“You will yet though, I ha’n’t nothing more to say now, but just mind what I tell you. You is both men that is marked to be killed, because you is leading radicals; so the white folks says they is gwine to kill you and a score more right round here close; I can’t help it, but I’ve done my duty, and you must take car’ of yourselves. It wouldn’t be no use to prosecute this man. It would only make the whole of ’em mad, and worse than ever ’em open a hornet’s nest; but I want to ax you this favor, just remember my life now, as I’ve remembered your’n, and not tell that I told you this.” “Oh, we won’t tell, and we’re much obliged to you for your good intentions but we don’t scare worth a cent, after all.” Uncle Jesse left the office, and the other men walked down to the railroad station to meet the through train going north. “What do you think of the old man’s story?” asked Watta. “I don’t think much of it. He has maintained such an equivocal attitude that it is hard to tell whose hands he is playing into. He has been on one side and then on the other—with the colored people and then with the whites, till there is no telling where he is now.” “Elly, you are unfair. That man is just as true as steel; he is solid gold all through. He is with the side that is right, that is all, only he has more courage to speak out than some of us have. I reckon the fact is that the right hasn’t _always_ been the colored side. I’m afraid it hasn’t, though we’ve had so much the worst chance since we’ve had a chance at all, and such an outrageous list of grievances to remember, and to bear, that it isn’t an ordinary man that can look at things fairly here.” Now, I have a mind to think there is something serious in this matter, and that there will be more and more as election approaches. The white men at Baconsville are _awful mad_, because our Militia Company has been reorganized lately, and has been preparing for the centennial Fourth of July. One would think they expected to be massacred in their beds; and so they go to work and do things that might make every nigger mad at them. Sensible, isn’t it? “They are just raving, the white men are, some of them, and they do talk dreadfully. Old man Bob Baker there, gets into a passion whenever he sees us drilling on Market street. He hates to see a nigger he has hunted in the swamps before the war, and his dogs couldn’t catch, or could, practicing the use of arms with a State gun in his hands, and the Union flag over his head. He is like a mad bull, and “the stars and stripes” is the red rag that sets him a roaring and tearing up the ground.” Here Watta, the speaker, slapped his companion’s shoulder, and both broke into a loud laugh. “He has got an idea,” he resumed, “that all the roads within five miles of his plantation belong to _him_, I reckon, by the way he swears whenever he meets or passes the Company. I tell the boys to give the flag an extra spread whenever he is in sight, and we have it out.”