us at
all. It certainly was a chill. We sees something is wrong, and we begins
to have a notion of what it is.

The hotel-keeper, he spits out his chew, and goes behind his little
counter and takes a five-cent cigar out of his little show case and
bites the end off careful. Then he leans his elbows onto his counter and
reads our names to himself out of the register book, and looks at us,
and from us to the names, and from the names to us, like he is trying to
figger out how he come to let us write 'em there. Then he wants to know
where we come from before we come to Atlanta, where we had registered
from. We tells him we is from the North. He lights his cigar like he
didn't think much of that cigar and sticks it in his mouth and looks at
us so long in an absent-minded kind of way it goes out.

Then he says we orter go back North.

"Why?" asts the doctor.

He chewed his cigar purty nigh up to the middle of it before he
answered, and when he spoke it was a soft kind of a drawl--not mad or
loud--but like they was sorrowful thoughts working in him.

"Yo' all done struck the wo'st paht o' the South to peddle yo' niggah
medicine in, sah. I reckon yo' must love 'em a heap to be that concerned
over the colour of their skins."

And he turned his back on us and went into the back room all by himself.

We seen we was in wrong in that town. The doctor says it will be no use
trying to interduce our stuff there, and we might as well leave there
in the morning and go over to Bairdstown, which was a little place about
ten miles off the railroad, and make our start there.

So we got a rig the next morning and drove acrost the country. No one
bid us good-bye, neither, and Doctor Kirby says it's a wonder they
rented us the rig.

But before we started that morning we noticed a funny thing. We hadn't
so much as spoke to any nigger, except our own nigger Sam, and he
couldn't of told ALL the niggers in that town about the stuff to turn
niggers white, even if he had set up all night to do it. But every last
nigger we saw looked like he knowed something about us. Even after we
left town our nigger driver hailed two or three niggers in the road that
acted that-away. It seemed like they was all awful polite to us. And
yet they was different in their politeness than they was to them Georgia
folks, which is their natcheral-born bosses--acted more familiar,
somehow, as if they knowed we must be thinking about the same thing they
was thinki