Free Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down The River by Barbara Hambly Page A

God damn you, leave the bags alone! We haven't got all night!”
    The handsome young dandy sprang nervously away from the luggage pile and Captain Ney, and scrambled into the carriage as the vehicle jerked away.
    “What'd you-uh-pay for him?” Esteban glanced back to where Baptiste and the others were picking up the various valises and portmanteaux under the Spanish deck-mate's snapped commands.
    “Eleven hundred, from Davideaux.”
    “Not bad. How-uh-old is he?” They might have been speaking of a pack-pony. “Forty-eight? Um-uh-Things have been quiet here. We got-uh-ten acres cut today, and the new grinder's behaving itself. Oh, and Reuben died.”
    “Ten? Damn it, boy, those lollygagging niggers should have been able to clear off fifteen! Are you so stupid you don't realize we're weeks behind? Frost could hit us any day! Thierry, God damn you, I'd better see more cane coming in tomorrow or . . .”
    So much, thought January sourly, for poor Reuben, dead of shock or gangrene or simply because he lacked the physical reserves to pull him through having his legs crushed by a thousand pounds of falling iron. The stretch of ground between the house and the levee's gentle rise was scattered with the native oaks of the area. Through their dark trunks away to his right January could see the hell-mouth glare of the sugar-mill door, and the shapes moving before it as the women unloaded the cane carts. The men of the first gang-having completed a day in the field that began the instant it was light enough to avoid injury-dragged wood from the sheds to feed the boilers, a long line of half-naked bronze figures struggling out of the night.
    The smell of burning sugar clogged his nostrils, the choke of woodsmoke and the thick scents of wet earth and cane.
    Home.
    Something inside him seemed to be falling a long way into blackness. Cold fear and dreads of things he barely recalled:
    His father . . .
    “. . . damn Daubrays are behind it, I tell you! They have to be! It would be just like that weasel Louis to incite a man's own niggers to revolt. That Mammy Hera of theirs is a voodoo and I wouldn't put it past Louis Daubray to pay to have his own grandmother poisoned, if he thought he could get a half-arpent of land out of it. And that greasy brother of his would know who to ask!”
    “Father-uh-whatever else may be said of them, the D-Daubrays surely wouldn't-”
    “Don't you back-talk me, boy! I was knocking heads with those lying Orleannistes before you could piss standing! Ever since I married your stepmother they've been trying to find a way to keep me from claiming her father's land. Paying my own niggers to wreck the harvest would be of a piece with their sneakiness.”
    “D-Did you speak-uh-to the police about that trader, Jones? He'd stick at nothing-”
    “Listen, Father,” Robert interjected. “In France they were speaking of a new system of physical characteristics by which those of born criminal inclination might be identified. I'm sure if you examined the blacks-”
    “Oh, shut up, the both of you.” Fourchet flung away his cigar. The carriage drew rein before the steps of the big house, whose long windows glowed through the mists in sulfurous lozenges of muzzy light. “If we examined the blacks we'd find that every Sambo of 'em was a liar and a thief, and what a surprise that would be! Use your brain.”
    “I was endeavoring, sir, to-” Robert broke off as a tall shape appeared against the luminous rectangle of what January knew-since nearly all Creole plantation houses were built on the same plan-to be the bedroom of the lady of the house. He had an impression of pale hair pulled tight into an unfashionable knot at her nape. Of a small white hand resting protectively over a belly swollen with child. Then she passed into the shadow of the gallery as she descended the steps six feet to ground level, and stepped out into the torchlight once more as January sprang from the back of the carriage.
    “M'sieu