JULIE was gone. Steve was gone. Tragedy had stalked into Magnolia’s life; had cast its sable mantle over the Cotton Blossom. Pete had kept his promise and revenge had been his. But the taste of triumph had not, after all, been sweet in his mouth. There was little of the peace of satisfaction in his sooty face stuck out of the engine-room door. The arm that beat the ball drum in the band was now a listless member, so that a hollow mournful thump issued from that which should have given forth a rousing boom.
The day the Cotton Blossom was due to play Lemoyne, Mississippi, Julie Dozier took sick. In show-boat troupes, as well as in every other theatrical company in the world, it is an unwritten law that an actor must never be too sick to play. He may be sick. Before the performance he may be too sick to stand; immediately after the performance he may collapse. He may, if necessary, die on the stage and the curtain will then be lowered. But no real trouper while conscious will ever confess himself too sick to go on when the overture ends and the lights go down.
Julie knew this. She had played show boats for years, up and down the rivers of the Middle West and the South. She had a large and loyal following. Lemoyne was a good town, situated on the river, prosperous, sizable.
Julie lay on her bed in her darkened room, refusing all offers of aid. She did not want food. She did not want cold compresses on her head. She did not want hot compresses on her head. She wanted to be left alone—with Steve. Together the two stayed in the darkened room, and when some member of the company came to the door with offers of aid or comfort, there came into their faces a look that was strangely like one of fear, followed immediately by a look of relief.
Queenie sent Jo to the door with soup, her panacea for all ailments, whether of the flesh or the spirit. Julie made a show of eating it, but when Jo had clumped across the stage and down to his kitchen Julie motioned to Steve. He threw the contents of the bowl out of the window into the yellow waters of the Mississippi.
Doc appeared at Julie’s door for the tenth time though it was only mid-morning. “Think you can play all right, to-night, though, don’t you, Julie?”
In the semi-darkness of her shaded room Julie’s eyes glowed suddenly wide and luminous. She sat up in bed, pushing her hair back from her forehead with a gesture so wild as to startle the old trouper.
“No!” she cried, in a sort of terror. “No! I can’t play to-night. Don’t ask me.”
Blank astonishment made Doc’s face almost ludicrous. For an actress to announce ten hours before the time set for the curtain’s rising that she would not be able to go on that evening—an actress who had not suffered decapitation or an amputation—was a thing unheard of in Doc’s experience.
“God a’mighty, Julie! If you’re sick as all that, you’d better see a doctor. Steve, what say?”
The great blond giant seated at the side of Julie’s bed did not look round at his questioner. His eyes were on Julie’s face. “Julie’s funny that way. She’s set against doctors. Won’t have one, that’s all. Don’t coax her. It’ll only make her worse.”
Inured as he was to the vagaries of woman, this apparently was too much for Doc. Schultzy appeared in the doorway; peered into the dimness of the little room.
“Funny thing. I guess you must have an admirer in this town, Jule. Somebody’s stole your picture, frame and all, out of the layout in the lobby there. First I thought it might be that crazy Pete, used to be so stuck on you. . . . Now, now, Steve! Keep your shirt on! Keep your shirt on! . . . I asked him, straight, but he was surprised all right. He ain’t good enough actor to fool me. He didn’t do it. Must be some town rube all right, Julie, got stuck on your shape or something. I put up another one.” He stood a moment, thoughtfully. Elly came up behind him, hatted and gloved.
“I’m going up to town, Julie. Can I fetch you something? An orange, maybe? Or something from the drug store?”
Julie’s head on the pillow moved a negative. “She says no, thanks,” Steve answered for her, shortly. It was as though both laboured under a strain. The three in the doorway sensed it. Elly shrugged her shoulders, though whether from pique or indifference it was hard to say. Doc still stood puzzled, bewildered. Schultzy half turned away. “S’long’s you’re all right by to-night,” he said cheerfully.
“Says she won’t be,” Doc put in, lowering his voice.
“Won’t be!” repeated Schultzy, almost shrilly. “Why, she ain’t sick, is she! I mean, sick!”
Schultzy sent his voice shrilling from Julie’s little bedroom doorway across the bare stage, up the aisles of the empty auditorium, so that it penetrated the box office at the far end of the boat, where Andy, at the ticket window, was just about to be relieved by Parthy.
