“Let me down, seh!” shouted the Colonel. Mike set him down, and he marched proudly into the room, and seated himself with dignity and firmness on the extreme edge of a chair.
The Colonel was very small indeed for a man of so much dignity. He could not have been more than five foot one or two; he was slender—but his figure was shapely and supple. He was unquestionably a handsome man, with fine, thin features and an aquiline profile—like a miniature Henry Clay. His hair was snow-white—prematurely, no doubt—and at the first glance you thought he was clean shaven. Then you saw that there was scarcely a hair on his cheeks, and that only the finest imaginable line of snowy white moustaches curled down his upper lip. His skin was smooth as a baby’s and of the color of old ivory. His teeth, which he was just then exhibiting in a sardonic smile, were white, small, even. But if he was small, his carriage was large, and military. There was something military, too, about his attire. He wore a high collar, a long blue frock coat, and tight, light gray trousers with straps. That is, the coat had once been blue, the trousers once light gray, but they were now of many tints and tones, and, at that exact moment, they had here and there certain peculiar high lights of whitewash.
The Colonel did not wait to be arraigned. Sweeping his black, piercing eye over our little group, he arraigned us.
“Well, gentlemen,” with keen irony in his tone, “I reckon you think you’ve done a right smart thing, getting the Southern gentleman in a hole? A pro-dee-gious fine thing, I reckon, since it’s kept you away from chu’ch. Baptis’ church, I believe?” This was to poor Canfield, who was suspected of having been of that communion in his youth, and of being much ashamed of it after his marriage to an aristocratic Episcopalian. “Nice Sunday mo’ning to worry a Southern gentleman! Gentleman who’s owned a plantation that you could stick this hyeh picayune town into one co’neh of! Owned mo’ niggehs than you eveh saw. Robbed of his land and his niggehs by you Yankee gentlemen. Drinks a little wine to make him fo’get what he’s suffehed. Gets ovehtaken. Tries to avenge an insult to his honah. Put him in a felon’s cell and whitewash his gyarments. And now you come hyeh—you come hyeh—” here his eye fell with deep disapproval upon Winthrop’s white flannels—“you come hyeh in youh underclothes, and you want to have him held fo’ Special Sessions.”
“You are mistaken, Colonel Brereton,” Winthrop interposed; “if we can have your promise—“
“I will promise you nothing, seh!” thundered the Colonel, who had a voice like a church-organ, whenever he chose to use it; “I will make no conventions with you! I will put no restrictions on my right to defend my honah. Put me in youh felon’s cell. I will rot in youh infehnal dungeons; but I will make no conventions with you. You can put me in striped breeches, but you cyan’t put my honah in striped breeches!”
“That settles it,” said the justice.
“And all,” continued the Colonel, oratorically, “and all this hyeh fuss and neglect of youh religious duties, fo’ one of the cheapest and most o’nery niggehs I eveh laid eyes on. Why, I wouldn’t have given one hundred dollahs fo’ that niggeh befo’ the wah. No, seh, I give you my wo’d, that niggeh ain’t wo’th ninety dollahs!”
“Mike!” said the Justice, significantly. The Colonel arose promptly, to insure a voluntary exit. He bowed low to Winthrop.
“Allow me to hope, seh,” he said, “that you won’t catch cold.” And with one lofty and comprehensive salute he marched haughtily back to his dungeon, followed by the towering Mike.