For, you understand, what they thought, they being half liquored-up, and when one of them had jerked the blankets off me, was that I was a woman. One of them carried a lantern but it was smoky and dirty and didn’t give out much light. So they must have figured it out—my body being pretty white and slender then, like a young girl’s body I suppose—that some white swipe had brought me up there. The kind of girls around a town that will come with a swipe to a race track on a rainy night aren’t very fancy females but you’ll find that kind in the towns all right. I’ve seen many a one in my day. And so, I figure, these two big buck niggers, being piped that way, just made up their minds they would snatch me away from the white swipe who had brought me out there, and who had left me lying carelessly around. “Jes’ you lie still honey. We ain’t gwine hurt you none,” one of them said, with a little chuckling laugh that had something in it besides a laugh, too. It was the kind of laugh that gives you the shivers. The devil of it was I couldn’t say anything, not even a word. Why I couldn’t yell out and say “What the hell,” and just kid them a little and shoo them out of there I don’t know, but I couldn’t. I tried and tried so that my throat hurt but I didn’t say a word. I just lay there staring at them. It was a mixed-up night. I’ve never gone through another night like it. Was I scared? Lord Almighty, I’ll tell you what, I was scared. Because the two big black faces were leaning right over me now, and I could feel their liquored-up breaths on my cheeks, and their eyes were shining in the dim light from that smoky lantern, and right in the centre of their eyes was that dancing flickering light I’ve told you about your seeing in the eyes of wild animals, when you were carrying a lantern through the woods at night. It was a puzzler! All my life, you see—me never having had any sisters, and at that time never having had a sweetheart either—I had been dreaming and thinking about women, and I suppose I’d always been dreaming about a pure innocent one, for myself, made for me by God, maybe. Men are that way. No matter how big they talk about “let the women go hang,” they’ve always got that notion tucked away inside themselves, somewhere. It’s a kind of chesty man’s notion, I suppose, but they’ve got it and the kind of up-and-coming women we have nowdays who are always saying, “I’m as good as a man and will do what the men do,” are on the wrong trail if they really ever want to, what you might say “hog-tie” a fellow of their own. So I had invented a kind of princess, with black hair and a slender willowy body to dream about. And I thought of her as being shy and afraid to ever tell anything she really felt to anyone but just me. I suppose I fancied that if I ever found such a woman in the flesh I would be the strong sure one and she the timid shrinking one. And now I was that woman, or something like her, myself.