"What is a gentleman?" I asts him, thinking if he wasn't one it might take his mind off himself a little to tell me. "What MAKES one?"
"Authorities differ," says Doctor Kirby, slouching down in his chair, and grinning like he knowed a joke he wasn't going to tell no one. "I heard Doctor Jackson describe himself that way the other day."
Well, speaking personal, I never had smelled none of roses. I wasn't nothing but trash myself, so being a gentleman didn't bother me one way or the other. The only reason I didn't want to see them niggers bunked so very bad was only jest because it was such a low-down, ornery kind of trick.
"It ain't too late," I says, "to pull out of this nigger scheme yet and get into something more honest."
"I don't know," he says thoughtful. "I think perhaps it IS too late." And he sets there looking like a man that is going over a good many years of life in his mind. Purty soon he says:
"As far as honesty goes—it isn't that so much, O Daniel-come-to-judgment! It's about as honest as most medicine games. It's—" He stopped and frowned agin.
"What is it?"
"It's their being NIGGERS," he says.
That made the difference fur me, too. I dunno how, nor why.
"I've tried nearly everything but blackmail," he says, "and I'll probably be trying that by this time next year, if this scheme fails. But there's something about their being niggers that makes me sick of this thing already—just as the time has come to make the start. And I don't know WHY it should, either." He slipped another big slug of whiskey into him, and purty soon he asts me: