CHAPTER XVIII
ARSON DWIGHT remained two days in the vicinity of his farm waiting gloomily for the discovery and arrest of Pete Warren, his sole hope being that at the last grewsome moment he might prevail on the distraught man-hunters to listen to a final appeal for law and order. He was forced, however, to return to Darley, feeling sure, as did the others, that Pete was hiding in some undiscovered place in the mountains, or shrewd and deft enough to avoid the approach of man or hound. But it would not be for long, the hunters told themselves, for the entire spot was surrounded and well guarded and they would starve him out.
“The gang” breathed more freely when they saw Carson appear in the doorway of the den on the night of his return, and learned that through some miracle he had failed to meet Dan Willis, though not one of them was favorably impressed by the outward appearance of their leader. His eyes, in their darkened sockets, gleamed like despondent fires; on his tanned cheeks hectic flushes had appeared and his hands quivered as if from nervous exhaustion. Not a man among them dared reproach him for the further and futile political mistake he had made. He was a ruined man, and yet they admired him the more as they looked down on him, begrimed with the dregs of his failure. Garner's opinion, to himself expressed, was that Dwight was a failure only on the surface, but that it was the surface which counted everywhere except in heaven, and there no one knew what sort of coin would be current. Garner loved him. He loved him for his hopeless fidelity to Helen, for his firm-jawed clinging to a mere principle, such as trying to keep an old negro woman who had faith in him from breaking her heart, for his risking death itself to obtain full justice-for the black boy who was his servant. Yes, Garner mused, Carson certainly deserved a better deal all round, but deserving a thing according to the highest ethics, and getting it according to the lowest were different.
I The following night there was a queer, secret meeting of negroes in the town. Stealthily they left their cabins and ramshackle homes, and one by one they glided through the darkest streets and alleys to the house of one Neb Wynn, a man who had acquired his physical being and crudely unique personality from the confluence of three distinct streams of blood—the white, the Cherokee Indian, and the negro. He owned and drove a dray on the streets of the town, and being economical he had accumulated enough means to build the two-story frame (not yet painted) house in which he lived. The lower floor was used as a negro restaurant, which Neb's wife managed, the upper was devoted to the family bedroom, a guest-chamber for any one who wished to spend the night, and a fair-sized “hall,” with windows on the street, which was rented to colored people for any purpose, such as dances, lodge meetings or church sociables.
It was in this room, where no light burned, that the negroes assembled. Indeed, no sort of illumination was used below, and when a negro who had been secretly summoned reached the spot, he assured himself that no one was in sight, and then he approached the restaurant door on tiptoe, rapped twice with his knuckles, paused a moment, and then rapped three times. Thereupon Neb, with his ear to the key-hole on the inside, cautiously opened the door and drew the applicant within, and, closing the shutter softly, asked, “What is the password?”
“Mercy,” was the whispered reply.
“What's the countersign?”