"How do you account for it?" I asked, settling myself in my chair. (We were alone in the smoking compartment.)
"Account for what?"
"The change that has come over the South—to the negro," I answered.
"The negro has become a competitor, sir. The interests of the black man and the white man now lie apart. Once the white man was his friend; now he is his rival."
His eyes were boring into mine; his teeth set tight.
The doctrine was new to me, but I did not interrupt him.
"It wasn't so in the old days. We shared what we had with them. One-third of the cabins of the South were filled with the old and helpless. Now these unfortunates are out in the cold; their own people can't help them, and the white man won't."
"Were you a slave-owner?" I asked, not wishing to dispute the point.
"No, sir; but my father was. He had fifty of them on our plantation. He never whipped one of them, and he wouldn't let anybody else strike them, either. There wasn't one of them that wouldn't have come back if we had had a place to put him. The old ones are all dead now, thank God!—all except old Aleck; he's around yet."
"One of your father's slaves, did you say?"