Her screams mounted higher and higher until they reached ear-piercing shrieks. A head or two were stuck interrogatively through the opened door at the sound of Nancy’s woe, and as quickly withdrawn. Kenneth administered an opiate to Bud to relieve his pain and sat by the bed to do what he could in the short while that life remained. The sordidness of the whole affair sickened him and he longed to get away where he could breathe freely.
Strengthened by the opiate, Bud’s eyes flickered and then opened for a fraction of a minute. He smiled faintly when he recognized Kenneth. He made several ineffectual attempts to speak, but each effort resulted only in a gasp of pain. Kenneth ordered him to lie still. Bud, however, kept trying to speak. Roused by Nancy’s shrieks, he finally managed to gasp out a few words, interrupted by spasms of pain that shook his whole body.
“I knows I ain’t got long, Doc. Dat’s a’ right, Nancy, I ain’t blamin’ you none. I knows you couldn’t he’p it.”
He fell back on the pillow, coughing and writhing in pain.
“Lif’ me a li’l—hiar—on the pillar, Doc. Dat’s mo’ like—it! Doc—I ain’t been much ‘count. I tol’ dat man Parker—to stop foolin’ with my ’oman—but—he keep on—comin’ here—when I’m gone. He knew I wuz sellin’ liquor—an’ he tol Nancy he wuz gwine—hav’ his brudder—She’f Parker put me on—chain gang—if she tell me he come here—w’en I wuz gone.”
He had another paroxysm of coughing and lay for a minute as though already dead. Kenneth administered restoratives, meanwhile telling Nancy to keep quiet, which only made her weep the louder. After a few minutes Bud began speaking again.
“I come home to-day—an’ kotched him here. W’en I got mad an’ tol him—to get out—and stahted towards him—he grabbed his gun an’—shot me.” After a pause: “Doc, whyn’t dese white fo’ks—leave our women alone?—I ain’t nevah bothered none of their women.—An’ now—I’s done got—killed jus’ ’cause—I—I⸺”
He half raised himself on the pillow, looking at Nancy.
“Doan cry, Nancy gal—doan cry⸺”
He fell back dead. Kenneth, of no further assistance, left Nancy to her grief after promising to send the undertaker in to prepare Bud’s body for burial, and made his way out through the crowd, now greatly increased in numbers, gathered around the door. He wondered if anything would be done about the murder, at the same time knowing that nothing would. The South says it believes in purity. What was that phrase the Ku Kluxers used so much—“preservation of the sanctity of the home, protection of the purity of womanhood”? Yes, that was it. Suppose the races of the two principals had been reversed—that Bud Ware had been caught with George Parker’s wife. Why, the whole town would have turned out to burn Bud at the stake. Weren’t coloured women considered human—wasn’t their virtue as dear to them as to white women? Nancy and Bud weren’t of much good to the community but if Bud wanted his wife kept inviolate, hadn’t he as much right to guard her person as George Parker to protect his wife and two daughters? Again he felt himself up against a blind wall in which there was no gate, and which was too high to climb. He had determined to stay out of reach of the long arms of the octopus they called the race problem—but he felt himself slowly being drawn into its insidious embrace.