heir rights."

"And at the same time I suppose you are going to demand that the white
man shall not have his."

"No, won't demand that he shan't have his rights, but that he shan't
have his way."

"Not have his way with his own affairs? Good. And now let me tell you
something. Want to hear it?"

"I'm not aching to hear it."

"Well, I'll give it to you anyway. It's this: The first thing you know a
committee of gentlemen will call on you and offer you the opportunity to
make a few remarks, and after you have made them you will thereafter
decline all invitations to speak. At the end of a rope the most
talkative man finds a thousand years of silence. Long time for a man to
hush, eh? Well, our roads split here."

"How do you know?"

"Because I turn to the right."

"But may be my business calls me over that way."

"Don't know about that, but I'm going to turn into this lane and I don't
want you to come with me. Do you hear?"

Mayo did not answer. Gid turned into a road leading to the right, and
looking back he saw that Mayo was riding straight ahead. "At any rate he
ain't afraid to say what he thinks," the old man mused. "Got more nerve
than I thought he had, and although it may make him more dangerous, yet
it entitles him to more respect."

His horse's hoof struck into a patch of leaves, heaped beneath a
cottonwood, and from the rustling his ears, warmed by the old liquor,
caught the first bars of a tune he had known in his youth; and lifting
high his voice he sang it over and over again. He passed a negro cabin
whence often had proceeded at night the penetrating cry of a fiddle, and
it was night now but no fiddle sent forth its whine. A dog shoved open
the door, and by the fire light within the old man saw a negro sitting
with a gun across his lap, and beside him stood two boys, looking with
rapture upon their father's weapon. Throughout the neighborhood had
spread a report that the negroes were meeting at night to drill, and
this glance through a door gave life to what had been a shadow.

He rode on, and his horse's hoof struck into another patch of leaves,
but no tune arose from the rustle. The old man was thinking. In a field
of furrowed clouds the moon was struggling, and down the sandy road fell
light and darkness in alternating patches. Far away he saw a figure
stepping from light into darkness and back again into light. Into the
deep shadow of a vine-entangled tree he turned his horse, and here he
wai