The Forged Note. Micheaux Oscar

feel this way? Pshaw! You ought surely to be happy, calm and imperious. Mildred Latham loves you—and she needs you; but much she does with such nerves!" He braced himself as he neared the house, and pictured himself in the next hour. She would be in his arms—and all would be over—but the happiness. This picture became so vivid, that for a time it served to make him forget his nerves.

      And now he had come unto the house, the house of his treasure, and within all was silent. Strangely, a feeling came over him of an approaching doom. Before him, shivering in the cold night, sat an old woman, a hag. She looked at him out of one evil old eye, and he shuddered noticeably. She was uncouth and unwelcome. "What's she doing here?" he muttered.

      "Does—ah—Miss Mildred Latham live here?" He ventured at last.

      "Yes," snapped the hag, and appeared more evil still.

      "Thank you," he murmured with forced courtesy, but very uneasy. Drawing his card, he held it out to her, with: "Kindly take this and inform her that a gentleman—a friend—would be glad to speak with her." The old hag crushed it in her bony palm, and spat out five short words.... But, oh, what mean, cruel, hurting little words!

      He reeled in spite of his strength, then stood like a statue, frozen to the spot.

      The night was cold, and dark and dreary; but to Sidney Wyeth it was hot—suffocating in those next moments. His jaw dropped as he started to speak, but the words failed to come. After a time, the elements began to clear, but left him weak. He turned with a savage gripping at his heart, and stumbled back in the direction from whence he had come.

      "Oh, Mildred!" he wailed. "Mildred, Mildred! I can't believe it.... I can never, oh, never——and I loved you so!" On and on he went; at times walking, other times stumbling; but always uttering incoherent sentences. "It can't be true—it isn't true! That old hag—spiteful creature," he now growled distractedly,—"lied! I'll go back, curse her! I'll go back and prove her the liar she is." He halted, staggered drunkenly against a building, and then abruptly turned his face in the direction from whence he had come. But, 'ere he had gone far, he desisted. Believe those words or not, something forbade this step. Weaker than ever, torn, distracted, and mentally prostrated, he paused and leaned against a building, and for a long time gave up to utter misery.

      Our pen fails here to describe fully those conflicting moments. All that he had lived for in those days, and all that he had recently hoped for, seemed to have been swept forever from him in that one moment. After an interminable spell of mental blankness, a sentence he had once been fond of quoting, and which he had taken from Haggard's Pearl Maiden, came back to him out of a remote past. It was this: "With time, most men become used to disaster and rebuff. A colt that seems to break its neck at the crack of a whip, will hobble at last to the knacker, unmoved from a thousand blows rained upon him." So, presently, with a tired, wearied sigh, he gathered himself together, and, with a last despairing look in the direction of the fateful number, he passed down the dark street, and disappeared in the direction of The Jackson House.

      * * * * *

      "Wonder what's the matter wi' d' kid t'night?" said Jackson to his consort, as she looked up inquiringly when he re-entered the room, after showing Wyeth to his bed.

      "I wonder", she commented thoughtfully. "He's always so cheerful and pleasant when around. He walked in here like a ghost tonight. Now I wonder what is the matter?"

      It was late the following morning when Jackson chanced to be passing, and peeped into the room occupied by his friend, who had acted so strangely the night before. The coverlets had not been turned back, altho the bed was sunk in the middle, as if someone had tossed restlessly about over it the night before. Jackson wondered again. But at that hour, Sidney Wyeth was on a train that was speeding southward into Dixie.

      * * * * *

      So it happened that the hero of this story went forth into a land which is a part of our country.... A part wherein people and environment are so far different from the rest, that a great problem is ever an issue. This is the problem of human beings versus human beings. A land wherein one race vies with the other; that other being a multitude of black people, and, as one who reads this might know, a people who, once upon a time had been slaves, chattels, and who for fifty and a few years have been free. That time, however, has not been, as we might appreciate, sufficient to eliminate many things hereditary.

      * * * * *

      And what came to pass upon this journey; the things he discovered, the one he again met, of what had resulted, due to the machinations of a pious, evil genius, is the story I have to tell.

      CHAPTER TWO

       ATTALIA

       Table of Contents

      "Heah! Heah! Don't get on that cah!" cried the conductor the following morning, as Sidney Wyeth was climbing aboard the Jim Crow car of the Palm Leaf Limited, bound for Attalia. He backed up and looked about him in some surprise, and than demanded the reason why he shouldn't get aboard that "cah".

      "I thought I tole you once we had an extra heavy train, and no colored passengers allowed; but since I see yu', now I see you ain't the same fellah that was here awhile ago." And then, in a few words, he explained that, owing to the rush of people to the south during those first days of January, the Jim Crow section of the train had been dispensed with for that day. He explained further that a second section of the same train would follow shortly. As it would, in all probability, pass them at Lexington, Sidney, with a mumble of thanks, gathered up his grips and returned to the waiting room, catching the same an hour later.

      Kentucky soon lay before him. As far as eye could see, a snowy mantle covered the ground, for it was winter. Presently, countless rows of frame buildings appeared. A new brick station, which extended for some length along the track, gave the traveler welcome.

      When the train came to a stop, Sidney's attention was arrested by the sight of a creature that may have been called a man, but gave every evidence of being an ape.

      "I wonder," said he, to a fellow passenger, "do those things grow 'round here?"

      They both enjoyed a laugh.

      He was now in a land in which a portion of the people, apparently, possessed little sense of humor, judging from the way his jokes were accepted.

      On the car were two women, among the half dozen or so colored passengers. Sidney overheard one of them say to the other:

      "I'm from No'th C'lina; but I be'n in Oklahoma two ye's. I'm go'n back home t' stay. Whe' you from?"

      "Tennessee, Knoxville. I'm livin' in Bloomington, Illinois, now."

      They looked inquiringly in the direction of Wyeth, and presently he was drawn into the conversation. The latter possessed fine sense of humor, and when he found these people so serious, he took delight in joking.

      "Whe' you from?" they inquired, with all that is southern and hospitable in their tone.

      "From the Rosebud Country, South Dakota," he replied. Their faces were a study. Somewhere in the years gone by they might have heard of that state in school, but the Rosebud Country was Greek to them.

      "O-oh," they echoed, and then looked at each other and back at him. Presently one of them inquired: "Where is that?"

      "In Africa," he answered, but they did not catch the joke, and to this day, they speak of the man they met from the Dark Continent.

      At that moment, the train was crossing a stream over the highest bridge Sidney had ever seen, with possibly one or two exceptions. It seemed a thousand feet to the crystal water below, and every eye was fixed upon it. The porter, a long, lank, laughing creature, scion of the south and some porter, seeing an opportunity to draw attention, rushed up in a Shakesperian pose, and related dramatically, the incident of an intoxicated man, who, while crossing that very stream, fell, of a sudden, smack dab over-board, right into it. In concluding, he looked about him more dramatically