The Law of the Land, Emerson Hough [best beach reads of all time TXT] 📗

came down with the news of this uprising that I mentioned in my message. He brought along his woman; and I must say that though I don’t much mind this—”—he pointed to his injured arm—“if I have to eat that woman’s cooking much longer, I’m going to die.”

Then it was that Clarisse Delchasse arose grandly to the occasion. “Monsieur Colonel,” she said, as she divested herself of her bonnet, “I have swear I would cook no more; but me? I am once the best cook in New Orleans. I cook not for money, ah, non! but from pity! Sir, humanity it is so outrage’ by the poor cook that I have pity! So, Monsieur, I have pity also of you. Show me this girl that can not cook, and show me also the kitshen. Ah, we shall see whether Clarisse Delchasse have forget!”

“Show her, Miss Lady,” said Blount. “Show her. The place is yours. Oh, girl, we’re glad enough to have you back. Go get that gold-toothed woman of Jack’s, go get ‘em all, if you can find any of ‘em around. Get Bill, he’s around somewhere—get any of ‘em you can find, and tell ‘em to take care of you. Child, child, it’s glad enough we all are to have you back again. Ah, Miss Lady, what made you go away?”

Even as he spoke, Madame Delchasse, rolling up her cuffs, was marching down the hall. “By jinks!” said Blount, looking after her admiringly. “By jinks! It looks like things were going to happen, don’t it?” His strained features relaxed into a smile.

“But now come on, son,” he said, turning to Eddring, “you and I have got to have a talk. I’ll tell you about some of the things that have happened. We’ve been busy here in Tullahoma.”

Drawing apart into another room, Blount met Eddring’s hurried queries as to his own safety, and heard in turn the strange story of the late voyage and the incidents immediately preceding it. He told Blount of the discovery of Miss Lady living in the care of the old Frenchwoman, Madame Delchasse—Miss Lady, as they had both more than suspected, none other than Louise Loisson, the mysterious dancer in the city of New Orleans; told of the plot which he was satisfied had been the motive of Henry Decherd in inducing Miss Lady to accompany him upon the steamer. Blount added rapid confirmation here and there, and presently they came to a topic which could no longer be avoided.

“I know what was done,” said Eddring at length, after a slight pause in the conversation. “I found the place where it all happened. That’s where we spent the night, on the ridge, near the house.”

“Did they see? Did they know?” asked Blount, nodding toward the place where the two women had disappeared.

“No,” said Eddring. “I did not tell them. Blount, it’s awful. Where’s the law gone in this country?”

“Law?” cried Blount, fiercely, “we were the law! We sent for that nigger sheriff—the one they elected for a joke—hell of a joke, wasn’t it?—and he wouldn’t come. We had with us the old sheriff, Jim Peters, a good officer in this county, as you know, before now. We had with us every white voter in this precinct, every tax-payer. We found them, these levee-cutting, house-burning fools, right at their work. We left some of them dead there, and run some into the cane, and we took the balance over to that church of theirs which you saw. The water wasn’t so high then as you say it is now. There was a regular fight, and the niggers were plumb desperate. They had guns. Jim Bowles, down below here, was shot pretty bad, though I reckon he’ll get well. I was shot, too—not bad, but enough to make me some dizzy. Jim Peters—and I reckon he was the real officer of the law— was shot, too, so bad that he died pretty soon. Now I reckon you can tell what we found to be at the bottom of this, and who it was that’s been making all this deviltry here for years.”

“Delphine!”

“It was nobody else,” said Blount. “You talk about human tigers, and fiends, and all that kind of thing; that woman beat anything I ever did see or hear of. She was brave as a lion. Peters and Bowles and I closed in on her, wanting to take her, but she fought like a man, and a brave one. She had two six-shooters, and she dropped us, all three of us; and then before the others could close in on her, she turned loose on herself, and killed herself dead as hell. She didn’t see the finish of the others.”

Eddring buried his face in his hands and inwardly thanked Providence that he himself had not been present at such a scene.

Blount resumed presently. “Peters didn’t die right away,” said he. “He lay there with his head propped on a coat rolled up for a piller, and he talked to us all like we was at home in the parlor. ‘Keep on with it, boys,’ said he. ‘Do this thorough. Make this a white man’s country; or if you kain’t, don’t leave no white men alive in it.’ Then after a while he turns to me and says he, ‘Colonel, you know I’m not a rich man. Now I’ve got a couple of mighty fine b’ah-dogs, and I want to give ‘em to you; but if you don’t mind, I’d like mighty well if you’d send my wife over a good cow. She’s going to be left in pretty poor shape, I’m afraid, for you know how things have been going on the plantations,’ I told him I would. We was both laying on the ground together. I told him I would take care of his folks, for he was a friend of mine, and the right kind of man. He talked on a while like that, and finally he says, ‘Well, boys, I’m not going to live, and you’ve got a heap to do right now, and I mustn’t keep you from it. Jake,’ says he, ‘you Jake, come here.’—Jake was his nigger boy that he always kept around with him. We had three or four good darkies with us. My boy Bill, out there, was along, and this Jake and some others. ‘Jake,’ says Jim Peters to this boy, ‘come around here an’ take this piller out from under my head. Lay me down, and lemme die!’ Jake he didn’t want to, but Jim says to him again, ‘Jake, damn you,’ says he,‘do like I tell you’; so then Jake he took the piller out, and Jim he just lay back and gasped once, ‘Oh!’ like that, and he was gone. I call that dying like a gentleman,” said Blount.

“The poor fools,” presently went on the firm voice of the man who was recounting these commonplaces of the recent savage scenes, “they think, and they told us, some of them, that they’ve got the North behind them. They think the time is going to come when they won’t have to work any more. They want to make all this Delta black, and not white. If we could give it to them and fence them in we would be well rid of the whole proposition, North and South alike. These poor fools say that the North will make another war and set them free again! There’ll never be another war between the South and the North. Next time it will be North and South together, against the slaves, white and black. But as to the Delta going black, while we men in here are left alive—well, I want to say we’ll never live to see it. If the people up North could only know the trouble they make—could only know that that trouble lands hardest on the niggers, I think maybe they’d change a few of their theories. They don’t understand. They think that maybe after a while they can make us people think that black is white, and white is black. Carry that out, and it means extermination, on the one side or the other.

“Law?” he went on bitterly; “I wish you’d tell me what is the law. Good God, we white men in this country are anxious enough in our hearts to settle all these things. We want to be law-abiding, but how can we, unless we begin everything all over again? Law? You tell me, what is the law!”