“You fools! You fools!” he raged, struggling toward the center of the crowd again, “you're killing a white man there. An innocent white man------ Do you stop at nothing? You're killing a _white man_, I say!” “White man?” said the person whom he had struck, and who appeared to bear him little resentment for the blow. “Who's a white man? Not Jerry Carter here! He wasn't any white man. I've known him since he was a kid--he was just one of those yaller niggers.” And Carter heard it as he died. II--Old Man Murtrie |Old Man Murtrie never got any fresh air at all, except on Sundays on his way to and from church. He lived, slept, cooked and ate back of the prescription case in his little dismal drug store in one of the most depressing quarters of Brooklyn. The store was dimly lighted by gas and it was always damp and suggested a tomb. Drifting feebly about in the pale and cold and faintly greenish radiance reflected from bottles and show cases, Old Man Murtrie with his bloodless face and dead white hair and wisps of whisker was like a ghost that has not managed to get free from the neighborhood of a sepulcher where its body lies disintegrating. People said that Old Man Murtrie was nearly a hundred years old, but this was not true; he was only getting along towards ninety. The neighborhood, however, seemed a little impatient with him for not dying. Some persons suggested that perhaps he really had been dead for a long time, and did not know it. If so, they thought, it might be kind to tell him about it. But Old Man Murtrie was not dead, any more than he was alive. And Death himself, who has his moments of impatience, began to get worried about Old Man Murtrie. It was time, Death thought, that he was dead, since he looked so dead; and Death had said so, both to God and to the Devil. “But I don't want to garner him, naturally,” Death would say, “till I know which one of you is to have him. He's got to go somewhere, you know.” God and Death and the Devil used to sit on the prescription counter in a row, now and then, and watch Old Man Murtrie as he slept in his humble little cot back there, and discuss him. God would look at Old Man Murtrie's pale little Adam's Apple sticking up in the faint gaslight, and moving as he snored--moving feebly, for even his snores were feeble--and say, with a certain distaste: “I don't want him. He can't get into Heaven.” And the Devil would look at his large, weak, characterless nose;--a nose so big that it might have suggested force on any one but Old Man Murtrie--and think what a sham it was, and how effectually all its contemptible effort to be a real nose was exposed in Old Man Murtrie's sleep. And the Devil would say: “I don't want him. He can't get into Hell.” And then Death would say, querulously: “But he can't go on living forever. My reputation is suffering.”