But the wariest game was less coy than the poetess. She wrote, that day,
"O! hide me from the Northron's eye!
Let me not hear his fawning voice,
I heard the Southland matron sigh
And saw the piteous tear that" ...
Thus it ended; "as if," said Garnet to John, who with restrained pride showed him the manuscript, "as if grief for the past choked utterance—for the present. There's a wonderful eloquence in that silence, March, tell her to leave it as it is; dry so."
John would have done this had he not become extremely preoccupied. The affair at the old bridge was everybody's burning secret till the prospectors were gone. But the day after they left it was everybody's blazing news. Oddly enough, not what anybody had done, but what Leggett had said—in contempt of the color line—was the microscopic germ of all the fever. From window to window, and from porch to porch, women fed alarm with rumor and rumor with alarm, while on every sidewalk men collaborated in the invention of plans for defensive vengeance.
"Well, they've caught him—pulled him out of a dry well in Libertyville."
"I beg your pardon, he crossed the Ohio this morning at daylight."
John March was light-headed with much drinking of praise for having made it practicable to "smash this unutterable horror in the egg!"
Ravenel, near the Courier office, stopped at the beckon of Lazarus Graves and Charlie Champion. John was with them, laboring under the impression that they were with him. They wanted to consult Ravenel about the miscreant, and the "steps proper to be taken against him."
"When found," suggested Ravenel, and they pleasantly assented.
"Oh, yes," he said again, as the four presently moved out of the hot sun, "but if the color line hadn't been crossed already there wouldn't be any Leggett."