"Then Crouch reached over and took the pen out of the warden's hands, and marked a cross underneath what the warden had written, and when the warden asked him what he did that for, he said he wanted his mother to have something he had touched himself. By that time the new rope came and they swung him up. Curious, wasn't it? The warden said it was the funniest message he ever knew a dying nigger to send, and he'd hung a good many of 'em. It struck me as being some secret kind of a password. You never can tell about these coons." "Did the warden mail it?" "Oh, yes, of course he mailed it--warden's square as a brick. Sent it, of course, care of the man the girl works for. He lives somewhere around here, or Crouch said he did. Awfully glad to see you again--I get out here." The porter brought in the dogs, I picked up the gun, and we conducted the young sportsman out of the car and into a buggy waiting for him at the end of the platform. As I entered the car again and waved my hand to him from the open window, I saw a negro woman dart from out the crowd of loungers, as if in eager search of some one. She was a tall, bony, ill-formed woman, wearing the rude garb of a farm hand--blue cotton gown, brown sunbonnet, and the rough muddy shoes of a man. The dress was faded almost white in parts, and patched with different colors, but looked fresh and clean. It was held together over her flat bust by big bone buttons. There was neither collar nor belt. The sleeves were rolled up above the elbows, showing her strong, muscular arms, tough as rawhide. The hands were large and bony, with big knuckles, the mark of the hoe in the palms. In her eagerness to speak to the porter the sunbonnet had slipped off. Black as the face was, it brought to my mind, strange to say, those weather-tanned fishwives of the Normandy coast--those sturdy, patient, earnest women, accustomed to toil and exposure and to the buffetings of wind and tempest. When the porter appeared on his way back to the car, she sprang forward, and caught him by the arm. "Oh, I'm dat sorry! An' he ain't come wid ye?" she cried. "But ye see him, didn't ye?" The voice was singularly sweet and musical. "Ye did? Oh, dat's good." As she spoke, a little black bare-legged pickaninny, with one garment, ran out from behind the corner of the station, and clung to the woman's skirts, hiding her face in their folds. The woman put her hard, black hand on the child's cheek, and drew the little woolly head closer to her side. "Well, when's he comin'? I come dis mawnin' jes 's ye tol' me. An' ye see him, did ye?" she asked with a strange quivering pathos in her voice. "Oh, yes, I see him yisterday." The porter's answer was barely audible. I noticed, too, that he looked away from her as he spoke. "An' yer sho' now he ain't come wid ye," and she looked toward the train as if expecting to find some one. "No, he can't come till nex' Saturday," answered the porter.