“Heh, Cap! Cap! Come here. Julie’s sick. Julie’s too sick to go on. Says she’s too sick to . . .”
“Here,” said Andy, summarily, to Parthy; and left her in charge of business. Down the aisle with the light quick step that was almost a scamper; up the stage at a bound. “Best advance sale we’ve had since we started out. We never played this town before. License was too high. But here it is, not eleven o’clock, and half the house gone already.” He peered into the darkened room.
From its soft fur nest in the old sealskin muff the marmoset poked its tragic mask and whimpered like a sick baby. This morning there was a strange resemblance between the pinched and pathetic face on the pillow and that of the little sombre-eyed monkey.
By now there was quite a little crowd about Julie’s door. Mis’ Means had joined them and could be heard murmuring about mustard plasters and a good hot something or other. Andy entered the little room with the freedom of an old friend. He looked sharply down at the face on the pillow. The keen eyes plunged deep into the tortured eyes that stared piteously up at him. Something he saw there caused him to reach out with one brown paw, none too immaculate, and pat that other slim brown hand clutching the coverlet so tensely. “Why, Jule, what’s—— Say, s’pose you folks clear out and let me and Jule and Steve here talk things over quiet. Nobody ain’t going to get well with this mob scene you’re putting on. Scat!” Andy could distinguish between mental and physical anguish.
They shifted—Doc, Elly, Schultzy, Mis’ Means, Catchem the torpid. Another moment and they would have moved reluctantly away. But Parthy, torn between her duty at the ticket window and her feminine curiosity as to the cause of the commotion at Julie’s door became, suddenly, all woman. Besides—demon statistician that she was—she suddenly had remembered a curious coincidence in connection with this sudden illness of Julie’s. She slammed down the ticket window, banged the box-office door, sailed down the aisle. As she approached Doc was saying for the dozenth time:
“Person’s too sick to play, they’re sick enough to have a doctor’s what I say. Playing Xenia to-morrow. Good a stand’s we got. Prolly won’t be able to open there, neither, if you’re sick’s all that.”
“I’ll be able to play to-morrow!” cried Julie, in a high strained voice. “I’ll be able to play to-morrow. To-morrow I’ll be all right.”
“How do you know?” demanded Doc.
Steve turned on him in sudden desperation. “She’ll be all right, I tell you. She’ll be all right as soon as she gets out of this town.”
“That’s a funny thing,” exclaimed Parthy. She swept through the little crowd at the door, seeming to mow them down with the energy of her progress. “That’s a funny thing.”
“What?” demanded Steve, his tone belligerent. “What’s funny?”
Captain Andy raised a placating palm. “Now, Parthy, now, Parthy. Sh-sh!”
“Don’t shush me, Hawks. I know what I’m talking about. It came over me just this minute. Julie took sick at this very town of Lemoyne time we came down river last year. Soon as you and Doc decided we wouldn’t open here because the license was too high she got well all of a sudden, just like that!” She snapped a thumb and forefinger.
Silence, thick, uncomfortable, heavy with foreboding, settled down upon the little group in the doorway.
“Nothing so funny about that,” said Captain Andy, stoutly; and threw a sharp glance at the face on the pillow. “This hot sticky climate down here after the cold up north is liable to get anybody to feeling queer. None too chipper myself, far’s that goes. Affects some people that way.” He scratched frenziedly at the mutton-chop whiskers, this side and that.
“Well, I may not know much——” began Parthy.
Down the aisle skimmed Magnolia, shouting as she came, her child’s voice high and sharp with excitement. “Mom! Mom! Look. What do you think! Julie’s picture’s been stolen again right out of the front of the lobby. Julie, they’ve taken your picture again. Somebody took one and Schultzy put another in and now it’s been stolen too.”
She was delighted with her news; radiant with it. Her face fell a little at the sight of the figure on the bed, the serious group about the doorway that received her news with much gravity. She flew to the bed then, all contrition. “Oh, Julie darling, I’m so sorry you’re sick.” Julie turned her face away from the child, toward the wall.
Captain Andy, simulating fury, capered a threatening step toward the doorway crowd now increased by the deprecating figure of Mr. Means and Ralph’s tall shambling bulk. “Will you folks clear out of here or will I have to use force! A body’d think a girl didn’t have the right to feel sick. Doc, you get down and ’tend to that ticket window, or Parthy. If we can’t show to-night we got to leave ’em know. Ralph, you write out a sign and get it pasted up at the post office. . . . Sure you won’t be feeling better by night time, are you, Julie?” He looked doubtfully down at the girl on the bed.
