That was it.
That was what made the folks so mad.
For him to be a murderer and all dressed up and walking the town like he dared them to touch him, when he ought to have been skulking and hiding in the woods, muddy and dirty and running.
It was like he never even knew he was a murderer, let alone a nigger too.
“And so Halliday (he was excited, thinking about that thousand dollars, and he had already hit the nigger a couple of times in the face, and the nigger acting like a nigger for the first time and taking it, not saying anything: just bleeding sullen and quiet)—Halliday was hollering and holding him when the old man they call Uncle Doc Hines come up and begun to hit the nigger with his walking stick until at last two men had to hold Uncle Doc quiet and took him home in a car.
Nobody knew if he really did know the nigger or not.
He just come hobbling up, screeching,
‘Is his name Christmas?
Did you say Christmas?’ and shoved up and took one look at the nigger and then begun to beat him with the walking stick.
He acted like he was hypnotised or something.
They had to hold him, and his eyes rolling blue into his head and slobbering at the mouth and cutting with that stick at everything that come into reach, until all of a sudden he kind of flopped.
Then two fellows carried him home in a car and his wife come out and took him into the house, and the two fellows come on back to town.
They didn’t know what was wrong with him, to get so excited after the nigger was caught, but anyway they thought that he would be all right now.
But here it was not a half an hour before he was back downtown again.
He was pure crazy by now, standing on the corner and yelling at whoever would pass, calling them cowards because they wouldn’t take the nigger out of jail and hang him right then and there, Jefferson or no Jefferson.
He looked crazy in the face, like somebody that had done slipped away from a crazy house and that knew he wouldn’t have much time before they come and got him again.
Folks say that he used to be a preacher, too.
“He said that he had a right to kill the nigger.
He never said why, and he was too worked up and crazy to make sense even when somebody would stop him long enough to ask a question.
There was a right good crowd around him by then, and him yelling about how it was his right to say first whether the nigger should live or should die.
And folks were beginning to think that maybe the place for him was in the jail with the nigger, when here his wife come up.
“There are folks that have lived in Mottstown for thirty years and haven’t ever seen her.
They didn’t know who she was then until she spoke to him, because the ones that had seen her, she was always around that little house in Niggertown where they live, in a mother hubbard and one of his woreout hats.
But she was dressed up now.
She had on a purple silk dress and a hat with a plume on it and she was carrying a umbrella and she come up to the crowd where he was hollering and yelling and she said,
‘Eupheus.’
He stopped yelling then and he looked at her, with that stick still raised in his hand and it kind of shaking, and his jaw dropped slack, slobbering.
She took him by the arm.
A lot of folks had been scared to come nigh him because of that stick; he looked like he might hit anybody at any minute and not even knowed it or intended it.
But she walked right up under the stick and took him by the arm and led him across to where there was a chair in front of a store and she set him down in the chair and she said,
‘You stay here till I come back.
Don’t you move, now.
And you quit that yelling.’
“And he did.
He sho did.
He set right there where she put him, and she never looked back, neither.
They all noticed that.
Maybe it was because folks never saw her except around home, staying at home.
And him being a kind of fierce little old man that a man wouldn’t cross without he thought about it first.
Anyhow they were surprised.
They hadn’t even thought of him taking orders from anybody.
It was like she had got something on him and he had to mind her.
Because he sat down when she told him to, in that chair, not hollering and talking big now, but with his head bent down and his hands shaking on that big walking stick and a little slobber still running out of his mouth, onto his shirt.
“She went straight to the jail.
There was a big crowd in front of it, because Jefferson had sent word that they were on the way down to get the nigger.
She walked right through them and into the jail and she said to Metcalf,
‘I want to see that man they caught.’
“ ‘What do you want to see him for?’ Metcalf said.
“ ‘I ain’t going to bother him,’ she said. ‘I just want to look at him.’
“Metcalf told her there was a right smart of other folks that wanted to do that, and that he knew she didn’t aim to help him escape, but that he was just the jailer and he couldn’t let anybody in without he had permission from the sheriff.