There lay a silence in the room while the two women stared into each other’s souls with startled eyes. Swallowing hard, Miss Smith spoke.
“When I thought the endowment sure, I mortgaged the school in order to buy Tolliver’s land. The endowment failed, as you know, because—perhaps I was too stubborn.”
But Zora’s eyes snapped “No!” and Miss Smith continued:
“I borrowed ten thousand dollars. Then I tried to get the land, but Tolliver kept putting me off, and finally I learned that Colonel Cresswell had bought it. It seems that Tolliver got caught tight in the cotton corner, and that Cresswell, through John Taylor, offered him twice what he had agreed to sell to me for, and he took it. I don’t suppose Taylor knew what he was doing; I hope he didn’t.
“Well, there I was with ten thousand dollars idle on my hands, paying ten percent on it and getting less than three percent. I tried to get the bank to take the money back, but they refused. Then I was tempted—and fell.” She paused, and Zora took both her hands in her own.
“You see,” continued Miss Smith, “just as soon as the announcement of the prospective endowment was sent broadcast by the press, the donations from the North fell off. Letter after letter came from old friends of the school full of congratulations, but no money. I ought to have cut down the teaching force to the barest minimum, and gone North begging—but I couldn’t. I guess my courage was gone. I knew how I’d have to explain and plead, and I just could not. So I used the ten thousand dollars to pay its own interest and help run the school. Already it’s half gone, and when the rest goes then will come the end.”
Without, the great red sun paused a moment over the edge of the swamp, and the long, low cry of night birds broke sadly on the twilight silence. Zora sat stroking the lined hands.
“Not the end,” she spoke confidently. “It cannot end like this. I’ve got a little money that Mrs. Vanderpool gave me, and somehow we must get more. Perhaps I might go North and—beg.” She shivered. Then she sat up resolutely and turned to the book.
“Let’s go over matters carefully,” she proposed.
Together they counted and calculated.
“The balance is four thousand seven hundred and ninety-eight dollars,” said Miss Smith.
“Yes, and then there’s Mrs. Vanderpool’s check.”
“How much is that?”
Zora paused; she did not know. In her world there was little calculation of money. Credit and not cash is the currency of the Black Belt. She had been pleased to receive the check, but she had not examined it.
“I really don’t know,” she presently confessed. “I think it was one thousand dollars; but I was so hurried in leaving that I didn’t look carefully,” and the wild thought surged in her, suppose it was more!
She ran into the other room and plunged into her trunk; beneath the clothes, beneath the beauty of the Silver Fleece, till her fingers clutched and tore the envelope. A little choking cry burst from her throat, her knees trembled so that she was obliged to sit down.
In her fingers fluttered a check for—ten thousand dollars!
It was not until the next day that the two women were sufficiently composed to talk matters over sanely.
“What is your plan?” asked Zora.
“To put the money in a Northern savings bank at three percent interest; to supply the rest of the interest, and the deficit in the running expenses, from our balance, and to send you North to beg.”
Zora shook her head. “It won’t do,” she objected. “I’d make a poor beggar; I don’t know human nature well enough, and I can’t talk to rich white folks the way they expect us to talk.”
“It wouldn’t be hypocrisy, Zora; you would be serving in a great cause. If you don’t go, I—”
“Wait! You shan’t go. If anyone goes it must be me. But let’s think it out: we pay off the mortgage, we get enough to run the school as it has been run. Then what? There will still be slavery and oppression all around us. The children will be kept in the cotton fields; the men will be cheated, and the women—” Zora paused and her eyes grew hard.
She began again rapidly: “We must have land—our own farm with our own tenants—to be the beginning of a free community.”
Miss Smith threw up her hands impatiently.
“But sakes alive! Where, Zora? Where can we get land, with Cresswell owning every inch and bound to destroy us?”
Zora sat hugging her knees and staring out the window toward the sombre ramparts of the swamp. In her eyes lay slumbering the madness of long ago; in her brain danced all the dreams and visions of childhood.
“I’m thinking,” she murmured, “of buying the swamp.”
XXXIII
The Buying of the Swamp
“It’s a shame,” asserted John Taylor with something like real feeling. He was spending Sunday with his father-in-law, and both, over their after-dinner cigars, were gazing thoughtfully at the swamp.
“What’s a shame?” asked Colonel Cresswell.
“To see all that timber and prime cotton-land going to waste. Don’t you remember those fine bales of cotton that came out of there several seasons ago?”
The Colonel smoked placidly. “You can’t get it cleared,” he said.
“But couldn’t you hire some good workers?”
“Niggers won’t work. Now if we had Italians we might do it.”
“Yes, and in a few years they’d own the country.”
“That’s right; so there we are. There’s only one way to get that swamp cleared.”
“How?”
“Sell it to some fool darkey.”
“Sell it? It’s too valuable to sell.”
“That’s just it. You don’t understand. The only way to get decent work out of some niggers is to let them believe they’re buying land. In nine cases out of
