e once
in a while to where Melanctha and her mother lived, but always that
pleasant, sweet-appearing, pale yellow woman, mysterious and uncertain
and wandering in her ways, was close in sympathy and thinking to her
big black virile husband.

James Herbert was a common, decent enough, colored workman, brutal and
rough to his one daughter, but then she was a most disturbing child to
manage.

The young Melanctha did not love her father and her mother, and she
had a break neck courage, and a tongue that could be very nasty. Then,
too, Melanctha went to school and was very quick in all the learning,
and she knew very well how to use this knowledge to annoy her parents
who knew nothing.

Melanctha Herbert had always had a break neck courage. Melanctha
always loved to be with horses; she loved to do wild things, to ride
the horses and to break and tame them.

Melanctha, when she was a little girl, had had a good chance to live
with horses. Near where Melanctha and her mother lived was the stable
of the Bishops, a rich family who always had fine horses.

John, the Bishops' coachman, liked Melanctha very well and he always
let her do anything she wanted with the horses. John was a decent,
vigorous mulatto with a prosperous house and wife and children.
Melanctha Herbert was older than any of his children. She was now a
well grown girl of twelve and just beginning as a woman.

James Herbert, Melanctha's father, knew this John, the Bishops'
coachman very well.

One day James Herbert came to where his wife and daughter lived, and
he was furious.

"Where's that Melanctha girl of yours," he said fiercely, "if she is
to the Bishops' stables again, with that man John, I swear I kill her.
Why don't you see to that girl better you, you're her mother."

James Herbert was a powerful, loose built, hard handed, black, angry
negro. Herbert never was a joyous negro. Even when he drank with other
men, and he did that very, often, he was never really joyous. In the
days when he had been most young and free and open, he had never
had the wide abandoned laughter that gives the broad glow to negro
sunshine.

His daughter, Melanctha Herbert, later always made a hard forced
laughter. She was only strong and sweet and in her nature when she was
really deep in trouble, when she was fighting so with all she really
had, that she did not use her laughter. This was always true of poor
Melanctha who was always so certain that she hated trouble.