“Wake up, you bastard!” Lawson was shouting at him.

His eyes opened and his head drooped to one side; his temples pulsed with pain. A heavy weight seemed to be pressing on top of his head. He was aware of a warm trickle of blood seeping down one corner of his mouth and, as out of a dense mass of steam, he heard the distant clang of a fire wagon. Foolishly, he wondered where the fire was. Then Rachel suddenly filled his mind. Rachel. . . . He grew frantic.

“I want to go home! I want to go home!” he cried over and over.

“You’re going to stay here until you talk, see?” Lawson said. “Get up and sit in that chair.”

He rose slowly and would have fallen had not Murphy caught his arm. He sat uncertainly in the chair and his body jerked imperceptibly with each beat of his heart.

“How old are you, boy?”

The voice had reached him from an unknown location and he gazed up aimlessly.

“Twenty-nine,” he said vaguely.

“Just twenty-nine goddamn too many years around here, hunh?”

“No, sir.”

“Say ‘Yes, sir,’ goddammit!”

“Yes, sir,” he mumbled without tone or spirit.

“Before we get through with you, you sonofabitching nigger, we’re going to teach you something . . .”

Back and forth they walked in front of him. Their white faces were grim and bent toward the floor. The smoke from their burning cigarettes stung his eyes.

“Tell us the truth, boy. You’d been watching Mr. and Mrs. Peabody for a long time, hadn’t you?” Lawson asked.

“No, sir,” he mumbled.

“Couldn’t you see into their bedroom window from the kitchen door where we saw you cleaning this morning?”

“I don’t know, mister,” he whispered.

“You’re a goddamn liar! When we were in Mrs. Peabody’s house we could see you . . .”

“I never wanted to look over there, mister . . .”

“After you killed ’em,” Lawson’s voice went on, ignoring his feeble, protesting answers, “you deliberately went about your work all day as though nothing had happened, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know what happened over there, mister,” he sobbed.

“You’re just about the coolest nigger killer I ever talked to,” Lawson said. “You’re playing a game, but we’ll break you, even if we have to kill you!”

They resumed their walking in front of him, their shoes still making hollow thuds on the wooden floor. Each of the men was more than six feet tall and seemed to weigh well over two hundred pounds; their sheer height and weight frightened him, for he weighed but one hundred thirty and stood but five feet seven inches. The room was stiflingly hot; it seemed that he could not get enough air into his lungs and he breathed with short, panting breaths. Encasing his body was a film of sticky sweat.

Time dragged as though by some force outside of himself; the horror of the three men walking in front of him faded and he saw Rachel lying upon the cheap, brass bed he had bought when they had married and started housekeeping nearly a year ago. In his imagination he saw her lying there in the heat of the night, fanning herself, fretful, restless, moving her swollen body about on the bedcovers, sighing, waiting for him. . . . Good God! He had to get home or send word to her somehow! If only they would call Reverend Davis! Or Mrs. Wooten! Appealingly he looked up at them out of his mood; they still marched in front of him. He grew hysterical as he felt that he did not exist for them.