I try occasionally to picture to myself the lonely horror-stricken nights Jabez Puffwater must have endured with that appalling fear always crouching within him, egging him on towards the culminating tragedy of his sad career.
There had been talk of a lynching in New Orleans and of a shooting in Old Virginia and there were even whispers of a slapping in Alabama.
Jabez was priming his pistol one morning while he hastily scanned the elevating disclosures—social and otherwise—of the New York American, when a breathless woman rode up to the store on a tricycle. She delivered a note to Jabez and waited while he read it.
"Come at once—am exceedingly ill—Aunt Topsy."
Jabez thought for a moment—then crushing down his rising apprehensions he mounted his mare Buffalo Babs and made for the hills.
Ten miles there and ten miles back, and the fear always with him—the fear of the Black Rising.
Many psychoanalysts have endeavoured to discover the exact motive for Jabez Puffwater's sudden and unexpected slaying of his old Aunt Topsy—whose coal-black arms had fondled him as a baby. Many theories have been put forward, but none of them—with the exception, perhaps, of Herman Pipper—possess the ring of truth. Pipper's deduction of the circumstantial evidence is that it was all the outcome of a naughty practical joke played by little Michael Drisher who appeared suddenly during Jabez's interview with his Aunt and burst the awful news upon them that there had been a fearful Black Rising in Oggsville, Ken. and that debauch—murder—and worse were going on all over the globe.
"With a great cry," Pipper tells us, "Jabez smote his brow. 'At last!' he moaned in deep anguish. 'At last it has come!' Then he turned, and seizing a large milk bottle he battered the head of Aunt Topsy, crying the while in the voice of a fanatic, 'For my home town! For my home town! This is a just reprisal!!!' Then with a last look at the havoc he had wrought he went out of the house and into the wilderness—"
Pipper's imaginative description ends too abruptly to be really satisfactory; but one fact about the life of Jabez Puffwater will remain emblazoned on America's history for time immemorial—that if he had only possessed the rhetoric of a Proon—the presence of a Hooter—the education of a Floop—the racial understanding of a Bogtoe and the mentality of a Snurge—he would not only have proved himself invaluable to the home constituency of Oggsville, Ken. but have been an entirely different man altogether.