Carson went out into the quiet street and walked along to the post-office. At the intersection of the streets near the Johnston House, on any ordinary day, a dozen drays and hacks in the care of negro drivers would have been seen, and on the drays and about the hacks stood, as a rule, many idle negro men and boys; but this morning the spot was significantly vacant. At the negro barber-shop, kept by Buck Black, a mulatto of marked dignity and intelligence for one of his race, only the black barbers might be seen, and they were not lounging about the door, but stood at their chairs, their faces grave, their tongues unusually silent. They might be asking themselves questions as to the possible extent of the fires of race-hatred just now raging--if the capture and death of Pete Warren would quench the conflagration, or if it would roll on towards them like the licking flames of a burning prairie--they might, I say, ask _themselves_ such questions, but to the patrons of their trade they kept discreet silence. And no white man who went near them that day would ask them what they believed or what they felt, for the blacks are not a people who give much thought even to their own social problems. They had leaned for many generations upon white guidance, and, with childlike, hereditary instinct, they were leaning still. Finding no letters of importance in the little glass-faced and numbered box at the post-office, Carson, sick at heart and utterly discouraged, went up to the Club. Here, idly knocking the balls about on a billiard-table, a cigar in his mouth, was Keith Gordon. “Want to play a game of pool?” he asked. “Not this morning, old man,” Carson answered.