“He don’t look mad,” thought Josh. “I hope he ain’t mad with we uns.” Josh had met his idol in Lewis Somerville. Boylike he admired strength more than anything in the world, and could not this young giant lift a log and place it on his shoulders and carry it to the desired spot as easily as he himself could carry a twig? There was a poetical streak in this mountain boy, too, that saw in Lewis the young knight. “’Tain’t nothin’ to fool a nigger,” he comforted himself by saying.
“Well, sir,” he said cheerfully to Lewis, “the hornets is all good as dead. What must we uns do now?”
“Now you are going to take your punishment for being no gentleman.”
“Gentleman! Huh! We uns ain’t never set up to be no gentleman.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that. When I hired you to come work for my cousins, I understood, of course, that you were a gentleman. Otherwise I would not have considered you for a moment. Do you suppose I would have any one come around these ladies who are everything in the world to me if he were not a gentleman?”
“There’s that nigger, Oscar! We uns is as good as he is. He ain’t no gentleman.”
“He is as good a gentleman as there is in the land. He came up here with these young ladies whom he has known ever since they were babies rather than desert them when he thought he might be needed. I have never known Oscar to say a coarse word or do an ungentle act. I, too, have known him all my life. He is a good, clean man, inside and out, and would cut off his hand before he would scare a helpless woman.”
“’Twan’t nothin’ but a nigger ’ooman!”
“You say nothing but a negro as though that were the lowest thing in the world, and still just now you spoke with a certain pride of being as good as one. Now I tell you, you are not as good as one unless you act better. You have a long line of free English ancestors behind you and these poor things are but recently out of slavery. Now you come with me and take your punishment if you want to stay and work for this camp.”