Jerry, the porter, who had gone downstairs to the counting-room to find two whole chairs, now entered with one in each hand.  He set a chair for the general, who gave him an amiable nod, to which Jerry responded with a bow and a scrape.  Captain McBane made no acknowledgment, but fixed Jerry so fiercely with his single eye that upon placing the chair Jerry made his escape from the room as rapidly as possible.

“I don’ like dat Cap’n McBane,” he muttered, upon reaching the hall.  “Dey says he got dat eye knock’ out tryin’ ter whip a cullud ’oman, when he wuz a boy, an’ dat he ain’ never had no use fer niggers sence,—­’cep’n’ fer what he could make outen ’em wid his convic’ labor contrac’s.  His daddy wuz a’ overseer befo’ ‘im, an’ it come nachul fer him ter be a nigger-driver.  I don’ want dat one eye er his’n restin’ on me no longer ‘n I kin he’p, an’ I don’ know how I’m gwine ter like dis job ef he’s gwine ter be comin’ roun’ here.  He ain’ nothin’ but po’ w’ite trash nohow; but Lawd!  Lawd! look at de money he’s got,—­livin’ at de hotel, wearin’ di’mon’s, an’ colloguin’ wid de bes’ quality er dis town!  ‘Pears ter me de bottom rail is gittin’ mighty close ter de top.  Well, I s’pose it all comes f’m bein’ w’ite.  I wush ter Gawd I wuz w’ite!”

After this fervent aspiration, having nothing else to do for the time being, except to remain within call, and having caught a few words of the conversation as he went in with the chairs, Jerry, who possessed a certain amount of curiosity, placed close to the wall the broken stool upon which he sat while waiting in the hall, and applied his ear to a hole in the plastering of the hallway.  There was a similar defect in the inner wall, between the same two pieces of studding, and while this inner opening was not exactly opposite the outer, Jerry was enabled, through the two, to catch in a more or less fragmentary way what was going on within.

He could hear the major, now and then, use the word “negro,” and McBane’s deep voice was quite audible when he referred, it seemed to Jerry with alarming frequency, to “the damned niggers,” while the general’s suave tones now and then pronounced the word “niggro,”—­a sort of compromise between ethnology and the vernacular.  That the gentlemen were talking politics seemed quite likely, for gentlemen generally talked politics when they met at the Chronicle office.  Jerry could hear the words “vote,” “franchise,” “eliminate,” “constitution,” and other expressions which marked the general tenor of the talk, though he could not follow it all,—­partly because he could not hear everything distinctly, and partly because of certain limitations which nature had placed in the way of Jerry’s understanding anything very difficult or abstruse.

He had gathered enough, however, to realize, in a vague way, that something serious was on foot, involving his own race, when a bell sounded over his head, at which he sprang up hastily and entered the room where the gentlemen were talking.