Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/23

 Guinea or Gooseville. These negro drivers were burly men with shining black skins and gleaming eyes and teeth, whose merry laughter was almost belied by the ferocious, brutal whips they carried—whips precisely like that Simon Legree had wielded in the play in the theater just across the Square, now, by a stroke of poetic justice, in the hands of Uncle Tom himself. But on this day the firemen were not to be seen under the eaves of the market-house; their checker-boards were quite abandoned. The mules between the shafts of these two-wheeled drays hung their heads and their long ears drooped under the heat, and their black masters were curled up on the sidewalk against the wall of the saloon, asleep. The Irishmen were nowhere to be seen, and Market Square was empty, deserted, and sprawled there reflecting the light in a blinding way, while from the yellow, dusty level of its cobbled surface rose, wave on wave, palpably, that trembling, shimmering, vibrating heat. And yet, there was one waking, living thing in sight. There, out in the middle of the Square he stood, a dusty, drab figure, with an old felt hat on a head that must have ached and throbbed in that implacable heat, with a mass of rags upon him, his frayed trousers gathered at his ankles and bound about by irons, and a ball and chain to bind him to that spot. He had a broom in his hands, and was aimlessly making a little smudge of dust, doing his part in the observance of an old, cruel, and hideous superstition.

I knew, of course, that he was a prisoner. Usually there were three or four, sometimes half a dozen,