With a sudden lithe movement Julie flung herself into Steve’s arms, clung to him, weeping. “No!” she cried, her voice high, hysterical. “No! No! No! Leave me alone, can’t you! Leave me alone!”
“Sure,” Andy motioned, then, fiercely to the company. “Sure we’ll leave you alone, Julie.”
But Tragedy, having stalked her victim surely, relentlessly, all the morning, now was about to close in upon her. She had sent emissary after emissary down the show-boat aisle, and each had helped to deepen the look of terror in Julie’s eyes. Now sounded the slow shambling heavy tread of Windy the pilot, bearded, sombre, ominous as the figure of fate itself. The little group turned toward him automatically, almost absurdly, like a badly directed mob scene in one of their own improbable plays.
He clumped up the little flight of steps that led from the lower left-hand box to the stage. Clump, clump, clump. Irresistibly Parthy’s eyes peered sharply in pursuit of the muddy tracks that followed each step. She snorted indignantly. Across the stage, his beard waggling up and down as his jaws worked slowly, rhythmically on a wedge of Honest Scrap. As he approached Julie’s doorway he took off his cap and rubbed his pate with his palm, sure sign of great mental perturbation in this monumental old leviathan. The yellow skin of his knobby bald dome-like head shone gold in the rays of the late morning sun that came in through the high windows at the side of the stage.
He stood a moment, chewing, and peering mildly into the dimness of the bedroom, Sphinx-like, it seemed that he never would speak. He stood, champing. The Cotton Blossom troupe waited. They had not played melodrama for years without being able to sense it when they saw it. He spoke. “Seems that skunk Pete’s up to something.” They waited. The long tobacco-stained beard moved up and down, up and down. “Skinned out half an hour back streaking toward town like possessed. He yanked that picture of Julie out of the hall there. Seen him. I see good deal goes on around here.”
Steve sprang to his feet with a great ripping river oath. “I’ll kill him this time, the ——”
“Seen you take that first picture out, Steve.” The deep red that had darkened Steve’s face and swelled the veins on his great neck receded now, leaving his china-blue eyes staring out of a white and stricken face.
“I never did! I never did!”
Julie sat up, clutching her wrapper at the throat. She laughed shrilly. “What would he want to steal my picture for! His own wife’s picture. Likely!”
“So nobody in this town’d see it, Julie,” said Windy, mildly. “Listen. Fifty years piloting on the rivers you got to have pretty good eyesight. Mine’s as good to-day as it was time I was twenty. I just stepped down from the texas to warn you I see Pete coming along the levee with Ike Keener. Ike’s the sheriff. He’ll be in here now any minute.”
“Let him,” Andy said, stoutly. “Our license is paid. Sheriff’s as welcome around this boat as anybody. Let him.”
But no one heard him; no one heeded him. A strange and terrible thing was happening. Julie had sprung from her bed. In her white nightgown and her wrapper, her long black hair all tumbled and wild about her face, a stricken and hunted thing, she clung to Steve, and he to her. There came a pounding at the door that led into the show-boat auditorium from the fore deck. Steve’s eyes seemed suddenly to sink far back in his head. His cheek-bones showed gaunt and sharp as Julie’s own. His jaw was set so that a livid ridge stood out on either side like bars of white-hot steel. He loosened Julie’s hold almost roughly. From his pocket he whipped a great clasp-knife and opened its flashing blade. Julie did not scream, but the other women did, shriek on shriek. Captain Andy sprang for him, a mouse attacking a mastodon. Steve shook him off with a fling of his powerful shoulders.
“I’m not going to hurt her, you fool. Leave me be. I know what I’m doing.” The pounding came again, louder and more insistent. “Somebody go down and let him in—but keep him there a minute.”
No one stirred. The pounding ceased. The doors opened. The boots of Ike Keener, the sheriff, clattered down the aisle of the Cotton Blossom.
