The impish look came curling round his lips, but for a moment only, and it was gone.

“That shook Daddy Ben up a good deal.”

“Having his grandson do it, do you mean?”

“Oh, he’s used to his grandson!  Grandsons in that race might just as well be dogs for all they know or care about their progenitors.  Yet Daddy Ben spent his savings on educating Charles Cotesworth and two more—­but not one of them will give the old man a house to-day.  If ever I have a home—­” John stopped himself, and our silence was no longer easy; our unspoken thoughts looked out of our eyes so that they could not meet.  Yet no one, unless directly invited by him, had the right to say to hint what I was thinking, except some near relative.  Therefore, to relieve this silence which had ceased to be agreeable, I talked about Daddy Ben and his grandsons, and negro voting, and the huge lie of “equality” which our lips vociferate and our lives daily disprove.  This took us comfortably away from weddings and cakes into the subject of lynching, my violent condemnation of which surprised him; for our discussion had led us over a wide field, and one fertile in well-known disputes of the evergreen sort, conducted by the North mostly with more theory than experience, and by the South mostly with more heat than light; whereas, between John and me, I may say that our amiability was surpassed only by our intelligence!  Each allowed for the other’s standpoint, and both met in many views:  he would have voted against the last national Democratic ticket but for the Republican upholding of negro equality, while I assured him that such stupid and criminal upholding was on the wane.  He informed me that he did not believe the pure blooded African would ever be capable of taking the intellectual side of the white man’s civilization, and I informed him that we must patiently face this probability, and teach the African whatever he could profitably learn and no more; and each of us agreed with the other.  I think that we were at one, save for the fact that I was, after all, a Northerner—­and that is a blemish which nobody in Kings Port can quite get over.  John, therefore, was unprepared for my wholesale denunciation of lynching.

“With your clear view of the negro,” he explained.

“My dear man, it’s my clear view of the white!  It’s the white, the American citizen, the ‘hope of humanity,’ as he enjoys being called, who, after our English-speaking race has abolished public executions, degenerates back to the Stone Age.  It’s upon him that lynching works the true injury.”

“They’re nothing but animals,” he muttered.

“Would you treat an animal in that way?” I inquired.

He persisted.  “You’d do it yourself if you had to suffer from them.”

“Very probably.  Is that an answer?  What I’d never do would be to make a show, an entertainment, a circus, out of it, run excursion trains to see it—­come, should you like your sister to buy tickets for a lynching?”