“It's a sight deeper science than that when you work it accordin' to up-to-date rules an' regulations,” Trawley blandly explained. “The furder you advance in it the more you seem to lay hold of. You seed me bendin' up an' down just now. Exercise like that, 'long with deep breathin', an' the idea that you are, so to speak, pullin' good thoughts an' intentions into you along with the wind, will do more than ten wholesale drug-stores. I know, for I am actually a new man, from toe to scalp. I don't eat nothin' now but ham. Look at my muscles.” Trawley exhibited an arm tightly contracted and smiled proudly. “Why, I was ready for my windin'-sheet an' the coolin'-board. If I had to give up my stable, an' every hoss an' rig I have, or let go of this idea, I'd do it an' work like a nigger in a ditch for bare bread an' water. Paul calls it 'the Science of Life,' an' he's right. In our talk that day he said that it would be well to try, as far as I could, to undo any wrong I'd ever done, an' soon after that I saw Pete Watson's widow passin' the stable. I'll swear she did look pitiful in her old raggety shoes with the toes out, totterin' along with her kinky head down. Well, I called 'er in an' had a talk--” “An' give us all dead away!” Hoag flashed in renewed fear. “No, I didn't. She was in a powerful bad fix, an' I let 'er have a few dollars an' told 'er to look me up any time she was rail bad off. Lordy! the sight o' that old thing's face did me good for a week. I'm goin' to hire one o' her sons to work in the stable. I reckon I'd be a freer man if I wasn't sorter obligated to you boys; but I tell you now, Jim, I'm goin' to drag my skirts away from you all as much as possible. All that secret-order business an' followin' your lead got me down. Paul says, in all the places he's been at, he never has seed as bad a condition of affairs as we got right here. He says--an' I don't know whether he suspicioned that I was implicated or not--but he says that all that night-prowlin', an' scarin' half-witted niggers an' stringin' 'em up to limbs, won't settle our trouble. He says that we've got to be gentle with the blacks an' train 'em. He says the old slaveholders was kind to 'em, an' that's why no outrages was ever heard of before slavery was abolished, an' he says treatin' the niggers decent now will--” “He's a fool!” Hoag growled, angrily. “He's gone off an' lived among a lot o' Yankees who think niggers are a grade better'n us white folks down here. They don't know nigger-nature, an' _he_ don't, neither, but I'll tell you one thing: he'd better keep his mouth shet, an' you--you can quit us if you want to, but you'd better not make too many brags about it.”