N his office in one corner of his great grain and cotton warehouse, at a dusty, littered desk before a murky, cobweb-bed window, Garner found old Dwight, his lap full of telegraphic reports, his head submerged in a morning paper containing the market and crop news in general. Outside of the thin-walled office heavy iron trucks, in the grasp of brawny black men, rattled and rumbled over the heavy floor and across weighty skids into open cars in the rear. There was the creaking sound of the big hand elevators engaged in hoisting and lowering bales, barrels, bags, and casks, the mellow sing-song of the light-hearted negroes as they toiled, blissfully ignorant of the profound gloom which had fallen on the defender of their rights.
“I came to see you on an important matter concerning Carson,” Garner began, as he leaned over the old man's desk.
Dwight lowered his paper, shrugged his shoulders, and sniffed.
“Campaign funds, I reckon,” he said. “Well, I've been looking for some such demand. In fact, I've been astonished that you fellows haven't been after me sooner. I'll do anything but buy whiskey to give away. I'm against that custom.”
“It wasn't that,” said Garner, who, usually plain-spoken, shrank from beating about the bush even in so delicate a matter. “The truth is, Carson is in a little trouble, Mr. Dwight.”
“Trouble?” the merchant said, bluntly. “Will you kindly show me when he's ever been out of it? Since the day he was born it's been scrape after scrape. By all possessed, Billy, when he wasn't a year old I had to spend fifty dollars to encase all the chimneys in with iron grating to keep him from crawling into the fire. He's walked or stumbled into every fire that was made since then. When he was only twelve a man out at the farm fell in a well and nothing would do Carson but that he must go down after him. He did it, fastened the only available rope about the man and sent him to the top, and when they lowered it to Carson he was so nearly drowned that he could hardly sit in the loop. If I had a list of the scrapes that boy went through at home and at college I'd sell it to some blood-and-thunder novel writer. It would make his fortune. Well, what is it now?”
“Carson is in very serious trouble I'm afraid, Mr. Dwight,” Garner said, as he took a chair and sat down. “You will have to prepare yourself for a pretty sharp shock. He couldn't help it. It was pushed on him to such an extent that there was no other way out of it and retain his self-respect. Mr. Dwight, you, of course, heard of Dan Willis's death?”