“Stop those women screeching,” Steve shouted. Then, to Julie, “It won’t hurt much, darling.” With incredible swiftness he seized Julie’s hand in his left one and ran the keen glittering blade of his knife firmly across the tip of her forefinger. A scarlet line followed it. He bent his blond head, pressed his lips to the wound, sucked it greedily. With a little moan Julie fell back on the bed. Steve snapped the blade into its socket, thrust the knife into his pocket. The boots of Sheriff Ike Keener were clattering across the stage now. The white faces clustered in the doorway—the stricken, bewildered, horrified faces—turned from the two within the room to the one approaching it. They made way for this one silently. Even Parthy was dumb. Magnolia clung to her, wide-eyed, uncomprehending, sensing tragedy though she had never before encountered it.
The lapel of his coat flung back, Ike Keener confronted the little cowed group on the stage. A star shone on his left breast. The scene was like a rehearsal of a Cotton Blossom thriller.
“Who’s captain of this here boat?”
Andy, his fingers clutching his whiskers, stepped forward. “I am. What’s wanted with him? Hawks is my name—Captain Andy Hawks, twenty years on the rivers.”
He looked the sheriff of melodrama, did Ike Keener—boots, black moustaches, wide-brimmed black hat, flowing tie, high boots, and all. Steve himself, made up for the part, couldn’t have done it better. “Well, Cap, kind of unpleasant, but I understand there’s a miscegenation case on board.”
“What?” whispered Magnolia. “What’s that? What does he mean, Mom?”
“Hush!” hissed Parthy, and jerked the child’s arm.
“How’s that?” asked Andy, but he knew.
“Miscegenation. Case of a Negro woman married to a white man. Criminal offense in this state, as you well know.”
“No such thing,” shouted Andy. “No such thing on board this boat.”
Sheriff Ike Keener produced a piece of paper. “Name of the white man is Steve Baker. Name of the negress”—he squinted again at the slip of paper—“name of the negress is Julie Dozier.” He looked around at the group. “Which one’s them?”
“Oh, my God!” screamed Elly. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”
“Shut up,” said Schultzy, roughly.
Steve stepped to the window and threw up the shade, letting the morning light into the crowded disorderly little cubicle. On the bed lay Julie, her eyes enormous in her sallow pinched face.
“I’m Steve Baker. This is my wife.”
Sheriff Ike Keener tucked the paper in his pocket. “You two better dress and come along with me.”
Julie stood up. She looked an old woman. The marmoset whimpered and whined in his fur nest. She put out a hand, automatically, and plucked it from the muff and held it in the warm hollow of her breast. Her great black eyes stared at the sheriff like the wide-open unseeing eyes of a sleep walker.
Steve Baker grinned—rather, his lips drew back from his teeth in a horrid semblance of mirth. He threw a jovial arm about Julie’s shrinking shoulder. For once she had no need to coach him in his part. He looked Ike Keener in the eye. “You wouldn’t call a man a white man that’s got Negro blood in him, would you?”
“No, I wouldn’t; not in Mississippi. One drop of nigger blood makes you a nigger in these parts.”
“Well, I got more than a drop of—nigger blood in me, and that’s a fact. You can’t make miscegenation out of that.”
“You ready to swear to that in a court of law?”
“I’ll swear to it any place. I’ll swear it now.” Steve took a step forward, one hand outstretched. “I’ll do more than that. Look at all these folks here. There ain’t one of them but can swear I got Negro blood in me this minute. That’s how white I am.”
Sheriff Ike Keener swept the crowd with his eye. Perhaps what he saw in their faces failed to convince him. “Well, I seen fairer men than you was niggers. Still, you better tell that——”
Mild, benevolent, patriarchal, the figure of old Windy stepped out from among the rest. “Guess you’ve known me, Ike, better part of twenty-five years. I was keelboatin’ time you was runnin’ around, a barefoot on the landin’. Now I’m tellin’ you—me, Windy McKlain—that that white man there’s got nigger blood in him. I’ll take my oath to that.”
Having thus delivered himself of what was, perhaps, the second longest speech in his career, he clumped off again, across the stage, down the stairs, up the aisle, looking, even in that bizarre environment, like something out of Genesis.
Sheriff Ike Keener was frankly puzzled. “If it was anybody else but Windy—but I got this straight from—from somebody ought to know.”
“From who?” shouted Andy, all indignation. “From a sooty-faced scab of a bull-drumming engineer named Pete. And why? Because he’s been stuck on Julie here I don’t know how long, and she wouldn’t have anything to do with him.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes, it is,” Steve put in, quickly. “He was after my wife. Anybody in the company’ll bear me out. He wouldn’t leave her alone, though she hated the sight of him, and Cap here give him a talking—didn’t you, Cap? So finally, when he wouldn’t quit, then there was nothing for it but lick him, and I licked him good, and soused him in the river to get his dirty face clean. He crawls out swearing he’ll get me for it. Now you know.”
