In silence she kissed his lips, kissed each shackle on his wrists, took her handkerchief and wiped the bruised blood from the old wound on his arm the iron had opened afresh, and then with a look, beneath which the Captain shrank, she said in low tones:
“Do your work quickly. You have but a few moments to get out of this town with your prisoner. I have sent a friend to hold my son. If he comes before you go, he will kill you on sight as he would a mad dog.”
With a sneer, the Captain passed the hotel and led the doctor, still in half-unconscious stupor, toward the depot down past his old slave quarters. He had given his negroes who remained faithful each a cabin and a lot.
They looked on in awed silence as the Captain proclaimed:
“Fellow citizens, you are the equal of any white man who walks the ground. The white man’s day is done. Your turn has come.”
As he passed Jake’s cabin, the doctor’s faithful man stepped suddenly in front of him, looking at the Captain out of the corners of his eyes, and asked:
“Is I yo’ equal?”
“Yes.”
“Des lak any white man?”
“Exactly.”