teret's. Unfortunately, Mammy Jane had gone to visit a sick woman in
the country, and was not expected to return for several hours.

XXXII

THE STORM BREAKS

The Wellington riot began at three o'clock in the afternoon of a day as
fair as was ever selected for a deed of darkness. The sky was clear,
except for a few light clouds that floated, white and feathery, high in
air, like distant islands in a sapphire sea. A salt-laden breeze from
the ocean a few miles away lent a crisp sparkle to the air.

At three o'clock sharp the streets were filled, as if by magic, with
armed white men. The negroes, going about, had noted, with uneasy
curiosity, that the stores and places of business, many of which closed
at noon, were unduly late in opening for the afternoon, though no one
suspected the reason for the delay; but at three o'clock every passing
colored man was ordered, by the first white man he met, to throw up his
hands. If he complied, he was searched, more or less roughly, for
firearms, and then warned to get off the street. When he met another
group of white men the scene was repeated. The man thus summarily held
up seldom encountered more than two groups before disappearing across
lots to his own home or some convenient hiding-place. If he resisted any
demand of those who halted him--But the records of the day are
historical; they may be found in the newspapers of the following date,
but they are more firmly engraved upon the hearts and memories of the
people of Wellington. For many months there were negro families in the
town whose children screamed with fear and ran to their mothers for
protection at the mere sight of a white man.

Dr. Miller had received a call, about one o'clock, to attend a case at
the house of a well-to-do colored farmer, who lived some three or four
miles from the town, upon the very road, by the way, along which Miller
had driven so furiously a few weeks before, in the few hours that
intervened before Sandy Campbell would probably have been burned at the
stake. The drive to his patient's home, the necessary inquiries, the
filling of the prescription from his own medicine-case, which he carried
along with him, the little friendly conversation about the weather and
the crops, and, the farmer being an intelligent and thinking man, the
inevitable subject of the future of their race,--these, added to the
return journey, occupied at least two hours of Miller's time.

As he neared the town