Keener now addressed himself to Julie for the first time. “He says—this Pete—that you was born here in Lemoyne, and that your pop was white and your mammy black. That right?”
Julie moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. “Yes,” she said. “That’s—right.”
A sudden commotion in the group that had been so still. Elly’s voice, shrill with hysteria. “I will! I’ll tell right out. The wench! The lying black——”
Suddenly stifled, as though a hand had been clapped none too gently across her mouth. Incoherent blubberings; a scuffle. Schultzy had picked Elly up like a sack of meal, one hand still firmly held over her mouth; had carried her into her room and slammed the door.
“What’s she say?” inquired Keener.
Again Andy stepped into the breach. “That’s our ingénue lead. She’s kind of high strung. You see, she’s been friends with this—with Julie Dozier, here—without knowing about her—about her blood, and like that. Kind of give her a shock, I guess. Natural.”
It was plain that Sheriff Ike Keener was on the point of departure, puzzled though convinced. He took off his broad-brimmed hat, scratched his head, replaced the hat at an angle that spelled bewilderment. His eye, as he turned away, fell on the majestic figure of Parthenia Ann Hawks, and on Magnolia cowering, wide-eyed, in the folds of her mother’s ample skirts.
“You look like a respectable woman, ma’am.”
Imposing enough at all times, Parthy now grew visibly taller. Cold sparks flew from her eyes. “I am.”
“That your little girl?”
Andy did the honours. “My wife, Sheriff. My little girl, Magnolia. What do you say to the Sheriff, Magnolia?”
Thus urged, Magnolia spoke that which had been seething within her. “You’re bad!” she shouted, her face twisted with the effort to control her tears. “You’re a bad mean man, that’s what! You called Julie names and made her look all funny. You’re a——”
The maternal hand stifled her.
“If I was you, ma’am, I wouldn’t bring up no child on a boat like this. No, nor stay on it, neither. Fine place to rear a child!”
Whereupon, surprisingly enough, Parthy turned defensive. “My child’s as well brought up as your own, and probably better, and so I tell you. And I’ll thank you to keep your advice to yourself, Mr. Sheriff.”
“Parthy! Parthy!” from the alarmed Andy.
But Sheriff Ike Keener was a man of parts. “Well, women folks are all alike. I’ll be going. I kind of smell a nigger in the woodpile here in more ways than one. But I’ll take your word for it.” He looked Captain Andy sternly in the eye. “Only let me tell you this, Captain Hawks. You better not try to give your show in this town to-night. We got some public-spirited folks here in Lemoyne and this fix you’re in has kind of leaked around. You go to work and try to give your show with this mixed blood you got here and first thing you know you’ll be riding out of town on something don’t sit so easy as a boat.”
His broad-brimmed hat at an angle of authority, his coat tails flirting as he strode, he marched up the aisle then and out.
The little huddling group seemed visibly to collapse. It was as though an unseen hand had removed a sustaining iron support from the spine of each. Magnolia would have flown to Julie, but Parthy jerked her back. Whispering then; glance of disdain.
“Well, Julie, m’girl,” began Andy Hawks, kindly. Julie turned to him.
“We’re going,” she said, quietly.
The door of Elly’s room burst open. Elly, a rumpled, distraught, unlovely figure, appeared in Julie’s doorway, Schultzy trying in vain to placate her.
“You get out of here!” She turned in a frenzy to Andy. “She gets out of here with that white trash she calls her husband or I go, and so I warn you. She’s black! She’s black! God, I was a fool not to see it all the time. Look at her, the nasty yellow——” A stream of abuse, vile, obscene, born of the dregs of river talk heard through the years, now welled to Elly’s lips, distorting them horribly.
“Come away from here,” Parthy said, through set lips, to Magnolia. And bore the child, protesting, up the aisle and into the security of her own room forward.
“I want to stay with Julie! I want to stay with Julie!” wailed Magnolia, overwrought, as the inexorable hand dragged her up the stairs.
In her tiny disordered room Julie was binding up her wild hair with a swift twist. She barely glanced at Elly. “Shut that woman up,” she said, quietly. “Tell her I’m going.” She began to open boxes and drawers.
