"What for, solgers?" asks Phipps.
"Soldiers, no, dogs," says the shop-keeper, puckering his mouth as though he had sampled a lemon.
"O!" says Phipps, suddenly realizing the fact. "I ain't got no dogs; bad stock; don't pay; tax 'em up where I live; wouldn't pay tax for forty dogs." More niggers passed, repassed, and looked in at Phipps and the storekeeper.
"I say, ain't the niggers got to be thick—infernal thick, in your town lately?"
"Well, I don't know that they are," replied the shop-keeper; "getting rather scarce, I think, since the Fugitive bill has been put in force over the country, sir, but it does appear to me," said the shop-keeper, twiging sundry and suspicious-looking col'ud gem'en passing by his store, gaping in rather wistfully at the door, and peeping through the sash of the windows—"it does appear to me, that a good many colored persons are about this morning; yes, there is, why there goes more, more yet; bless me, there's another, two, three, four, why a dozen has just passed; they seem to look in here rather curiously, I wonder—only look; what has stirred them up, I want to know!" the fluctuation of the Congo market completely attracted the handsome man's attention; his surprise finally assumed the most tangible shape and complexion of fear, for the niggers, one and all, looked savage as meat-axes, and began to get too numerous to mention.
"What dat! got pistils in your pocket, eh?" says one of two big buck Niggers, shying up alongside of the new velocipeding up-country artisan. "What dat! got de hand-cuffs in he pocket!"—[Page 99.]
"Well, guess I'll be goin'," says Phipps, after fumbling over some of the shooting-irons, jack-knives, etc.; reaching the street, he was more fully impressed with the fixed fact, that the niggers were all sorts of thick. They fairly crowded him; one buck darkey rubbed slap up against Phipps, as he moved out of the store. "Look here, Mister," says Phipps, "ain't all this street big enough for you without a crowdin' me?"
The nigger stopped, looked arsenic and chain lightning at Phipps, and then moved off, saying in a sort of undertone—
"Gorra, I guess you'll be crowded a wus'n dat afore dis day is ober."