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My father went over and sat down at the table. He took a faded silk envelope out of his, coat, and laid it down before him. Then he answered Zindorf. "There will be no sale," he said. Mr. Lucian Morrow interrupted. "And why no sale, Sir?" "Because there is no slave to sell," replied my father. "This girl is not the daughter of the octoroon woman, Suzanne." Zindorf's big jaws tightened.
To test her out, I put my own story around the life of a friend, telling her of a man who had married an octoroon, leaving a daughter of color and a son by a previous marriage with a white woman; also describing the consequences that had ensued. Miss Walker heard me with interested attention. She admitted that the complications were serious.
Men moved or stood beneath the trees on the cliffside in attitudes of supreme awe or growing uneasiness, according to their kind: for among them were numbered Spaniard and Briton, creole and mulatto, Carib and octoroon, with coal-black negroes enough to outnumber all the rest and it was upon these last that profound awe sat oppressively.
Fitzgerald had treated the octoroon, at the time of his marriage with Miss Bell; that he had subsequently sold her to a very base man, in payment of a debt; that she, terrified and bewildered by the prospect of such a fate, had, in a moment of frantic revenge, changed her babe for his daughter's; and that consequently the Gerald he had been educating as his grandson was in fact the son of the octoroon, and born a slave.
It was the scream that brought Pascherette out of the hut, where she sheltered from the storm, to see the council hall in flames. It was the scream that told the little octoroon where the fire had birth. And Pascherette, too, believed that the three strangers were still within the cells. She had plans of her own that required the safety of those men, at least for a while.
The little octoroon lay where she had fallen, a pitiful little huddled heap; never once had her pain-dulled eyes left the giant, or the place where he might appear. And now she saw him coming toward her, not as a ministering angel, but like a figure of wrath, swinging his great broad-ax in one hand as easily as another man might swing a cutlas. She shivered as he stood over her, accusing.
Before we knew it they were upon us! I have been in any one of the three separately many a time. In '95 off the Blue Canary Islands I was caught in an octoroon, one of those eight-sided storms, that spun our ship around like a top, and killed all the canaries for miles about the sea was strewn with their bodies. But this! "Below," bellowed Captain Triplett, and we made a dive for the hatch.
The mongrels are the result of all kinds of mixtures; black and white, mulatto and white, quadroon and white, octoroon and white.
The passionate repose of her face was immodest; the possession of a torso such as a sculptor might have carved was brazen. The girl was shamefully well appointed. One morning as Captain Renfrew came home from town, he chanced to walk just behind the octoroon, and quite unconsciously the girl delivered an added fillip to the old gentleman's uneasiness.
Her construction of the swindle was more flattering than any apology he had been able to frame for himself. "Still, Cissie, I ought to have used the greatest care " "I'm not talking about what you 'ought," stated the octoroon, crisply; "I'm talking about what you are. When it comes to 'ought, we colored people must get what we can, any way we can. We fight from the bottom."
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