"You'll get the reward all right, if it's him," said the sergeant reassuringly. "But you'll have to wait till it's identified. There've been a lot of duplicates brought in, sabe."
Presently other men in khaki and flannel, who in spite of their undress showed, somehow, as officers, came down the street, and they, and the sergeant, and the man with the bag, went into the house.
After a long wait, an orderly came out, pale and shaken, and turned toward the military telegraph station. "It's him," he said briefly, to his waiting fellows. "That Contract Dentist in there knowed him by his teeth. God! I'm plumb glad I ain't no kind of medico."
The men looked at each other, silently, for a long minute. The spirit of jesting seemed to have left them. The judicial one spoke first. "Well, he got his good and hard at last," said he. "But he sure got a run for his money."
Then I understood what it was all about. I wrote of that thing in the bag once, not knowing it then for a pawn in the Game of the Little Gods. There was a time when men called it Fagan.
While Fagan was still a kinky-haired youngster, clad only in the traditional shirt, a question forced itself on his attention. "Why ain't I got a pappy?" he asked his mother, and the great, deep-bosomed woman laughed the deep, melodious laugh of her race.
"Lawszee, honey, I raickon you has," she replied. "Mos' chillen has."
"Who is my pappy?" the child persisted.
The woman laughed again. "Lawszee, chile, how you spaik me to 'maimber that? I'se got other things to 'maimber, I raickon."
We couldn't expect much of a Fagan, born of that race and class, and he learned not to expect much of us. A bit of food, a bit of clothing, and a chance to roll around on the levee with the other pickaninnies, and bask in the sunshine and sniff the sweety-sour smells from the sugar-ships, sufficed him. For many years these pleasures were his for the taking. And as he grew older they still sufficed, with the addition of a little cheap tobacco and cheaper gin, and he found that a modicum of labor and a care never to offend one of the heaven-born white race would procure them. The labor was easy, for the son of the deep-bosomed, supple-limbed woman had grown, as the rank, free growth of a swamp shoots up, into a great, broad, graceful man to whom the toil of others was mere play. And he was of a nature so easy-going and joyous and childishly obliging that the heaven-born pointed him out with approval as "a nigger like we had before the war."