Blount resumed presently. "Peters didn't die right away," said he. "He lay there with his head propped on a coat rolled up for a piller, and he talked to us all like we was at home in the parlor. 'Keep on with it, boys,' said he. 'Do this thorough. Make this a white man's country; or if you kain't, don't leave no white men alive in it.' Then after a while he turns to me and says he, 'Colonel, you know I'm not a rich man. Now I've got a couple of mighty fine b'ah-dogs, and I want to give 'em to you; but if you don't mind, I'd like mighty well if you'd send my wife over a good cow. She's going to be left in pretty poor shape, I'm afraid, for you know how things have been going on the plantations,' I told him I would. We was both laying on the ground together. I told him I would take care of his folks, for he was a friend of mine, and the right kind of man. He talked on a while like that, and finally he says, 'Well, boys, I'm not going to live, and you've got a heap to do right now, and I mustn't keep you from it. Jake,' says he, 'you Jake, come here.'--Jake was his nigger boy that he always kept around with him. We had three or four good darkies with us. My boy Bill, out there, was along, and this Jake and some others. 'Jake,' says Jim Peters to this boy, 'come around here an' take this piller out from under my head. Lay me down, and lemme die!' Jake he didn't want to, but Jim says to him again, 'Jake, damn you,' says he,'do like I tell you'; so then Jake he took the piller out, and Jim he just lay back and gasped once, 'Oh!' like that, and he was gone. I call that dying like a gentleman," said Blount. "The poor fools," presently went on the firm voice of the man who was recounting these commonplaces of the recent savage scenes, "they think, and they told us, some of them, that they've got the North behind them. They think the time is going to come when they won't have to work any more. They want to make all this Delta black, and not white. If we could give it to them and fence them in we would be well rid of the whole proposition, North and South alike. These poor fools say that the North will make another war and set them free again! There'll never be another war between the South and the North. Next time it will be North and South together, against the slaves, white and black. But as to the Delta going black, while we men in here are left alive--well, I want to say we'll never live to see it. If the people up North could only know the trouble they make--could only know that that trouble lands hardest on the niggers, I think maybe they'd change a few of their theories. They don't understand. They think that maybe after a while they can make us people think that black is white, and white is black. Carry that out, and it means extermination, on the one side or the other.