“I reckon so; yes. Well, now, this is what I call providential; and I reckon I wa’n’t fur wrong in coming, if it is Sunday. The folks in No’thern Ohio don’t do no business on Sundays, and money paid Sunday a’n’t paid at all—can be collected over again; but work is driving awfully now. The freshet put the cawn back so for awhile; but it is ketching up now. But I knowed I ought to come.”
Handshakings and preliminaries over, the trio were soon seated around a large writing table—colored men all of them. Both Elly and Watta were tall and slender—the former quite black, and the latter very light—and both had enjoyed the blessing of education at a Northern school established for the benefit of freedmen, and almost sanctified to the race by bearing the name of “Lincoln.”
Jesse Roome’s northern experiences had not been with books, save at evening schools, of which he had eagerly availed himself; but his naturally well-balanced mind and keen powers of observation had not been idle; and sensible ideas of common duties and relations of life in a highly-civilized and enlightened community were his reward.
Elly was a thriving lawyer and ex-member of the State Legislature, where he had been “Speaker of the House,” and, ever with an eye to business, he had already scented a fee in his visitor’s troubled manner and reply.
“You must excuse my abruptness, but I leave on the train for Columbia in half an hour,” said he, “and you and Watta can talk after I am gone. Now, what can I do for you?”
“First of all, I want some money for my services as constable; and second I want to talk about the political situation, and to tell you some things I have heard men say that is interested. Well, how I got to know this thing—”
“What thing?” asked the lawyer. “Why, that Elly and Watta and Kanrasp and some score of other radicals, has got to be killed,” said Uncle Jesse, lowering his voice to a husky whisper.
“Ha! ha! ha?” roared Elly, throwing himself back in his chair, till his head seemed in danger of getting wedged between the chair-back and a bookcase behind him. “Why, Roome, I thought you was a sensible man,” said he, when he had recovered his breath. “The days of the Ku-Klux Klan’s are over, and all done in this State. When we punished two hundred and fifty of the fifteen hundred ‘very respectable gentlemen,’ as they called each other, who were arrested in 1871-’2, the thing was killed out here, you see.”
“No, I don’t see,” said Roome.
“But do you suppose a man really means what he says when he talks like that now-a-days?” and the two threatened men laughed, and wriggled in great apparent merriment, and in true negro fashion, though really quaking with fear.