Why Joan? Part 44

The effect was histrionic; and yet Joan realized that her father was not bl.u.s.tering. He meant it.

There came a wail from beyond that made her shiver, the cry of a man in mortal terror. "I ain't never done it, 'fore Gawd I ain't never tetched that woman. Oh, Boss! O-o-oh, Boss!" It was like the cry of a d.a.m.ned soul to G.o.d. "_Don'_ you let 'em git me!"

There was an agony of hope in the appeal, as of one who sees at hand unexpected deliverance.

The Major responded to it, speaking in quiet rea.s.surance as she had sometimes heard him speak, years ago, when she had wakened out of some nightmare in the little bed beside her parents'.

"All right, boy. They shan't get you,"

He strode through the crowd, putting men out of his way right and left.

In sheer surprise they let him pa.s.s till he reached the negro, who cringed to him, catching at his hand.

Then a voice cried out, "Here, we're wastin' time. Muzzle the old boy!"

The Major turned and stared magnificently in the direction of his voice, nettled by the term "old boy."

"Evidently," he remarked, "the gentleman does not know who I am!"

Joan was seized with an hysterical desire to laugh. At such a moment the bombast of it was too much. Suppose they should inquire minstrel-fashion, "Well, then, Mr. Johnsing, who _are_ you?"

But the crowd was not as used to her father as she was. They hesitated, impressed by his hauteur, his fine clothes, the waiting limousine. They stirred uneasily. A voice near her murmured, "Mebbe it's the Governor!"

Richard Darcy took instant advantage of the impression he had created, and began to speak. It was not the first time she had heard him make a speech, for he was frequently called upon to aid some friend in turning the tide of political battle. The Major, indeed, had rather a reputation for a.s.sisting his friends into office--It was typical of Joan that she listened critically despite her thumping heart; that she watched what she could see of the faces about her, picked out by the lights of the car; that she missed no expression on the gray, working features of the negro, darting wild glances about him like a newly caged wolf she had seen once at the Zoo, frantically eying the people who stood to stare at it.

Her father's voice poured out in a golden flood, running the gamut from anger to gentle suasion. It was the voice of the natural orator, which depends very little for its effect upon words. Once, pa.s.sing a negro church, Joan had heard just such a voice rising and falling within, and though not a word of the sermon reached her, after a few moments she had been almost ready to sway and moan with the congregation as it muttered, "Yas, good Lawd!" "Be mussiful to us po' sinners" "Come, Jesus, come down and take me home!"

Some such effect began to be visible on the Major's audience. There were stirrings and murmurings that suggested applause. He rose to them. The eloquence that lies so close under the skin of Southern-born men--certainly of all Southern-born men of Irish stock--came to the surface and flowered. He showed this handful of rough farmers what it should mean to them to be natives of so great and glorious a commonwealth ("'Commonwealth'--what a splendid word, my friends!"); wearing in her bosom all the riches of the earth, nourishing at that bosom a race of supermen ("And superwomen, my friends! superwomen!"); carrying in her womb the greatness of the country's future.

"Statesmen we give to the world--law-makers, not lawbreakers! Soldiers we give, not midnight marauders and a.s.sa.s.sins!" (If he borrowed freely from a certain greater Kentucky orator who speaks only with his pen, the Major was unaware of plagiarism.) "Show me the fools who say Kentuckians are lawless? We make our laws as we need them, gentlemen--and we obey them! Perhaps the greatest of our laws is this: 'Never kick a dog when it is down.'" His voice sank to a warm and personal friendliness. "I ask you, gentlemen--is there any dog more down than the negro? It is not his fault that he is here where he is no longer wanted. It is not his fault that he brought with him when he came the ways and the intelligence of the jungle. It is ours, perhaps, that he has kept them. We shall never tame the negro by proving ourselves savages!--My friends, you and I here in Kentucky pride ourselves on breaking our horses and our dogs by means of kindness. Shall we do less for our unfortunate black brother?"

