“Captain McBane,” he said, “it’s against the law for you to ride in the nigger car.”

“Who are you talkin’ to?” returned the other.  “I’ll ride where I damn please.”

“Yes, sir, but the colored passenger objects.  I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to go into the smoking-car.”

“The hell you say!” rejoined McBane.  “I’ll leave this car when I get good and ready, and that won’t be till I’ve finished this cigar.  See?”

He was as good as his word.  The conductor escaped from the car before Miller had time for further expostulation.  Finally McBane, having thrown the stump of his cigar into the aisle and added to the floor a finishing touch in the way of expectoration, rose and went back into the white car.

Left alone in his questionable glory, Miller buried himself again in his newspaper, from which he did not look up until the engine stopped at a tank station to take water.

As the train came to a standstill, a huge negro, covered thickly with dust, crawled off one of the rear trucks unobserved, and ran round the rear end of the car to a watering-trough by a neighboring well.  Moved either by extreme thirst or by the fear that his time might be too short to permit him to draw a bucket of water, he threw himself down by the trough, drank long and deep, and plunging his head into the water, shook himself like a wet dog, and crept furtively back to his dangerous perch.

Miller, who had seen this man from the car window, had noticed a very singular thing.  As the dusty tramp passed the rear coach, he cast toward it a glance of intense ferocity.  Up to that moment the man’s face, which Miller had recognized under its grimy coating, had been that of an ordinarily good-natured, somewhat reckless, pleasure-loving negro, at present rather the worse for wear.  The change that now came over it suggested a concentrated hatred almost uncanny in its murderousness.  With awakened curiosity Miller followed the direction of the negro’s glance, and saw that it rested upon a window where Captain McBane sat looking out.  When Miller looked back, the negro had disappeared.

At the next station a Chinaman, of the ordinary laundry type, boarded the train, and took his seat in the white car without objection.  At another point a colored nurse found a place with her mistress.

“White people,” said Miller to himself, who had seen these passengers from the window, “do not object to the negro as a servant.  As the traditional negro,—­the servant,—­he is welcomed; as an equal, he is repudiated.”

Miller was something of a philosopher.  He had long ago had the conclusion forced upon him that an educated man of his race, in order to live comfortably in the United States, must be either a philosopher or a fool; and since he wished to be happy, and was not exactly a fool, he had cultivated philosophy.  By and by he saw a white man, with a dog, enter the rear coach.  Miller wondered whether the dog would