Once entered on these agreeable reminiscences, he went on in language the tenor of which is fortified by a memorandum made at the time. "But that isn't a circumstance to what happened three weeks ago last Tuesday. There's a nigger in this town that bought a cravenette coat from us for thirteen dollars and a half. It costs us about nine dollars, but he only paid instalments of four and a half, and then, for about six months, he dodged me; but my brother and I saw him on the street, and I jumped out of the buggy before he could run away, and says I, 'I want you to pay for that coat.' He had it on. He says, 'I hain't got any money.' Says it sarcastic-like. Well, of course I wouldn't take any lip from a nigger like that, and I sailed right in. I hit him between the eyes, and he up with a shovel and lambasted me with the flat of it right between the shoulder-blades, but I could have got away with him all right if his wife hadn't have come up with a piece of board and caught me on the side; my brother jumped right out of the buggy, and he hit her square and knocked her down, and we had a regular mix-up. We got the coat, and when we came away, we left the man lying senseless on the ground." "But don't those people ever get out warrants against you?" "Warrants against me, I guess not! I lay in bed five days, and when I got up, my brother and I swore out warrants against the nigger and his wife. We brought them up in court and the judge fined them forty-seven dollars, and he says to me, 'All the fault I find with you is that you didn't kill the double adjective nigger. He's the worst nigger in town!'" With all allowances for the lies visibly admixed in this unpleasant tale, it undoubtedly lifts the cover off a kind of thing that goes on every day between the superior and the inferior races. On the one side stand the negro customers, shiftless, extravagant, slinking away from their debts, yet doubtless afterward puffed with pride to be able to boast that they had a knock-down fight with a white man and were not shot; the other actor in this drama of race hatred could not even claim to be a Poor White; he was the son of a traveling man, had some education, was successful above the average, and until he began to talk about himself might for a few minutes have passed as a gentleman; yet to save a loss of less than five dollars, and to assert his superiority of race, he was perfectly willing to put himself on the level of the lowest Negro, and to engage in fisticuffs with a woman.