“I decided to bring Joe over myself, so as to have no misunderstanding,” he announced. “The other negroes have been picking at him a good deal, and he is a little out of sorts, but he ’ll get all right.”
The Gills were standing in the passage, a look of stupid embarrassment on their honest faces. Despite their rugged strength of character, they were not a little awed by the presence of such a prominent member of the aristocracy, notwithstanding the fact that their dealings with the Colonel had not, in a financial way, been just to their fancy.
“I’m much obliged to you, sir,” Peter found himself able to enunciate.
The Colonel lighted a cigar and began to smoke. A sad, careworn expression lay in his big blue eyes. He had the appearance of a man who had not slept for a week. His tired glance swept from the Gills to the negro in the wagon, and he said, huskily:
“Bounce out, Joe, and do the very best you can. I hate to part with you, but you know my condition—we’ve talked that over enough.”
Slowly the tall black man crawled out at the end of the wagon and stood alone on the ground. The expression of his face was at once so full of despair and fiendishness that Mrs. Gill shuddered and looked away from him.
“Well, Gill,” said the planter, “I reckon me and you are even at last. I’m going down to Savannah, where I hope to get a fresh start and amount to more in the world. Goodbye to you—good-bye, Joe.”
He had only nodded to the pair in the passage, but he reached over the wagon-wheel for the hand of the negro, and as he took it a tender expression of regret stamped itself on his strong features.
“Be a good boy, Joe,” he half-whispered. “As God is my heavenly judge, I hate this more than anything else in the world. If I could possibly raise the money I’d take you with me—or free you.”
The thick, stubborn lip of the slave relaxed and fell to quivering.