Mr Tom was smoking a very big Manila cheroot, and was accompanied upon his rounds by a huge and ferocious-looking Cuban bloodhound, the hungry corners of whose great greedy slobbering mouth hung down hideously on either side in loose folds of skin of the most bloodthirsty and sinister aspect. As he went along, Tom Dupuy kept patting affectionately from time to time his four-footed favourite, to whom, nevertheless, every now and again he applied, as it seemed out of pure wantonness, the knotted lash of the cruel dog-whip which he carried jauntily in his right hand. The dog, however, formidable as he was, so far from resenting this unkindly treatment, appeared to find in it something exceedingly congenial to his own proper barbarous nature; for after each such savage cut upon his bare flanks from the knotted hide, he only cowered for a second, and then fawned the more closely and slavishly than ever upon his smiling master, looking up into his face with a strange approving glance from his dull eyes, that seemed to say: ‘Exactly the sort of thing I should do myself, if you were the dog, and I were the whip-holder.’
At a bend of the path, where the road turned suddenly aside to cross the dry bed of a winter torrent, Tom Dupuy came upon a clump of tall cabbage palms, hard by a low mud-built negro hut, overshadowed in front by two or three huge flowering bushes of crimson hibiscus. A tall, spare, gray-headed negro, in a coarse sack by way of a shirt, with his bare and sinewy arms thrust loosely through the long slits which alone did duty in the place of sleeve-holes, was leaning as he passed upon a wooden post. The bloodhound, breaking away suddenly from his master, at sight and smell of the black skin, its natural prey, rushed up fiercely towards the old labourer, and leapt upon him with a savage snarl of his big teeth, and with ominous glittering eyes. But the negro, stronger and more muscular than he looked, instead of flinching, caught the huge brute in his long lean arms, and flung him from him by main force with an angry oath, dashing his great form heavily against the rough pathway. Quick as lightning, the dog, leaping up again at once with diabolical energy in its big flabby mouth, was just about to spring once more upon his scowling opponent, when Tom Dupuy, catching him angrily by his leather collar, threw him down and held him back, growling fiercely, and showing his huge tearing teeth in a ferocious grin, after the wonted manner of his deadly kind. ‘Quiet, Slot, quiet!’ the master said, patting his hollow forehead with affectionate admiration. ‘Quiet, sir; down this minute! Down, I tell you!—He’s death on niggers, Delgado—death on niggers. You should stand out of the way, you know, when you see him coming. Of course, these dogs never can abide the scent of you black fellows. The bookay d’Afreek always drives a bloodhound frantic.’
The old negro drew himself up haughtily and sternly, and stared back in the insolent face of the slouching young white man with a proud air of native dignity. ‘Buckra gentleman hab no right, den, to go about wid dem dog,’ he answered angrily, fixing his piercing fiery eye on the bloodhound’s face. ‘Dem dog always spring at a black man wherebber dey find him. If you want to keep dem, you should keep dem tied up at de house, so as to do for watchdog against tievin’ naygur. But you doan’t got no right to bring dem about de ro-ads, loose dat way, jumpin’ up at people’s troats, when dem standin’ peaceable beside dem own hut here.’
Tom Dupuy laughed carelessly. ‘It’s their nature, you see, Delgado,’ he answered with a pleasant smile, still holding the dog and caressing it lovingly. ‘They and their fathers were trained long ago in slavery days to hunt runaway niggers up in the mountains and track them to their hiding-places, and drag them back, alive or dead, to their lawful masters; and of course that makes them run naturally after the smell of a nigger, as a terrier runs after the smell of a rat. When the rat sees the terrier coming, he scuttles off as hard as his legs can carry him into his hole; and when you see Slot’s nose turning round the corner, you ought to scuttle off into your hut as quick as lightning, if you want to keep your black skin whole upon your body. Slot never can abide the smell of a nigger.—Can you, Slot, eh, old fellow?’
The negro looked at him with unconcealed aversion. ‘I is not rat, Mistah Dupuy,’ he said haughtily. ‘I is gentleman myself, same as you is, sah, when I come here over from Africa.’
Tom Dupuy sneered openly in his very face. ‘That’s the way with all you Africans,’ he answered with a laugh, as he flipped the ash idly from his big cheroot. ‘I never knew an imported nigger yet, since I was born, that wasn’t a king in his own country. Seems to me, they must all be kings over yonder in Congo, with never a solitary subject to divide between them.—But I say, my friend, what’s going on over this way to-night, that so many niggers are going up all the time to the Methody chapel? Are you going to preach ’em a missionary sermon?’
Delgado glanced at him a trifle suspiciously. ‘Dar is a prayer-meetin’, sah,’ he said with a cold look in his angry eye, ‘up at Gilead. De bredderin gwine to meet dis ebenin’.’
‘Ho, ho; so that’s it! A prayer-meeting, is it? Well, if I go up there, will you let me attend it?’
Delgado’s thick lip curled contemptuously, as he answered with a frown: ‘When cockroach gib dance, him no ax fowl!’
‘Ah, I see. The fowl would eat the cockroaches, would he? Well, then, Louis Delgado, I give you fair warning; if you don’t want a white man to go and look on at your nigger meetings, depend upon it, it’s because you’re brewing some mischief or other up there against the constituted authorities. I shall tell my uncle to set his police to look well after you. You were always a bad-blooded, discontented, disaffected fellow, and I believe now you’re up to some of your African devilry or other. No obeah,[1] mind you, Delgado—no obeah! Prayer-meetings, my good friend, as much as you like; but whatever you do, no obeah.’