lay unmolested in the flaccid grip of his left hand, and his broad black throat gaped cleanly open from ear to ear, as a result of the skilled razor-work of his hated and hating rival, Jefferson Flack, twenty— eight, who now lay peacefully, unsuspected and unsought, with their mutual mistress, Miss Molly Fiske, in her apartment on east Pine Street. Moses had been murdered in moonlight.
A starved cat walked softly along by the boards on Upper Valley: as the courthouse bell boomed out its solid six strokes, eight negro laborers, the bottoms of their overalls stiff with agglutinated cement, tramped by like a single animal, in a wedge, each carrying his lunch in a small lard bucket.
Meanwhile, the following events occurred simultaneously throughout the neighborhood.
Dr. H. M. McRae, fifty-eight, minister of the First Presbyterian Church, having washed his lean Scotch body, arrayed himself in stiff black and a boiled white shirt, and shaved his spare clean un-aging face, descended from his chamber in his residence on Cumberland Avenue, to his breakfast of oatmeal, dry toast, and boiled milk. His heart was pure, his mind upright, his faith and his life like a clean board scrubbed with sandstone. He prayed in thirty-minute prayers without impertinence for all men and the success of all good ventures. He was a white unwasting flame that shone through love and death; his speech rang out like steel with a steady passion.
In Dr. Frank Engel’s Sanitarium and Turkish Bath Establishment on Liberty Street, Mr. J. H. Brown, wealthy sportsman and publisher of the Altamont Citizen, sank into dreamless sleep, after five minutes in the steam-closet, ten in the tub, and thirty in the dry-room, where he had submitted to the expert osteopathy of “Colonel” Andrews (as Dr. Engel’s skilled negro masseur was affectionately known), from the soles of his gouty feet to the veinous silken gloss of his slightly purple face.
Across the street, at the corner of Liberty and Federal, and at the foot of Battery Hill, a white-jacketed negro sleepily restacked in boxes the scattered poker-chips that covered the centre table in the upstairs centre room of the Altamont City Club. The