Steve approached Andy, low-voiced. “Cap, take us down as far as Xenia, will you, for God’s sake! Don’t make us get off here.”
“Down as far as Xenia you go,” shouted Captain Andy at the top of his voice, “and anybody in this company don’t like it they’re free to git, bag and baggage, now. We’ll pull out of here now. Xenia by afternoon at four, latest. And you two want to stay the night on board you’re welcome. I’m master of this boat, by God!”
They left, these two, when the Cotton Blossom docked at Xenia in the late afternoon. Andy shook hands with them, gravely; and Windy clumped down from the pilot house to perform the same solemn ceremony. You sensed unseen peering eyes at every door and window of the Cotton Blossom and the Mollie Able.
“How you fixed for money?” Andy demanded, bluntly.
“We’re fixed all right,” Julie replied, quietly. Of the two of them she was the more composed. “We’ve been saving. You took too good care of us on the Cotton Blossom. No call to spend our money.” The glance from her dark shadow-encircled eyes was one of utter gratefulness. She took up the lighter pieces of luggage. Steve was weighed down with the others—bulging boxes and carpet bags and bundles—their clothing and their show-boat wardrobe and their pitifully few trinkets and personal belongings. A pin cushion, very lumpy, that Magnolia had made for her at Christmas a year ago. Photographs of the Cotton Blossom. A book of pressed wild flowers. Old newspaper clippings.
Julie lingered. Steve crossed the gangplank, turned, beckoned with his head. Julie lingered. An unspoken question in her eyes.
Andy flushed and scratched the mutton-chop whiskers this side and that. “Well, you know how she is, Julie. She don’t mean no harm. But she didn’t let on to Magnolia just what time you were going. Told her to-morrow, likely. Women folks are funny, that way. She don’t mean no harm.”
“That’s all right,” said Julie; picked up the valises, was at Steve’s side. Together the two toiled painfully up the steep river bank, Steve turning to aid her as best he could. They reached the top of the levee. They stood a moment, breathless; then turned and trudged down the dusty Southern country road, the setting sun in their faces. Julie’s slight figure was bent under the weight of the burden she carried. You saw Steve’s fine blond head turned toward her, tender, concerned, encouraging.
Suddenly from the upper deck that fronted Magnolia’s room and Parthy’s came the sound of screams, a scuffle, a smart slap, feet clattering pell-mell down the narrow wooden balcony stairs. A wild little figure in a torn white frock, its face scratched and tear-stained, its great eyes ablaze in the white face, flew past Andy, across the gangplank, up the levee, down the road. Behind her, belated and panting, came Parthy. Her hand on her heart, her bosom heaving, she leaned against the inadequate support offered by Andy’s right arm, threatening momentarily to topple him, by her own dead weight, into the river.
“To think that I should live to see the day when—my own child—she slapped me—her mother! I saw them out of the window, so I told her to straighten her bureau drawers—a sight! All of a sudden she heard that woman’s voice, low as it was, and she to the window. When she saw her going she makes for the door. I caught her on the steps, but she was like a wildcat, and raised her hand against me—her own mother—and tore away, with me holding this in my hand.” She held out a fragment of torn white stuff. “Raised her hand against her own——”
Andy grinned. “Good for her.”
“What say, Andy Hawks!”
But Andy refused to answer. His gaze followed the flying little figure silhouetted against the evening sky at the top of the high river bank. The slim sagging figure of the woman and the broad-shouldered figure of the man trudged down the road ahead. The child’s voice could be heard high and clear, with a note of hysteria in it. “Julie! Julie! Wait for me! I want to say good-bye! Julie!”
The slender woman in the black dress turned and made as though to start back and then, with a kind of crazy fear in her pace, began to run away from the pursuing little figure—away from something that she had not the courage to face. And when she saw this Magnolia ran on yet a little while, faltering, and then she stopped and buried her head in her hands and sobbed. The woman glanced over her shoulder, fearfully. And at what she saw she dropped her bags and bundles in the road and started back toward her, running fleetly in spite of her long ruffled awkward skirts; and she held out her arms long before they were able to reach her. And when finally they came together, the woman dropped on her knees in the dust of the road and gathered the weeping child to her and held her close, so that as you saw them sharply outlined against the sunset the black of the woman’s dress and the white of the child’s frock were as one.