half-burned cigarettes. In the places of the revelers stood a group of sobbing, terrified negroes.

[Pg 69]

We were not native southerners, accustomed to seeing the black people in their paroxysms of fear, and the sight went straight home to all of us. These were the “cotton field niggers” of which old-time planters speak, slaves to the blackest superstitions that ever cursed the tribes of the Congo, and the night’s crime had gone hard with them. Their faces were gray, rather than black, the whites of their eyes were plainly visible, and they made a confused babble of sound. The women, particularly, were sobbing and praying alternately; most of the men were either stuttering or apoplectic with sheer terror. Some of them cowered, shrieking, as we opened the door.

“Shut up that noise,” Nopp demanded. A dead silence followed his words. “No one is going to hurt you as long as you stay in here and shut up. Where’s the boss.”

One of them pointed, rather feebly, to the next room. And I took the instant’s interval [Pg 70]to reach the side of some one that sat, alone and silent, in a big chair in the chimney-corner.

[Pg 70]

It was Edith Nealman, and she had been rounded up with the rest of the house employees. Her bare feet were in slippers, and she wore a long dressing-gown over her night-dress. Her hair hung in two golden braids over her shoulders.

I was glad to see that the terror of the blacks had not passed, in the least degree, to her. Of course she was pale and shaken, her eyes were wide, but her voice when she spoke was subdued and calm, and there was not the slightest trace of hysteria about her. “It’s a dreadful thing, isn’t it?” she said. “Poor little Florey—who’d want to murder him!”

“Nobody knows—but we’re going to get him, anyway,” I promised rashly. And what transpired thereafter did not come out in the inquest.

It was only a little thing, but it meant teeming worlds to me. One of her hands groped out to mine, and I pressed it in reassurance.

Besides the native southern blacks that acted as gardeners and chambermaids and table hands about the place, Nealman had rounded up his mulatto chauffeur. Mrs. Gentry, his white housekeeper, sat a little to one side of the group of negroes.

[Pg 71]

[Pg 71]

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