“But that is not all,” went on the Old Man hoarsely. “My poor little girl was seen talking to one of these devils last evening, at dusk, at the further end of the green. And to-day, the moment the Bank was open, she changed a fifty-pound note. There can be no doubt about it. The manager himself told me. Of course, he thought the money was mine. God in heaven! what does it all mean, and what has become of her?”
Schwartz sat down, and bent his head. He gave it up. He didn’t know what to do. Neither did I. I was acquainted with Minkie’s plan, but, so far as I could see, it had nothing in it which was likely to keep her away from home.
No wonder people in Dale End called that a Black Christmas. It was nearly being a fiery one also, because others in the village shared Schwartz’s idea, and it was actually proposed that the police-station should be burnt down and the negroes roasted inside it. Isn’t there a proverb about scratching a Russian and finding a Tartar? Well, to my thinking, you will not find such a world of difference between Surrey and Alabama when a black man is suspected of doing away with a white girl.
And our Minkie, too! Oh, look here, I’m off into the Latin tongues. I can’t express my feelings in pure Anglo-Saxon. Give me a torch and a bucket of tar; I’ll find the feathers! Saperlotte! What was it Giovanni used to say?
CHAPTER V
THE UNDOING OF SCHWARTZ
Told by Minkie
I SUPPOSE it was very wrong of me to leave home without warning. Mam says that if I had told her what I meant to do she would have been spared all anxiety. Of course, Mam means that now; my own private impression is that all sorts of objections might have occurred to her then; and any interference with my plan might have upset things altogether. However, if I tell the story in my own way, you will see I had several good reasons for acting as I did. One of my copy-books had a head-line: “It is a dangerous yet true axiom that the end justifies the means,” and I never understood that sentence until I read in a paper how a clever little boy had extinguished a fire in a bedroom by pulling a plug out of the cistern in an attic overhead. Had there been no fire, that clever little boy would have got spanked. See?
And there was no time to be lost. Seven powerful negroes had not come to Dale End for amusement. They meant mischief. Without going so far as killing us all in our beds, they could easily have attacked the house and held us up, as they say in America, until the ju-ju was found. They were not afraid of the law; six of them were ready to go to prison provided the seventh got clear away with their funny little god. And what would Mam have thought then? And Evangeline? And what would Polly have said?