Harry recognised his man at once, and the hot temper of the Lincolnshire Noels boiled up within him. He hit out at the fellow with his riding-whip viciously. Delgado didn’t attempt to dodge the blow—a negro never does—but merely turned his head haughtily, so that the bundle of sticks pushed hard against the horse’s nose, and set it bleeding with the force of the sudden turn. Delgado knew it would: the sticks, in fact, were prickly acacia. The horse plunged and reared a little, and backed up in fright against the cactus hedge. The sharp cactus spines and the long aloe-like needles of the pinguin leaves in the hedgerow goaded his flank severely as he backed against them. He gave another plunge, and hit up wildly against Nora’s mount. Nora kept her seat bravely, but with some difficulty. Harry was furious. Forgetting himself entirely, he knocked the bundle of sticks off the old man’s head with a sudden swish of his thick riding-crop, and then proceeded to lay the whip twice or three times about Delgado’s ears with angry vehemence. To his great surprise, Delgado stood, erect and motionless, as if he didn’t even notice the blows. Appeased by what he took to be the man’s submissiveness, Harry dug his heel into his horse’s side and hurried forward to rejoin Nora, who had ridden ahead hastily to avoid the turmoil.
‘He’s an ill-conditioned, rude, bad-blooded fellow, that nigger there,’ he said apologetically to his pretty companion. ‘I know him before. He’s the very same man I told you of the other evening, that wouldn’t pick my whip up for me the first day I came to Trinidad. I’m glad he’s had a taste of it to-day for his continual impudence.’
‘He’ll have you up for assault, you may be sure, Mr Noel,’ Nora answered earnestly. ‘And if Mr Hawthorn tries the case, he’ll give it against you, for he’ll never allow any white man to strike a negro. That man’s name is Delgado; he’s an African, you know—an imported African—and a regular savage; and he had a fearful quarrel once with papa and Tom Dupuy about the wages, which papa has never forgiven. But Mr Hawthorn does say’—and Nora dropped her voice a little—‘that he’s really had a great deal of provocation, and that Tom Dupuy behaved abominably, which of course is very probable, for what can you expect from Tom Dupuy, Mr Noel?—But still’—and this she said very loudly ‘all the negroes themselves will tell you that Louis Delgado’s a regular rattlesnake, and you must put your foot firmly down upon him if you want to crush him.’
‘If you put your foot on rattlesnake,’ Louis Delgado cried aloud from behind, in angry accents, ‘you crush rattlesnake; but rattlesnake sting you, so you die.’ And then he muttered to himself in lower tones: ‘An’ de rattlesnake has got sting in him tail dat will hurt dat mulatto man from Englan’, still, dat tink himself proper buckra.’
Tom Dupuy and his uncle had just reached the spot when Louis Delgado said angrily to himself, in negro soliloquy, this offensive sentence. Tom reined in and looked smilingly at his uncle as Delgado said it. ‘So you know something, too, about this confounded Englishman, you wretched nigger you!’ he said condescendingly. ‘You’ve found out that our friend Noel’s a woolly-headed mulatto, have you, Delgado?’
Louis Delgado’s eyes sparkled with gratified malevolence as he answered with a cunning smile: ‘Aha, Mistah Tom Dupuy, you glad to hear dat, sah! You want to get some information from de poor naygur dis ebenin’, do you! No, no, sah; de Dupuys an’ me, we is not fren’; we is at variance one wit de odder. I doan’t gwine to tell you nuffin’ at all, sah, about de buckra from Englan’. But when mule kick too much, I say to him often: “Ha, ha, me fren’, you is too proud. You tink you is horse. I s’pose you doan’t rightly remember dat your own fader wasn’t nuffin’ but a common jackass!”’
He loved to play with both his intended victims at once, as a cat plays with a captured mouse before she kills it. Keep him in suspense as long as you can—that’s the point of the game. Dandle him, and torture him, and hold him off; but never tell him the truth outright, for good or for evil, as long as you can possibly help it.
‘Do you really know anything,’ Tom Dupuy asked eagerly, ‘or are you only guessing, like all the rest of us? Do you mean to tell me you’ve got any proof that the fellow’s a nigger?—Come, come, Delgado, we may have quarrelled, but you needn’t be nasty about it. I’ve got a grudge against this man Noel, and I don’t mind paying you liberally for anything you can tell me against him.’
But Delgado shook his head doggedly. ‘I doan’t want your money, sah,’ he answered with a slow drawl; ‘I want more dan your money, if I want anyting. But I doan’t gwine to help you agin me own colour. Buckra for buckra, an’ colour for colour! If you want to find out about him, why doan’t you write to de buckra gentlemen over in Barbadoes?’
He kept the pair of white men there, dawdling and parleying, for twenty minutes nearly, while Harry and Nora went riding away alone towards the mountain cabbage-palms. It pleased Delgado thus to be able to hold the two together on the tenter-hooks of suspense—to exercise his power before the two buckras. At last, Tom Dupuy condescended to direct entreaty. ‘Delgado,’ he said with much magnanimity, ‘you know I don’t often ask a favour of a nigger—it ain’t the way with us Dupuys; it don’t run in the family—but still, I ask you as a personal favour to tell me whatever you know about this matter: I have reasons of my own which make me ask you as a personal favour.’