But with his hand on Dwight's arm Garner was moving to the door. “Come on, lot's get to work,” he said, with a deep breath and a grateful side glance at Baker.
In front of the office one of Carson's farm wagons drawn by a pair of mules was standing. Tom Hill-yer, Carson's overseer and general manager, sat on the seat, and behind him stood Pete Warren, ready for his stay in the country.
“Miss Helen's made quick work of it, I see,” Carson remarked. “She's determined to get that rascal out of temptation.”
“You ought to give him a sharp talking to,” said Garner. “He's got entirely too much lip for his own good. Skelt told me this morning that if Pete doesn't dry up some of that gang will hang him before he is a month older. He doesn't know any better, and means nothing by it, but he has already made open threats against Johnson and Willis. You understand those men well enough to know that in such times as these a negro can't do that with impunity.”
“I agree with you, and I'll stop and speak to him now.”
When Carson came in and sat down at his desk, a few moments later, Garner looked across at him and smiled.
“You certainly let him off easy,” he said. “I could have thrown a Christmas turkey down the scamp's throat through that grin of his. I saw you run your hand in your pocket and knew he was bleeding you.”
“Oh, well, I reckon I'm a failure at that sort of thing,” Dwight admitted, with a sheepish smile. “I started in by saying that he must not be so foolhardy as to make open threats against any of those men, and he said: 'Looky here, Marse Carson, dem white rapscallions cut gashes in my body deep enough ter plant corn in, an' I ain't gwine ter love 'em fer it. You wouldn't, you know you wouldn't.'”
“And he had you there,” Garner said, grimly. “Well, they may say what they please up North about our great problem, but nothing but time and the good Lord can solve it. You and I can tell that negro to keep his mouth shut from sunup till sun-down, but I happen to know that he had a remote white ancestor that was the proudest, hardest fighter that ever swung a sword. Some of the rampant agitators say that deportation is the only solution. Huh! if you deported a lot of full-blood blacks along with such chaps as this one, it would be only a short time before the yellow ones would have the rest in bondage, and so history would be going backward instead of forward. I guess it's going forward right now if we only had the patience to see it that way.”