Gaitskill did not reply. Instead he took out his watch and studied it carefully. He was thinking: the old combination freight and passenger train had left Tickfall at noon; it had traveled for three hours and twenty minutes at a speed of fifteen miles an hour. The train was not yet out of Tickfall parish. Then Gaitskill spoke: “All you niggers listen to me: Go down to the old cotton-shed back of my house and wait until I come. Hurry, now!” He turned, entered the bank, locked the door behind him, and strode to the telephone. “Hello, Susie!” he said to the operator. “Gimme the station-agent at Tonieville--quick!” There was a nervous quiver in his strong voice, and as he waited he drummed with his fingers on the table, tapped the toe of one foot on the floor, then snatched up a paper-weight and began to grind it savagely into the blotter on a desk. The coons had exasperated him often enough, he thought; but Pap Curtain had gone the limit. He would catch that nigger and wring his fool neck. “Hey--hello!” he bawled through the speaking-tube. “Is that you, Bill? This is Gaitskill--Say, has No. 2 passed through Tonieville yet? Coming now? All right, listen: tell the constable to board the Jim-Crow coach on that train and haul off a nigger--a yellow nigger with a baboon face and shifty eyes and a mouth which sneers. Yes! his name is Pap Curtain. He’s got a pocketful of money. Sure! Haul him off. Tell the constable to bring him back on No. I! Good-bye!” Gaitskill hung up the receiver, wiped the sweat from his face, and walked out of the bank, pausing at the door long enough to inform the clerk: “I’m going down to the cotton-shed, Frank. Got to hold an executive session with those coons!” * * * * * Pap Curtain had the negro-coach all to himself. He leaned back and sighed with a vast content. “Dem coons tried to knife me, but I beat ’em to it!” he snickered, as the train puffed slowly along. “One hundred an’ eighteen dollars is shore good wages fer a day’s wuck.” He planned his expenditure of the money: first a visit to New Orleans, and a happy time in the negro resorts of that city. After that a job on a steamboat which traveled down the river. After a long time, a return to Tickfall and a renewal of friendships with his negro neighbors. “Niggers don’t hold spite long,” he grinned. “An’ money don’t bother ’em hardly at all, whedder he makes it or loses it!” The train stopped at Tonieville and Pap stuck his head far out of the window to see who he would know at the station. He felt a sharp tap on his shoulder, pulled his head in, and looked behind him. A tall white man with tobacco-stained whiskers and a deputy-sheriff’s badge pinned to a strap of his suspenders spoke: “Climb off peaceable, Pap Curtain! Colonel Tom Gaitskill wants you back at Tickfall on the next train!”