Page:Emma Speed Sampson--The shorn lamb.djvu/175

Rh smokehouse door and the henhouse door. He said nothing about it even to his mother. In the night, the first one after the installation, the bell rang out sharply at about midnight. Philip sprang to his window, from which he had a good view of the smokehouse. In the moonlight he could plainly see two frightened negro youths standing spell-bound for a moment and then fleeing as though the devil himself were after them.

That incident placed Philip in the first rank of charm workers, and Mam' Peachy was forced to take a back seat.

The old woman hated him with a hatred as deadly as she did his mother, but she feared him, too. She tried desperately to reinstate herself with her own people. It was hard to have been paramount for a hundred years and then have a slip of a white man come and with a few simple, straightforward words and some toothache medicine and some silly little bells take all her prestige from her.

Sending all the colored children to school was the last blow. Education was something Mam' Peachy had fought persistently. She had tried in her early womanhood to learn to read, but in spite of her keen intelligence and powerful will she could not learn. Perhaps it was the fault