“Any news from the mountains?” Carson asked, as he sat down at his desk.
“Yes; Pole Baker was in here just now.” Garner leaned his broom-handle against the mantel-piece, and stood critically eying his partner's worn face and dejected mien. “He said the mob, or mobs, for there are twenty factions of them, had certainly hemmed Pete in. He was hiding somewhere on Elk Knob, and they hadn't then located him. Pole left there long before day and said they had already set in afresh. I reckon it will be over soon. He told me to keep you here if I had to swear out a writ of dangerous lunacy against you. He says you have not only killed your own political chances, but that you couldn't save the boy if you were the daddy of every man in the chase. They've smelled blood and they want to taste it.”
“You needn't worry about me,” Carson said, dejectedly. “I realize how helpless I was yesterday, and am still. There was only one thing that might have been done if we had acted quickly, and that was to telegraph the Governor for troops.”
“But you wouldn't sanction that; you know you wouldn't,” said Garner. “You know every mother's son of those white men is acting according to the purest dictates of his inner soul. They think they are right. They believe in law, and while I am a member of the bar, by Heaven! I say to you that our whole legal system is rotten to the core. Politics will clear a criminal at the drop of a hat. A dozen voters can jerk a man from life imprisonment to the streets of this town by a single telegram. No, you know those sturdy men over there think they are right, and you would not be the cause of armed men shooting them down like rabbits in a fence corner.”
“No, they think they are right,” Carson said. “And they were my friends till this came up. Any mail?”
“I haven't been to the post-office. I wish you'd go. You need exercise; you are off color—you are as yellow as a new saddle. Drop this thing. The Lord Himself can't make water run up-hill. Quit thinking about it.”
Carson went out into the quiet street and walked along to the post-office. At the intersection of the streets near the Johnston House, on any ordinary day, a dozen drays and hacks in the care of negro drivers would have been seen, and on the drays and about the hacks stood, as a rule, many idle negro men and boys; but this morning the spot was significantly vacant. At the negro barber-shop, kept by Buck Black, a mulatto of marked dignity and intelligence for one of his race, only the black barbers might be seen, and they were not lounging about the door, but stood at their chairs, their faces grave, their tongues unusually silent. They might be asking themselves questions as to the possible extent of the fires of race-hatred just now raging—if the capture and death of Pete Warren would quench the conflagration, or if it would roll on towards them like the licking flames of a burning prairie—they might, I say, ask themselves such questions, but to the patrons of their trade they kept discreet silence. And no white man who went near them that day would ask them what they believed or what they felt, for the blacks are not a people who give much thought even to their own social problems. They had leaned for many generations upon white guidance, and, with childlike, hereditary instinct, they were leaning still.
Finding no letters of importance in the little glass-faced and numbered box at the post-office, Carson, sick at heart and utterly discouraged, went up to the Club. Here, idly knocking the balls about on a billiard-table, a cigar in his mouth, was Keith Gordon.
“Want to play a game of pool?” he asked.
“Not this morning, old man,” Carson answered.