That night he would have to work late picking up papers in the lobby, running errands for the boss, and shining shoes. After he had put the spittoons around, he would go out and get a hamburger sandwich and a cup of coffee for supper; then he would come back and help Charlie if he could.... Charlie was a good old boy. He had taken only a dollar for getting Sandy his job and he often helped him make tips by allowing Sandy to run to the telegraph office or do some other little odd job for a guest upstairs.... Sure, Charlie was a nice guy.

Things were pretty busy tonight. Several men had their shoes shined as they sat tipped back in the lobby chairs while Sandy with his boot-black box let them put up a foot at a time to be polished. One tall farmer gave him a quarter tip and a pat on the head.

“Bright little feller, that,” he remarked to the boss.

About ten o’clock the blond Miss Marcia McKay’s bell rang, and, Charlie being engaged, Joe Willis sent Sandy up to see what she wanted. Miss McKay had just come in out of the snow a short time before with a heavy-set ugly man. Both of them were drunk. Sandy knocked timidly outside her room.

“Come in,” growled the man’s voice.

Sandy opened the door and saw Miss McKay standing naked in the middle of the floor combing her hair. He stopped on the threshold.

“Aw, come in,” said the man. “She won’t bite you! Where’s that other bell-boy? We want some licker! . . . Damn it! Say, send Charlie up here! He knows what I want!”

Sandy scampered away, and when he found Charlie, he told him about Miss McKay. The child was scared because he had often heard of colored boys’ being lynched for looking at white women, even with their clothes on—but the bell-boy only laughed.

“Yuh’re a dumb little joker!” he said. “Just stay around here awhile and yuh’ll see lots more’n that!” He winked and gave Sandy a nudge in the ribs. “Boy, I done sold ten quarts o’ licker tonight,” he whispered jubilantly. “And some a it was mine, too!”

Sandy went back to the lobby and the shining of shoes. A big, red-necked stranger smoking and drinking with a crowd of drummers in one corner of the room called to him “Hey, boy! Shine me up here!” So he edged into the center of the group of men with his blacking-box, got down on his knees before the big fellow, took out his cans and his cloths, and went to work.

The white men were telling dirty stories, uglier than any Sandy had heard at the colored barber-shop and not very funny—and some of them made him sick at the stomach.

The big man whose shoes he was shining said: “Now I’m gonna tell one.” He talked with a Southern drawl and a soft slurring of word-endings like some old colored folks. He had been drinking, too. “This is ’bout a nigger went to see Aunt Hanner one night. . . .”