‘We got nuffin, sah,’ Uncle ’Zekiel answered, blankly and whiningly, now helpless as a child before the sudden inundation of armed rioters, for without his master he could do nothing.
Harry looked around him desperately for a moment, then, advancing a step with hasty premeditation, he wrenched a cutlass suddenly by an unexpected snatch from one of the foremost batch of rioters, and stepped back with it once more unhurt, as if by miracle, into the narrow pass of the mahogany doorway.
‘Stand away, Miss Dupuy!’ he cried to her earnestly. ‘If you value your life, stand back, I beg of you. This is no place for you to-night. Run, run! If you don’t escape, there’ll be more murder done presently.’
‘I shall not go,’ Nora answered, clenching her fist hard and knitting her brow sternly, ‘as long as one of these abominable wretches dares to stop without permission upon my father’s piazza.’
‘Then stand away, you there!’ Harry shouted aloud to the surging mob; ‘stand away this moment, every one of you! Whoever steps one single step nearer this lady behind me, that step shall be his last.’
Delgado stood still and hesitated once more, with strange irresolution—he didn’t like to hit the brown man—but Isaac Pourtalès, lifting his cutlass wildly above his head, took a step in front and brought it down with a fierce swish towards Harry’s skull, in spite of kinship. Harry parried it dexterously with his own cutlass, like a man who has learned what fencing means; and then, rushing, mad with rage, at the astonished Isaac before he knew what to look for, brought down a heavy blow upon his right shoulder, that disabled his opponent forthwith, and made him drop at once his useless weapon idly by his side. ‘Take that, you nigger dog!’ Harry hissed out fiercely through his close-set teeth; ‘and if any other confounded nigger among you all dares to take a single step nearer in the same direction, he’ll get as much and more, too, than this insolent fellow here has got for his trouble.’
The contemptuous phrase once more roused all the negroes’ anger. ‘Who you call nigger, den?’ they cried out fiercely, leaping in a body like wild beasts upon him. ‘Kill him—kill him! Him doan’t fit to lib. Kill him—kill him, dis minute—kill him!’
But Delgado, some strange element of compassion for the remote blood of his own race still rising up instinctively and mysteriously within him, held back the two or three foremost among the pressing mass with his sinewy arm. ‘No, no, me fren’s,’ he shouted angrily, ‘doan’t kill him, doan’t kill him. Tiger no eat tiger, ole-time folk say; tiger no eat tiger. Him is nigger himself. Him is Isaac Pourtalès’ own cousin.—Doan’t kill him. His mudder doan’t nobody, I tell you, me fren’s, but coloured gal, de same as yours is—coloured gal from ole Barbadoes. I sayin’ to you, me fren’s, ole-time folk has true proverb, tiger no eat tiger.’
The sea of angry black faces swelled up and down wildly and dubiously for a moment, and then, with the sudden fitful changefulness of negro emotion, two or three voices, the women’s especially, called aloud, with sobs and shrieks: ‘Doan’t kill him!—doan’t kill him! Him me brudder—him me brudder. Doan’t kill him! Hallelujah!’
Harry looked at them savagely, with knit brows and firm-set teeth, his cutlass poised ready to strike in one hand, and his whole attitude that of a forlorn-hope at bay against overwhelming and irresistible numbers.