As they sat alone that evening, neither Wilson Jacobs nor his sister offered any comment upon how they were saved an embarrassing ordeal. They were both thinking, thinking, and seeing, with their eyes full of tears, a chair where one had sat and talked and laughed with them the Sunday night before. Their hearts were heavy, very heavy, for, strangely enough, they felt that Mildred Latham would never sit in that chair again. CHAPTER SIXTEEN _The Beast and The Jungle_ "REMEMBER THE SABBATH DAY AND KEEP IT HOLY" This was the inscription under a cartoon in the Effingham Herald, one Sunday, following a Sunday when crime seemed to have run riot. The cartoon pictured a huge knife stuck into a human heart, and the moral was, that on the Sabbath day, when its population was supposed to be at pious worship, murder was un-Godly. The Sunday previous to this, seven different murders had occurred in that many different parts of the town. Sidney had read the accounts, and said nothing when he saw they were all black people. Only one exception, and that was one who had shot another, and in attempting to escape, had been shot by the police. Thus was the condition of crime in Effingham. It was a rare Sunday that didn't have five or six shootings, killings and cutting affrays. The record for the previous year showed more than three hundred murders, mostly by Negroes upon each other, and in part by the police. Eighty per cent of all murder in the city was among two-fifths of the whole, or the Negro population. But what surprised Wyeth was, that insofar as speaking of it as an everyday occurrence, and something to be expected, the colored people paid little attention to it. By this time, Wyeth had become known as a severe critic. And, therefore, against colored people in their effort for salvation, so the critics complained. There was one, however, who saw beneath the surface, and who said, in reply to the criticisms going the rounds, that Wyeth was criticised, not for the criticisms, but for his method of bringing the truth before the eyes which did not wish to see it. "We've tried every way possible to obtain a library," said one. "What are some of the ways?" he inquired pointedly. "Well, for instance, we have asked the teachers to each give a book for that purpose. We have almost two hundred teachers in this town, and if each one gave a book, and the preachers likewise, that would make considerable of a library." "For sixty thousand people, yes." And under his breath he added, "You fool!" "Why do you not write an editorial and bring attention to the dreadful amount of crime that seems to have submerged your population," he said one day to Mathews, a very excellent writer. "I'm writing of what people are doing that is uplifting," the other returned.