Reginald had always been and always would be true son and heir of Hiram Wiggins, the manufacturin’ tailor. Although as relationships go in this world, he wuz only his grandnephew.
But he had laid claim, and wuz the only possessor of all his crafty, cruel, brutal, aggressive nature, his low habits and tastes, his insolent, half bold, half meachin’ manners.
Hiram Wiggins’es own children wuz two old maid daughters, so meek they could hardly say their souls wuz their own.
They worked samplers, copied from their mothers, and regulated their behavior on this model, which wuz a eminently Christian one, and did much good in a modest, unassumin’ way with the wealth their father had heaped up. They wuz the children of their mother, and their cousin Reginald, true son of their father.
But I am a eppisodin’, and to resoom.
Col. Seybert, like all men of his class, had some choice spirits that copied his manners and carried out his plans. And among them all who toadied to him and carried out his base plans, the foremost one wuz Nick Burley, as we have said prior and before this.
He hated Victor as much as Col. Seybert did. One of the causes of Burley’s dislike was what feeds enmity so often in base natures—Victor wuz so superior to him that Burley wuz always oncomfortable in his presence.
To be with a young man who neither drank, swore, nor tore the characters of women to tatters, and boasted of great deeds in love and valor, wuz to Burley incomprehensible. What wuz mysterious must be wrong.
And then Victor evidently shunned the society of Burley, and avoided him whenever he could. And as Burley wuz a white man and Victor “a damned nigger,” such a state of things wuz not to be borne.
Col. Seybert had, we may be sure, fanned the coals of hatred to a still greater heat, till at last they wuz at a white glow, and Nick Burley wuz ready to do any act that Col. Seybert recommended, anything for vengeance and “to show that cussed black dog not to feel above a gentleman and a white man.”