"Listen!" said he, bending forward and speaking in low tones. "The pigment which abides in your skin and gives you your color and the peculiar Negro odor renders you immune from yellow fever. This bottle here is full of yellow fever germs. Organize you a band of trusted Negroes, send them through the South, let them empty these germs into the various reservoirs of the white people of the South and pollute the water. The greatest scourge that the world has ever known will rage in the South. The whites will die by the millions and those that do not die will flee from the stricken land and leave the country to your people.
"The desolation wrought will for a time disorganize this whole nation and the Pan-Slavists will have the more time to plan for the coming struggle.
"My scheme helps you and helps the Pan-Slavist cause and disposes of a common foe, a section of the white race. Of course, we will have you Negroes to fight in the last contest. But you would prefer being the ones living to make the fight, would you not?" asked the man, now nervously awaiting Ensal's next words.
Ensal was silent for a few seconds. Then he asked slowly:
"Do you make that proposition to me, a follower of the Christ?"
"I have anticipated you there. Did not God use plagues and a wholesale slaughter to solve the Egyptian race problem? Shall you be more righteous than God?"
"Really would you, a civilized being, propose to me a course that involves the wholesale destruction of women and innocent babes?" asked Ensal with mounting wrath.
"Did not your God tell the Hebrews to wage a war of extermination on the Canaanites?" asked the man.
Ensal arose and pointing his index finger at the man, said with a voice vibrant with deep feeling:
"Now hear me a while. During the Civil War my race met the requirements of honor where-ever the test was applied—whether it was in the test of the soldier on the field of battle or the slave guarding the women and children at home.