“We don’t all of us have emotions stronger than money-getting,” added I.
“I don’t know about emotions,” said Tim. “There’s forty of their wives and eighteen hundred niggers, and every Saturday night they has a fight an’ a batch on ’em gets killed, an’ I know it’s terrible expensive on labor. Most as bad as moonshine.”
“Have you got King Kelly, yet?” said Coe, in an undertone.
“Hush!” hissed Captain Healy, dramatically. Just then I noticed a file of peculiarly idle negroes sauntering down the “right of way;” they had passed us once or twice before, and appeared to have no occupation. “See anythin’ peculiar about them niggers?”
“They are very lazy,” said Coe.
“They look like minstrels,” said Miss Jeanie.
“By gracious!” cried Healy, slapping his thigh, “if she hasn’t hit it!” We looked at him inquiringly; he dropped his voice to a stage whisper. “Come up here,” and he started, dragging Mrs. Judge Pennoyer by one hand up the new gravel slope beside the line. Raoul followed, with Miss May; he had been very silent that morning; and I with Miss Jeanie. Her little foot was buried at once in the sliding gravel, over the dainty low shoe; I wanted to carry her up, had only propriety sanctioned it. At the top, Healy swept the horizon as if for spies; then bending over us, all in a close group, he said:
“Them ain’t real niggers—them’s United States revenue officers from New Orleans, under General McBride.”
“General McBride?”
“He’s in hidin’ in my hut. He wouldn’t black up. But them deputy-marshals thought it was a spree. We had to do it. Every Saturday the niggers are paid off—one dollar and fifty cents a day, nigh on to ten dollars apiece—an’ then King Kelly he’d come down from his stills in the mountain, with his men loaded with casks o’ pine-top, warranted to kill—an’ by sundown eighteen hundred niggers would be blind-drunk, an’ fit for shootin’. On last Sunday we lost sixty-two hands. An’ the head contractor, he swore nigh to lift yer ha’r off.”