Now he stood on the veranda and puffed his cigar with quick, short draughts, as a man does who falters between two horns of a dilemma. He turned his head to one side as if listening to his own thoughts, his tall, pointed collar meantime fitting snugly in a crease of his furrowed jaw.
At this moment the shambling, yet in a way facile, footsteps of Barnaby, the sporadic freedman of the household, were soothing. Colonel Sommerton turned his eyes on the comer inquiringly, almost eagerly.
“Well, Barn, you're back,” he said.
“Yah, sah; I'se had er confab wid 'em,” remarked the negro, seating himself on the top step of the veranda, and mopping his coal-black face with a red cotton handkerchief; “an' hit do beat all. Niggahs is mos'ly eejits, spacially w'en yo' wants 'em to hab some sense.”
He was a huge, ill-shapen, muscular fellow, old but still vigorous, and in his small black eyes twinkled an unsounded depth of shrewdness. He had been the Colonel's slave from his young manhood to the close of the war; since then he had hung around Ellijay what time he was not sponging a livelihood from Sommerton Place under color of doing various light turns in the vegetable garden, and of attending to his quondam master's horses.
Barnaby was a great banjoist, a charming song-singer, and a leader of the negroes around about. Lately he was gaining some reputation as a political boss.
There was but one political party in the county (for the colored people were so few that they could not be called a party), and the only struggle for office came in the pursuit of a nomination, which was always equivalent to election. Candidates were chosen at a convention or mass-meeting of the whites and the only figure that the blacks were able to cut in the matter was by reason of a pretended, rather than a real, prejudice against them which was used by the candidates (who are always white men) to further their electioneering schemes, as will presently appear.
“Hit do beat all,” Barnaby repeated, shaking his heavy head reflectively, and making a grimace both comical and hideous. “Dat young man desput sma't and cunnin', sho's yo' bo'n he is. He done been foolin' wid dem niggahs a'ready.”
The reader may as well be told at once that if a candidate could by any means make the negroes support his opponent for the nomination it was the best card he could possibly play; or, if he could not quite do this, but make it appear that the other fellow was not unpopular in colored circles, it served nearly the same turn.
Phyllis, when she ran crying up-stairs after the conversation with her father, went to her room, and fell into a chair by the window. So it chanced that she overheard the conference between Colonel Sommerton and Barnaby, and long after it was ended she still sat there leaning on the window-sill. Her eyes showed a trifle of irritation, but the tears were all gone.