The hound had grown quiet now, and released from the chain, came to sniff at the bunk. All at once he flung up his great head with a low howl, then, crouching, licked the nerveless hand that hung down.
All at once the hound flung up his great head with a low howl,
then, crouching, licked the nerveless hand that hung down
Jubilee Jim looked in startled amaze, then seized the lantern and held it close. "Who dis hyuh?" he said.
As if at the challenge, the eyes in the white face opened and for a single instant consciousness flickered there. "Jube—" said a weak voice, "you—old—scoundrel—" Then the eyes closed and the mutterings recommenced.
The lantern rattled on the floor, as the old negro fell upon his knees by the pallet. "Et's him!" he cried. "Dee Lawd he'p! Et's Marse Harry hese'f!" He leaned and looked, with a painful bewilderment, at the striped garments, the smooth, clipped scalp. "Huccome he got dem close on?" he said to himself, half-fearfully. He stood a moment looking from them to the pallet, then hastily rolled the sodden things into a bundle and thrust it out of sight behind one of the sacks on the floor.
Late the next afternoon the smoke from the stone chimney of the big bungalow rose in a pale spiral into the keen windless air. Inside a leaping fire of chestnut wood burned on the huge hearth and Harry lay on a comfortable, blanket-covered couch in the corner. All day long Jubilee Jim had watched beside him, as he tossed in delirium, now and then touching the hot hand, laying cooling cloths on the fevered wound, or feeding him with a spoon. He had not dared go down the mountain to fetch a doctor, fearing to leave his patient so long alone.
All day, as he watched, his slow brain had been busy with the strangeness of that arrival—most of all with the mystery of the striped clothes. To his simple intelligence, unvexed by the complexities of life in communities, evil and good stood out in sharp and irreconcilable contradistinction, and the garments were a harrowing symbol. But deep in him was that profound, unreasoning belief—the South's touching legacy of ante-bellum days—that trust and confidence that is dog-like and unswerving.
Towards evening, when the sick man became easier and he lay more quietly, though his fever ran high, Jubilee Jim opened the door, and stood looking out onto the lone, frosty hillside. The sun was going down amid a flutter of scarlet scarfs and the marbled pines stood in sombre clusters outlined like sentinels above the pansied twilight of the snowy valley. At length he knelt down and with gnarled hands clasped and eyes still on the colourful sky, he said: