“I hope you’ll see clearer in the time to come, then,” answered Daniel. “I be sorry to have troubled you with my poor affairs. I’ll ax no more from ’e except to keep your mouth shut about me. That, at least, ban’t too much to ax?”
“Your moral sense is not merely weak, but wanting,” answered the other. “To ignore you is to ignore your crime. No Englishman can do that. I, at least, will not have it on my conscience that I let a murderer go free. Move at your peril!”
The sailor glared in sheer wonder; then his surprise gave place to passion.
“By God, but you’m a canting prig! Your friendship—’tis trash I wouldn’t own for money. Talk of vartue and duty to me! Do ’e think of all I’ve suffered—all the torment and misery I’ve gone through—a man as innocent as the young dawn! Taken from my wife—called a murderer afore I was tried—every man’s hand against me! The likes of you would make Job break loose. Your honour and your duty! Bah—stinking stuff. I’d rather be a mongrel nigger without a shirt than you! I’d—”
Vivian interrupted him and cried out in a loud voice,—
“Arrest this man! In the name of the law, take him! He is a murderer!”
They stood some distance from the rest, and now Jabez Ford hastened forward with several negroes. The coloured men chattered wildly, but none made any effort to run in on Sweetland. Before they reached him Vivian had already closed with his old friend.
“For justice!” he cried. “Right is on my side, and well you know it!”
“Liar!” answered the other. “You’re no man to do this thing. Neither right nor might be on your side. Take what you’ve courted!”
The unequal struggle was quickly at an end, for Vivian’s physical powers were as nothing beside the strength of Daniel. The sailor shook him like a dog shakes a rat; then he gripped his huge arms round him and hugged him breathless.