“My God! will yer, boss? Lawd, won't I cut er shine at chu'ch next Sunday! Say, Marse Carson, you ain't gwine ter let um keep me in here over Sunday, is you?”
“I'll do the best I can for you, Pete,” the young man said, and when the jailer had opened the door he descended the stairs with a heavy, despondent tread.
“Poor, poor devil!” he said to himself. “He's not any more responsible than a baby. And yet our laws hold him, in his benighted ignorance, more tightly, more mercilessly than they do the highest in the land.”
CHAPTER XXIV.
ESPITE the news Pole Baker had brought to town regarding the disposition of the mountaineers to let justice take its formal trend in the case of the negro already arrested, as the day wore on towards its close the whole town took on an air of vague excitement. Men who now lived at Darley, but had been former residents of the country, and were supposed to know the temper and character of the aggrieved people, shook their heads and smiled grimly when the subject of Pete's coming trial was mentioned. “Huh!” said one of these men, who kept a small grocery store on the main street, “that nigger'll never see the door of the court-house.”