Ewing rushed off to give the news to his wife. …
The three men carried the unconscious form to her room. With a short “Good night” to Dr. Bennett, Kenneth left the house with Mrs. Johnson and drove away. …
CHAPTER XVI
The following day Kenneth was kept busy arranging his affairs in order to leave the following morning for Atlanta for the operation on Mrs. Tucker. It had been a most difficult task for him to persuade her to have it done. He had been at last successful when he made her realize that it would mean either the operation or death. She dreaded the trip to Atlanta but Kenneth refused to perform the operation except at a hospital and there was none nearer than Atlanta at which a Negro could operate.
During the day he had been kept so busy that he had not had time to go out of the coloured section except once, and that when in the late afternoon he drove through Lee Street to see how Mary Ewing was faring. He had been so busy with his own thoughts that he had paid little attention to the whites who were standing around on the streets. He did not see the threatening and hostile looks they gave nor did he notice the excited whispering and muttering when he came into their sight.
Ed Stewart had partly told the truth at the meeting of the Klan when he said that Dr. Williams had informed him of the organization Kenneth and the others were forming. Kenneth had seen little of the pompous and intensely jealous physician since the time when he had forced Dr. Williams to assist him in the appendicitis operation on Mrs. Emma Bradley. Kenneth had felt nothing but an amused contempt for his fellow-practitioner, for he knew that Dr. Williams covered his deficiencies in medical knowledge and skill with the bombastic and self-important air he affected.
Dr. Williams, on the other hand, had never forgiven Kenneth for the incident in which Kenneth had shown him up in a manner that injured the former’s pride far more than Kenneth had suspected. Dr. Williams felt that the younger man had deliberately and with malice aforethought offered a gratuitous insult to him as dean of the coloured medical profession of Central City, though that profession numbered but two members. Kenneth’s success as a physician in Central City, having taken as he had some of the best of Dr. Williams’ own patients whom he had considered peculiarly his own, the insult plus Kenneth’s success had rankled in his breast until, being of a petty and mean disposition, he hated the younger man with a deep and vindictive hatred.
He had not, however, intended that his conversation with Ed Stewart should assume the proportions that it eventually did. On the day before the meeting of the Klan at which Kenneth had been named as the one responsible for the organization of the Negroes, Dr. Williams had met Ed Stewart driving out along a country road near Ashland. Williams was returning from making a professional call in that neighbourhood. Stewart, a big, raw-boned, and lanky “Cracker” or “Peck,” as they are called by Negroes in the South, was going to inspect the cotton crops of his tenant-farmers, that he might estimate how big the crops would be and might know accordingly how large the tenants’ bills should be for supplies furnished.
They had stopped to pass the time of day and for Stewart to find which of the Negroes on his place was sick. He wanted to know if that sick one was too sick to work the crop, as the loss of even one worker during cotton-picking time was serious, what with the number of Negroes who had gone North. Having gained the information, he started to question Dr. Williams in a way that he thought was exceedingly adroit and clever, but through which ruse the coloured doctor saw instantly and clearly.
“Say, Doc, you know anything ‘bout these niggers ’round here holdin’ these meetin’s nearly ev’ry night? Seems t’ me it’s mighty late for them to be holdin’ revival services and indo’ camp-meetin’s?” he queried in as casual a tone as he could manage.