Suddenly his fingers twitching about a knife in his hand, Batouala, the Mokoundji rushed upon this couple. He was foaming. His fist was raised for the blow. More nimble than monkeys, Bissibingui and Yassiguindjia leapt out of his reach. He pursued them. Ah, these children of a dog had the impudence to desire each other before his very eyes. He’d have the skin of that strumpet. As for Bissibingui ... Ah, wouldn’t the women make fun of him then. Yassiguindjia! The idea! Hadn’t he bought her with seven waist cloths, a box of salt, three copper collars, a bitch, four pots, six hens, twenty she goats, forty big baskets of millet, and a girl slave! Ah, he’d make Yassiguindjia take the test poison.”[411] But the arrival of the commandant saves the guilty couple. Batouala, however, still plots the life of Bissibingui, who is plotting the robbery of his own people, as one of the commandant’s soldiery. In the great hunt Batouala hurls a javelin at his rival, misses him and is himself struck down by an infuriated passing panther. So the dark patriot falls and the black scalawag wins. It is an impressive picture of African life, the men, the women and the conjugality. Turn we now to the coast of South Carolina, where in “The Black Border,” the scene is laid, for “Jim Moultrie’s Divorce,” the deepest in discernment of all the life like sketches of that moving book. Jim, too, was a great hunter, an unwearied pursuer. No animal. But a black man. A believer in divorce, as almost all Negroes in America are, even in South Carolina, where the law refuses it. At the end of a cold blustering day in February, after pushing his clumsy dug-out canoe into every creek and lead of the Jehossee marshes, to flush ducks for the white sportsman who had hired him, at sun set he is turning home. How the picture appeals to us of the coast. “Far up the river, like low hung stars, twinkled the watch fires of a great timber raft outward bound for the estuary of the North Edisto. From a distant plantation came the sweet lu-la-lu of a happy Negro freed from work. The raft borne upon the bosom of the strong ebb tide, neared rapidly, and around its fires, built on earth covered platforms, the negro raftsmen talked and laughed as they cooked their supper and the flames lighted the face and magnified the figure of the black steersman who stood by the great sweep oar, with which at the stern of the raft, he guided its course down stream. For an hour Jim had silently bucked the tide, impelling the boat under the powerful strokes of his paddle, alternately left and right. ‘What are you thinking of Jim?’ ‘Study ’bout ’ooman, suh.’ (A short silence).