nature flamed up and irradiated all that had been merely dull and common
clay a moment before. As he ran on, with his coat tails flapping around
him, and his thin legs wobbling from the unaccustomed speed at which he
moved, he was so unimposing a figure that only the Deity who judges the
motives, not the actions, of men would have been impressed by the
spectacle. Even the three hearty brutes--and it took him but a glance to
see that two of them were drunk, and that the third, being a sober
rascal, was the more dangerous--hardly ceased their merry torment of the
young negro in their midst when he came up with them.

"I know that boy," he said. "He is the grandson of Aunt Mehitable. What
are you doing with him?"

A drunken laugh answered him, while the sober scoundrel--a lank, hairy
ne-er-do-well, with a tendency to epilepsy, whose name he remembered to
have heard--pushed him roughly to the roadside.

"You git out of this here mess, parson. We're goin' to teach this damn
nigger a lesson, and I reckon when he's learned it in hell, he won't
turn his grin on a white woman again in a jiffy."

"Fo' de Lawd, I didn't mean nuttin', Marster!" screamed the boy, livid
with terror. "I didn't know de lady was dar--fo' de Lawd Jesus, I
didn't! My foot jes slipped on de plank w'en I wuz crossin', en I
knocked up agin her."

"He jostled her," observed one of the drunken men judicially, "an' we'll
be roasted befo' we'll let a damn nigger jostle a white lady--even if
she ain't a lady--in these here parts."

In the rector's bone and fibre, drilled there by the ages that had
shaped his character before he began to be, there was all the white
man's horror of an insult to his womankind. But deeper even than this
lay his personal feeling of responsibility for any creature whose
fathers had belonged to him and had toiled in his service.

"I believe the boy is telling the truth," he said, and he added with one
of his characteristic bursts of impulsiveness, "but whether he is or
not, you are too drunk to judge."

There was going to be a battle, he saw, and in the swiftness with which
he discerned this, he made his eternal choice between the preacher and
the fighter. Stripping off his coat, he reached down for a stick from
the roadside; then spinning round on the three of them he struck out
with all his strength, while there floated before him the face of a man
he had killed in his first charge at Manassas. The old fury, the old
triumph,