for having said so much.
She finished his sentence quietly, and, as it appeared, without resentment. "Mr. Smith, I suppose, described me as a nigger."
Carter made no reply. His brown eyes hung upon her pretty face intently.
"Mr. Smith, of course, knew my father, and my mother, too, for that matter, before I was born. My mother was a quadroon, and that makes me, you see, one-eighth African."