As they sat alone that evening, neither Wilson Jacobs nor his sister offered any comment upon how they were saved an embarrassing ordeal. They were both thinking, thinking, and seeing, with their eyes full of tears, a chair where one had sat and talked and laughed with them the Sunday night before.
Their hearts were heavy, very heavy, for, strangely enough, they felt that Mildred Latham would never sit in that chair again.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Beast and The Jungle
"REMEMBER THE SABBATH DAY AND KEEP IT HOLY"
This was the inscription under a cartoon in the Effingham Herald, one Sunday, following a Sunday when crime seemed to have run riot. The cartoon pictured a huge knife stuck into a human heart, and the moral was, that on the Sabbath day, when its population was supposed to be at pious worship, murder was un-Godly.
The Sunday previous to this, seven different murders had occurred in that many different parts of the town. Sidney had read the accounts, and said nothing when he saw they were all black people. Only one exception, and that was one who had shot another, and in attempting to escape, had been shot by the police.
Thus was the condition of crime in Effingham. It was a rare Sunday that didn't have five or six shootings, killings and cutting affrays. The record for the previous year showed more than three hundred murders, mostly by Negroes upon each other, and in part by the police. Eighty per cent of all murder in the city was among two-fifths of the whole, or the Negro population. But what surprised Wyeth was, that insofar as speaking of it as an everyday occurrence, and something to be expected, the colored people paid little attention to it.
By this time, Wyeth had become known as a severe critic. And, therefore, against colored people in their effort for salvation, so the critics complained. There was one, however, who saw beneath the surface, and who said, in reply to the criticisms going the rounds, that Wyeth was criticised, not for the criticisms, but for his method of bringing the truth before the eyes which did not wish to see it.