A voice in the crowd remarked, "_You_ can claim kin with him ef you want to, Jedge--_I_ ain't!"

A ripple of laughter greeted this sally, and Joan's tension relaxed. She felt intuitively that a crowd which laughs does not kill.

While he spoke, her father had more than once caught her eye over the heads of the others, urgently, meaningly. Now he nodded to her. Joan suddenly caught the message he was trying to convey.

"He wants us to go to him. Quick, James! Start your engine. Quietly!"

In his nervousness, however, the chauffeur started the car with a jerk, and many faces moved in their direction. The Major turned on the full tide of his voice, and rose to his climax.

"My friends," he asked solemnly, "have you thought to take into your hands the privilege of the Most High, who saith, 'Vengeance is mine'?

Perhaps you have called vengeance 'justice'? Even so there is a finer thing than justice. There is mercy. And there is something we may give even greater than mercy--something to which each of us poor souls has a human right. I refer, gentlemen, to the benefit of the doubt.

"Some day every one of us here present--who knows how soon?--must stand before the Judgment Seat, cowering as this wretch is cowering now. And what we dare to ask then will be perhaps not justice, nor even mercy--but simply the benefit of the doubt."

Tears came into Joan's eyes. It seemed to her that for a moment her father had forgotten his purpose there, and was speaking not for another but for himself....

His mind, however, had not left the business in hand. After a slight and telling pause, he said in his ordinary conversational voice, "Now I am going to take this negro with me, gentlemen, if you don't mind. I have at hand a safe conveyance, as you see. I pledge you my word to deliver him in person to the sheriff of this county."

He beckoned to Joan.

The spell was broken, and pandemonium reigned. "Look out--he's makin' a get-away!"

"Aw, what's the use? Leave him go!"

"By G.o.d, it was _my sister_--"

"Let me at him"--

"The gen'leman's right, I tell you!"--

And penetrating all a laconic drawl, "Stranger, leggo that n.i.g.g.e.r, and leggo quick."

Joan, on tiptoe, saw her father's head and beckoning hand above the crowd.

"Go on, James!" she said tensely. "Never mind if you run them down--"

"Stop!" gasped Effie May. "Don't you see those pistols? They mean to shoot!"

The terrified James did not know which to obey.

"Here, give me the wheel," ordered Joan. "Be quiet, Effie May!" Into her mind came scornfully one of her father's sayings, "The canaille are invariably timid."

Effie May suddenly screamed again. "They're going to _shoot_!"

And as if at a signal for which they had been waiting, two shots barked out.

The Major, still finely erect, thrust the negro behind him, and at the same moment Joan sprang out of the car to go to his defense; two instinctive acts which proved them father and child, and also proved indubitably the Darcy right to pride of race.

His steady voice reached her again as she struggled through the milling crowd; "You poor fools, look to what your folly has already led you!

You've shot the wrong man. You've shot _me_!"

There was a second of appalled silence. Then a man muttered "Golly!" and turned and fled. His panic was contagious. One after another, by twos and threes, the lynchers melted hastily away. When Joan reached her father he was seated on the ground, leaning for support against the bridge railing, alone except for the shackled negro.

He still had command of the situation. "Take my penknife, Dollykins, and set this boy free so that he can run," he ordered.

Joan cut the ropes, sick with relief. He was so calm that she thought he must have been bluffing the crowd.

"Dad! Dad! You're not really hurt, then?"

He smiled up at her. "Not hurt, my child. Killed," he said, dramatic to the last....

The negro did not run. In return for his defender's heroism, he performed a small act of heroism himself--not so small either, perhaps, considering that his life depended upon what use he made of the next few hours.

"I'll tote him to de car, lady," he offered, pantingly; and delayed further to give the paralyzed chauffeur instructions as to where to find the nearest doctor.

Joan sat on the floor of the limousine with her father's head in her lap, only half aware of his labored, fluttering breath, of the blood upon her dress, of her step-mother's wild pleadings with him just to look at her, just to say one word to his Effie May, who loved him--