Sheriff Ike Keener swept the crowd with his eye. Perhaps what he saw in their faces failed to convince him. “Well, I seen fairer men than you was niggers. Still, you better tell that——”
Mild, benevolent, patriarchal, the figure of old Windy stepped out from among the rest. “Guess you’ve known me, Ike, better part of twenty-five years. I was keelboatin’ time you was runnin’ around, a barefoot on the landin’. Now I’m tellin’ you—me, Windy McKlain—that that white man there’s got nigger blood in him. I’ll take my oath to that.”
Having thus delivered himself of what was, perhaps, the second longest speech in his career, he clumped off again, across the stage, down the stairs, up the aisle, looking, even in that bizarre environment, like something out of Genesis.
Sheriff Ike Keener was frankly puzzled. “If it was anybody else but Windy—but I got this straight from—from somebody ought to know.”
“From who?” shouted Andy, all indignation. “From a sooty-faced scab of a bull-drumming engineer named Pete. And why? Because he’s been stuck on Julie here I don’t know how long, and she wouldn’t have anything to do with him.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes, it is,” Steve put in, quickly. “He was after my wife. Anybody in the company’ll bear me out. He wouldn’t leave her alone, though she hated the sight of him, and Cap here give him a talking—didn’t you, Cap? So finally, when he wouldn’t quit, then there was nothing for it but lick him, and I licked him good, and soused him in the river to get his dirty face clean. He crawls out swearing he’ll get me for it. Now you know.”
Keener now addressed himself to Julie for the first time. “He says—this Pete—that you was born here in Lemoyne, and that your pop was white and your mammy black. That right?”
Julie moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. “Yes,” she said. “That’s—right.”
A sudden commotion in the group that had been so still. Elly’s voice, shrill with hysteria. “I will! I’ll tell right out. The wench! The lying black——”