“What’s the matter, Watson?” demanded Miller, hoping now to obtain some reliable information.

“Matter!” exclaimed the other.  “Everything’s the matter!  The white people are up in arms.  They have disarmed the colored people, killing half a dozen in the process, and wounding as many more.  They have forced the mayor and aldermen to resign, have formed a provisional city government a la Francaise, and have ordered me and half a dozen other fellows to leave town in forty-eight hours, under pain of sudden death.  As they seem to mean it, I shall not stay so long.  Fortunately, my wife and children are away.  I knew you were out here, however, and I thought I’d come out and wait for you, so that we might talk the matter over.  I don’t imagine they mean you any harm, personally, because you tread on nobody’s toes; but you’re too valuable a man for the race to lose, so I thought I’d give you warning.  I shall want to sell you my property, too, at a bargain.  For I’m worth too much to my family to dream of ever attempting to live here again.”

“Have you seen anything of my wife and child?” asked Miller, intent upon the danger to which they might be exposed.

“No; I didn’t go to the house.  I inquired at the drugstore and found out where you had gone.  You needn’t fear for them,—­it is not a war on women and children.”

“War of any kind is always hardest on the women and children,” returned Miller; “I must hurry on and see that mine are safe.”

“They’ll not carry the war so far into Africa as that,” returned Watson; “but I never saw anything like it.  Yesterday I had a hundred white friends in the town, or thought I had,—­men who spoke pleasantly to me on the street, and sometimes gave me their hands to shake.  Not one of them said to me today:  ‘Watson, stay at home this afternoon.’  I might have been killed, like any one of half a dozen others who have bit the dust, for any word that one of my ‘friends’ had said to warn me.  When the race cry is started in this neck of the woods, friendship, religion, humanity, reason, all shrivel up like dry leaves in a raging furnace.”

The buggy, into which Watson had climbed, was meanwhile rapidly nearing the town.

“I think I’ll leave you here, Miller,” said Watson, as they approached the outskirts, “and make my way home by a roundabout path, as I should like to get there unmolested.  Home!—­a beautiful word that, isn’t it, for an exiled wanderer?  It might not be well, either, for us to be seen together.  If you put the hood of your buggy down, and sit well back in the shadow, you may be able to reach home without interruption; but avoid the main streets.  I’ll see you again this evening, if we’re both alive, and I can reach you; for my time is short.  A committee are to call in the morning to escort me to the train.  I am to be dismissed from the community with public honors.”  Watson was climbing down from the buggy, when a small party of men were seen approaching, and big Josh Green, followed by several other resolute-looking colored men, came up and addressed them.