A roar of laughter greeted his first effort and he was encouraged to tell another.

“Old darky caught a gal on the levee . . .” he commenced.

Sandy finished polishing the shoes and put the cloths inside his wooden box and stood up waiting for his pay, but the speaker did not notice the colored boy until he had finished his tale and laughed heartily with the other men. Then he looked at Sandy. Suddenly he grinned.

“Say, little coon, let’s see you hit a step for the boys! . . . Down where I live, folks, all our niggers can dance! . . . Come on, boy, snap it up!”

“I can’t,” Sandy said, frowning instead of smiling, and growing warm as he stood there in the smoky circle of grinning white men. “I don’t know how to dance.”

“O, you’re one of them stubborn Kansas coons, heh?” said the red-necked fellow disgustedly, the thickness of whisky on his tongue. “You Northern darkies are dumb as hell, anyhow!” Then, turning to the crowd of amused lobby loungers, he announced: “Now down in Mississippi, whar I come from, if you offer a nigger a dime, he’ll dance his can off . . . an’ they better dance, what I mean!”

He turned to the men around him for approbation, while Sandy still waited uncomfortably to be paid for the shine. But the man kept him standing there, looking at him drunkenly, then at the amused crowd of Saturday-night loungers.

“Now, a nigger his size down South would no more think o’ not dancin’ if a white man asked him than he would think o’ flyin’. This boy’s jest tryin’ to be smart, that’s all. Up here you-all’ve got darkies spoilt, believin’ they’re somebody. Now, in my home we keep ’em in their places.” He again turned his attention to Sandy. “Boy! I want to see you dance!” he commanded.

But Sandy picked up his blacking-box and had begun to push through the circle of chairs, not caring any longer about his pay, when the southerner rose and grabbed him roughly by the arm, exhaling alcoholic breath in the boy’s face as he jokingly pulled him back.

“Com’ere, you little—” but he got no further, for Sandy, strengthened by the anger that suddenly possessed him at the touch of this white man’s hand, uttered a yell that could be heard for blocks.

Everyone in the lobby turned to see what had happened, but before Joe Willis got out from behind the clerk’s desk, the boy, wriggling free, had reached the street-door. There Sandy turned, raised his boot-black box furiously above his head, and flung it with all his strength at the group of laughing white men in which the drunken southerner was standing. From one end of the whizzing box a stream of polish-bottles, brushes, and cans fell clattering across the lobby while Sandy disappeared through the door, running as fast as his legs could carry him in the falling snow.