“Well, son,” said Judge Priest, “to begin with, ef I was you I'd run back inside of my store and put my hat on before I ketched a bad cold. And ef I was the chief of police of this city I'd find the accused party and lock him up good and tight. And ef I was everybody else I'd remain ez ca'm ez I could till I'd heared both sides of the case. There's nearly always two sides to every case, and sometimes there's likely to be three or four sides. I expect to impanel a new grand jury along in January and I wouldn't be surprised ef they looked into the matter purty thoroughly. They ginerally do.
“It's too bad, though, about Beaver Yancy!” added the judge; “I certainly trust he pulls through. Maybe he will—he's powerful husky. There's one consolation—he hasn't got any family, has he?”
And, with that, Judge Priest left them and went on down the snow-piled street and turned in at Mr. Soule's door. What with reading a Louisville paper and playing a long game of checkers with Squire Rountree behind the prescription case, and telephoning to the adjutant regarding that night's meeting of Gideon K. Irons Camp, and at noontime eating a cove oyster stew which a darky brought him from Sherill's short-order restaurant, two doors below, and doing one thing and another, he spent the biggest part of the day inside of Soule's and so missed his chance to observe the growing and the mounting of popular indignation.
It would seem Beaver Yancy had more friends than any unprejudiced observer would have credited him with having. Mainly they were the type of friends who would not have lent him so much as fifty cents under any conceivable circumstance, but stood ready to shed human blood on his account. Likewise, as the day wore on, and the snow, under the melting influence of the sun, began to run off the eaves and turn to slush in the streets, a strong prejudice against the presence of alien day labourers developed with marvellous and sinister rapidity.
Yet, had those who cavilled but stopped long enough to take stock of things, they might have read this importation as merely one of the manifestations of the change that was coming over our neck of the woods—the same change that had been coming for years, and the same that inevitably would continue coming through years to follow.
Take for example, Legal Row—that short street of stubby little brick buildings where all the lawyers and some of the doctors had their offices. Summer after summer, through the long afternoons, the tenants had sat there in cane-bottomed chairs tilted back against the housefronts, swapping gossip and waiting for a dog fight or a watermelon cutting to break the monotony. But Legal Row was gone now and lawyers did not sit out on the sidewalks any more; it was not dignified. They were housed, most of them, on the upper floor levels of the sky-scraping Planters' Bank building. Perhaps Easterners would not have rated it as a skyscraper; but in our country the skies are low and friendly skies, and a structure of eight stories, piled one on the other, with a fancy cornice to top off with, rears mightily high and imposing when about it, for contrast, are only two and three and four story buildings.
Kettler's wagon yard, where the farmers used to bring their tobacco for overnight storage, and where they slept on hay beds in the back stalls, with homemade bedquilts wrapped round them, had been turned into a garage and smelled now of gasoline, oils and money transactions. A new brick market house stood on the site of the old wooden one. A Great White Way that was seven blocks long made the business district almost as bright as day after dark—almost, but not quite. There was talk of establishing a civic centre, with a regular plaza, and a fountain in the middle of the plaza. There was talk of trying the commission form of government. There was talk of adopting a town slogan; talk of an automobile club and of a country club. And now white labour, in place of black, worked on a construction job.
When, after many false alarms, the P. A. & O. V. got its Boaz Ridge Extension under way the contractors started with negro hands; but the gang bosses came from up North, whence the capital had likewise come, and they did not understand the negroes and the negroes did not understand them, and there was trouble from the go-off. If the bosses fraternised with the darkies the darkies loafed; if, taking the opposite tack, the bosses tried to drive the gangs under them with hard words the gangs grew sullen and insolent.
There was a middle ground, but the perplexed whites could not find it. A Southem-born overseer or a Southem-born steamboat mate could have harried the crews with loud profanity, with dire threats of mutilation and violent death, and they would have grinned back at him cheerfully and kept right on at their digging and their shovelling. But when a grading expert named Flaherty, from Chicago, Illinois, shook a freckled fist under the nose of one Dink Bailey, coloured, for whom, just the night before, he had bought drinks in a groggery, the aforesaid Dink Bailey tried to disarticulate him with a razor and made very fair headway toward the completion of the undertaking, considering he was so soon interrupted.
Having a time limit ever before their pestered eyes, it sorely irked the contractors that, whereas five hundred black, brown and yellow men might drop their tools Saturday night at six o'clock, a scant two hundred or so answered when the seven-o'clock whistle blew on Monday morning. The others came straggling back on Tuesday or Wednesday, or even on Thursday, depending on how long their wages held out.