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Updated: June 19, 2025
Twice, after she entered the broken stretch she looked back, but could see no sign of them. She did not know that at that moment Chavis and Kester, enraged and disgusted over the trick she had played on them, were riding slowly through the valley toward their shack. She was almost through the broken stretch when the pony stumbled. She pulled quickly on the reins, and the pony straightened.
But it angered her to discover that her humane principles were being ridiculed; she was so incensed at Chavis that she felt she could remain to hear him no longer, and she got up, her face red, her eyes flashing, to go to her pony. But the pony was nowhere in sight.
There was one other thing that Ruth did not know the rage that dwelt in Randerson's heart against Chavis and Kester. He had shown no indication of it when she had related to him the story of her adventure with the men, nor did he mention it to any of his associates.
Plainly, she saw from his actions, from his tensed muscles, her threat would not stop him. She was very pale, and her breast heaved as though from a hard run; Chavis could hear the sound of her breathing as he set himself for a leap; but her lips were pressed tightly together, her eyes glowed and widened as she followed the man's movements. She was going to kill; she had steeled her mind to that.
Two or three hours later, in a little basin near the plateau where Ruth had overheard the men talking, Chavis and Kester were watching the crooked smile; their own faces as pale as Randerson's, their breath swelling their lungs as the threat of impending violence assailed them; their muscles rippling and cringing in momentary expectation of the rapid movement they expected and dreaded; their hearts laboring and pounding.
Exceptional men, like Gloucester and Chavis, of course availed themselves of such opportunities as came their way. All told, by 1800 the Negro had received much more education than is commonly supposed. Two persons one in science and one in literature because of their unusual attainments attracted much attention.
He was a full-blooded Negro, but a Southern writer says that "all accounts agree that John Chavis was a gentleman. He was received socially among the best whites and asked to table." In the war of 1812 thirty-three hundred Negroes helped Jackson win the battle of New Orleans, and numbers fought in New York State and in the navy under Perry, Channing, and others.
Ruth had been worried more than she would have been willing to admit, over the presence of Chavis and his two men in the vicinity, and that morning after she had questioned a puncher about the former Flying W foreman, she had determined to ride down the river for the purpose of making a long distance observation of the "shack" the puncher and Randerson had mentioned as being inhabited by Chavis.
He grew very vivid in her thoughts, and she found herself wondering, remembering the stern manliness of his face, whether he, listening to the story of Chavis' insult from her lips, would have sought to find excuses for her insulter. On Sunday afternoon Ruth, Masten, Aunt Martha, and Uncle Jepson were sitting on the front porch of the Flying W ranchhouse.
At the threshold she paused, for Randerson's voice, cold and filled with deadly definiteness, reached her: "Do you want to take his end of this?" Ruth turned. Randerson was pointing to Pickett's body, ghastly in its prone slackness. He was looking at Chavis. Evidently Chavis elected not to avenge his friend at that moment. For there was a dead silence while one might have counted fifty.
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