“Patricia—” the deep voice of the strong man was beginning to say as I was starting to spring forward in his defense and to do—I do not know what—when a firm grasp was laid upon my shoulder and I was turned away from the window into the light of the wide hall and found my Uncle, the General Robert, looking down into my flashing eyes with a great and very cool calmness.
“Young man,” he said as he gave to me a very powerful shake, “all women are poison but some are vitriol and others just—Oh, well, paregoric. Go out there and take another dose of that soothing syrup labeled Susan Tomlinson, before I take you home, and you—keep—away—from—vitriol—or—I’ll—break—your—hot—young— head. Vitriol, mind you!” With which command my Uncle, the General Robert, strode down the hall in the direction of the smoking room and left me blinking in the lights of the wide hall.
“Little Mas’ Robert,” came in a soft voice at my elbow as I stood tottering, “is you got a picture of yo’ mudder you could show Cato some day when the General ain’t lookin’. ’Fore I dies I wants to set my eyes on de woman dat drawed little Mas’ Henry away from us all. Dey is such a thing in dis hard old world as love what you goes ’crost many waters’ to git, and he shorely got it.” And I looked into the eyes of that old black man to find a truth that all the white humans about me, myself included, were acting in the terms of a lie.
Before I could answer the old man, in through the window came the Gouverneur Faulkner and the beautiful Madam Whitworth, and from his white face set in sternness and hers with its smile of the opening rose upon its red mouth I could not tell whether his honor had been slain or had been spared for another round.
“I’ll want you in my office at the Capitol at eleven to-morrow, Robert,” he said to me, and there was a cold sternness in his glance as they passed by me and the old Cato into the ballroom.
“At four,” murmured the beautiful Madam Whitworth as she swept past me with a soft smile but in a tone of voice too low for any ears save my own and I think of the old Cato’s.
For a very short moment the old black man detained me as he searched one of the pockets of his long gray coat and then he handed to me a tiny flat parcel apparently folded in some kind of thin red cloth.
“Wear that in your left shoe, honey, day and night. You’ll need it if she’s got her eye on you,” he said as he hurried away from me into the smoking room.
After disrobing that night, or rather in the early morning of the following day, I investigated the contents of that package. In it were a gray feather off of an apparently very nice chicken, a very old and rusty pin bent in two places and a flat little black seed I had never before beheld.
I gazed at the package for several long moments, then I put back upon my left foot the silk sock I had removed, placed the token of old Cato within it under my heel, dived into that large bed of my ancestors and in the darkness covered up my head tightly with the silk comforter.